Electra’s Cultural Jewel at Shelburne Museum

By Heather Michon

In the summer of 1997, I got to live a history geek’s dream. For 18 blissful weeks, I was a seasonal interpreter at the Shelburne Museum.

Where I once had to wait for a school field trip or shell out a couple of weeks’ worth of allowance money, I could simply wave my little plastic badge at the security guard and sail into the gates. I was allowed — heck, commanded — to spend the entire workday inside my favorite sites: Dutton House, the Variety Unit, the Webb Memorial Building, the Schoolhouse.

While I didn’t earn a lot of money or launch a brilliant career as a museum professional, I learned an enormous amount about American folk art and material culture. I got to ponder the imponderables of the collection, like: ‘how many duck decoys could one woman buy?’

My time there also punctured some long-held myths I had about the museum. Despite the 50th anniversary celebrations that summer, it was clear even to a neophyte like me that all was not well at the Shelburne. While the staff was incredibly knowledgeable, there seemed to be little new interpretation, and most displays had not changed in years.

A three-year battle over the sale of several pieces from the Impressionist collection had netted $31 million at auction and a boatload of bad publicity. Ticket sales had been declining for a decade. Things seemed mostly to be adrift.

To use the inevitable pun: Hope, literally, was on the way.

A True Restoration

Hope Alswang, Goddard graduate, former Webb Fellow at UVM, and past executive director of the New Jersey Historical Society, took the reins at the Shelburne Museum in 1997, with instructions from the Board of Directors that could be summed up as: fix it. Restore the institution to its rightful place as a major player in the museum world.

Over the past seven years, Alswang and her staff have done exactly that — begun to reestablish the Museum as the cultural jewel that it is.

With the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, six of the oldest buildings on the grounds were selected for face-lifts, both to improve their safety and to reinterpret their holdings. Dutton House, Stencil House, and Prentiss House all reopened to rave reviews three seasons ago. This season the Variety Unit, boasting eclectic collections of dolls, glass, pewter, ceramics, and scrimshaw, will have its debut.

All this is part of a larger plan to reinterpret every collection in the Museum to assess how it fits into the bigger picture, or at the very least, to see how to make it better.

Now, for example, you can get close to the Impressionist masterpieces in the Webb Memorial Building, rather than being stuck behind a railing several feet away. And the lighting is better. Small, meaningful changes.

Another innovation has been the use of temporary structures like the nostalgic 1950 House and the futuristic Collector’s House, prefabricated structures used to highlight a more modern period of Americana.

This season brings “Pedal to the Metal: A History of Children’s Pedal Cars,” a display of 70 toy cars dating from 1905 to 1970. The show details how the children’s toy industry and the burgeoning automobile industry grew together through the 20th Century. But this is no static display. The exhibit will include a pedal car riding area, a racetrack for miniature cars, video driving games, and a mock “garage” to assemble mix-and-match pedal car parts, along with videos and vintage photos.

“Pedal to the Metal” underlines another new emphasis for the Museum: the collection swap. These pedal cars are on loan from the Stamford Museum & Nature Center in Connecticut, which will, in turn, host a Shelburne exhibit of children’s illustrations entitled “From Goodnight Moon to Art Dog: The World of Clement, Edith and Thatcher Hurd.”

With its new emphasis on whimsical education and hands-on experience, the Shelburne Museum is returning to the philosophy of its founder, Electra Havemeyer Webb. “I want it to be an educational project, varied and alive,” Mrs. Webb wrote in 1949, “that will instill in those who visit a deeper understanding and appreciation of our heritage.”

The Brick House

Electra Havemeyer Webb will come even more forcefully to life with the opening of The Brick House later this year.

In 1910, J. Watson Webb drove his new bride to a “little pink brick farmhouse” not far from his parent’s estate on Shelburne Bay. “Don’t you think this is a lovely old house?” he asked.

She looked at the boarded-up windows and the shabby state of the property. “I must say, I did not know what to say,” Mrs. Webb said.

But Watson persisted. “He went on to tell me to look at the lovely proportions, told me of the history attached to it and then lastly said, ‘I used my allowance to board up the windows so that it would not go to pieces.’”

By the early 1920s, the modest 1847 farmhouse had been turned into a 40-room country estate, with beautifully landscaped grounds sloping gently to the Lake.

This was not their only home, or, before 1950, even their primary home. There was a 50,000-acre Adirondack summer “camp,” an estate at Westbury, Long Island, and the penthouse on Park Avenue whose rooms would eventually be dismantled and reinstalled at the Museum. But the Shelburne property was prized as a hunting lodge, where they could indulge in foxhunts and other outdoor sports with friends.

For Electra, it also became an artistic endeavor, one that set her on a path to creating the Museum.

Her furnishings were a blend of American and English antiques, purchased from the fashionable shops of New York City — the type of things any wealthy society matron interested in the Colonial Revival craze in decorating might acquire. But after that, Electra threw away the rulebook.

Rather than rely on interior decorators, she began to develop her own aesthetic On her walls, she installed scenic and historic wallpapers and stencils. On the floors, she scattered colorful antique hooked and rag rugs. She created vibrant arrangements for her vast, growing collection of folk art and collectibles.

The results were cluttered, but impressive. After one visit in 1923, industrialist Henry Francis duPont was so enthralled that he, too, began to collect Americana — and eventually founded Winterthur Museum in Delaware.

The Brick House was acquired by the Shelburne Museum in 2000, after the death of J. Watson Webb, Jr. For the last four years, curators have worked to restore the home to what it would have looked like during Electra’s day.

It will be one of the few private homes of American collectors open to the public. It will also be the public’s first chance to see the piece that started it all — the $25 cigar-store Indian she named “Mary O’Connor.”

The Legend Lives

So after years of ennui, the Shelburne Museum seems to be back on course. Memberships are up, annual visitation rates are no longer dropping, and long-needed improvements are marching along. They are, as their motto says, “forging ahead.”

Executive Director Hope Alswang is so dedicated to forging ahead and carrying out Electra Webb’s vision that she keeps a life-size cardboard cut-out of her long-departed predecessor near her desk. Development Director Deborah Shenk told reporter Stacey Chase in 2002, “I forget what it is that we were talking about, but Hope had another crazy idea. I leaned over and I said, ‘Hope, Electra’s dead.’ And she said, ‘Not to me she’s not!’”

Heather Michon is a Vermont woman currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia with her husband. She is managing editor of a small humanities publisher, as well as a freelance writer and consultant.