Testimonials

“It is only due to organizations such as yours that the important works of our Country are brought to the attention of the public.” —Marie Reilly, Museum of Bad Art, Dedham, 1998

"The Main Street Museum is just...its just the Most Wonderful Place on Earth!" —Pariah Beat Band, 2008

“The Main Street Museum—White River Junction’s answer to the Library of Congress.” —Peter Welch, U. S. House of Representatives, 2007.

“[The Main Street Museum] forces one to contemplate the nature of museums and curating. Why do we save what we save? How do we decide what to discard, what to display, what to hide away, and what to destroy.” —Joe Citro, Weird New England, 2004

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Mind Your Head Science tells us that the average brain fires its synapses several million times every hour. David Fairbanks Ford's brain probably fires its neural popguns at least four or five times as often, producing intracranial light shows to rival the aurora borealis or, at the very least, a Chinese salute to the Year of the Goat. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Ford's brain is, well, different.

Ford is the founder, president, curator, conservator, interpreter, fundraiser, business manager, publicist, maker of display cases, and floor sweeper for the Main Street Museum, a cabinet of curiosities that could have been designed by P. T. Barnum if only he had been really creative . At last sighting, the MSM (as the cognoscenti call it) was more or less in Hartford, Vermont, but when and where fortune will take it next, God only knows, although Ford is hoping for another storefront in White River Junction. You won't find the MSM in the usual guidebooks, but in Vermont, at least, it has developed a certain reputation and even attracted some funding from the Vermont Arts Council and a few other daring sources. Ford happily admits that the MSM has been called "Vermont's Strangest Musuem" and that he himself is often referred to as "quirky". However, he prefers to call the MSM "Vermont's most amiable museum."

Most of the MSM's collection is housed in an ancient back-road warehouse which also shelters Ford and three artist friends in genteel shabbiness. Some of MSM items are a mile away in a White River Junction café's corridor (which Ford has dubbed the Hall of Industrial Antiquities) and more can be seen on the World Wide Web at a handsome site that also features a virtual restroom. The warehouse collection is best of all of course, but he warehouse is unmarked and can take some effort to find. For those who persist by making an appointment and getting directions, these are some of the rewards.

• Elvis Presley's gallstones (allegedly), floating in bleach in a glass canning jar and resembling fuzzy white squid
• Pickled eggs in tar, a demonstration of preservation techniques that can result in sulfurous fumes.
• A small bottle that contained salve used to treat the horrific injuries of Phineas Gage (q.v.)
• A glass canning jar filled with shredded paper ("A translation of concept to physicality")
• The Virgisaurus: a Madonna figure iwht a dinosaur head. (If you find this more shocking than thought-provoking, it's probably time to leave. However, you'll miss the Miraculous Picture of hte Virgin Mary, miraculous "because it survived teh Flood of 1927.")
• Min in a jar. Go figure.
• Twin bottles of almost identical blue fluid: one, wildberry drink; the other, windshield washer fluid. This may be a commentary on the chemical concoctions of the American food industry. Or something.
• Slides

Jim Bissland, Long River Winding; Life, Love and Death Along the Connecticut, 1999