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A German critic, W. Bürger [writes] "Our Museums...are veritable graveyard-yards in which have been heaped up, with a tumulour-like promiscuousness, the remains which have been carried thither...all are hung pell-mell upon the walls of some noncommittal gallery—a kind of posthumous asylum, where a people, no longer capable of producing...come to admire this magnificent gallery of débris.”
- —G. Brown Goode, Museums of the Future, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 1891: p. 427
Contents
General Introduction
Lives of great men will remind us
- We can mold life as we choose,
And departing leave behind us
- Towels, safety pins, and shoes.
- —E. Bishop, 5 September 1929
The Collection of artifacts at the Main Street Museum is a unique experiment in material culture studies, consisting of objects of varied origins—man-made, historical, biological, botanical and mineralogical. The objects' significance lies in their layered meanings. These layered meanings are called forth by a collaborative effort of Museum visitors, staff, and donors.
The physical repository for our artifacts resides in a renovated fire station in White River Junction, Vermont. This 1893 building is rich in historic and narrative content. Consider, as a metaphor, the sugar egg. Our artifacts are contained within another, larger, artifact, decorated on both interior and exterior surfaces.
The largest portion of our website — the portion you are browsing right now — is constructed on a “wiki”-code platform and includes the catalog of our varied holdings utilizing open source technology that is fully accessible and available for unmoderated modifications and additions.
Assigning nuanced values to artifacts is increasingly difficult in the environment of most major collecting institutions. The neutrality of theoretical systems utilized by any museum is currently being called into question. As a small independent repository the Main Street Museum has the flexibility—indeed the mandate—to examine the layered and ever changing meanings of objects and their relationships to their surroundings. As the uses for objects are more or less continuously in flux, we analyze these uses through traditional disciplines (art historical, scientific and qualitative methods), but also through psychological analysis as well. Our emotional relationships with objects are formed circuitously. Therefore the meaning of objects is unlocked only through similar, indirect means. [learn less]
History
“White River Junction—a beauty spot in the midst of a valley of beauty and cheer.” —Gateway to Vermont, 1903
The museum opened on South Main Street in 1992 and immediately attracted a broad cross-section of citizenry: academics, art professionals, musicians, politicians, journalists, the under-employed, habitual evil-livers, and also quite ordinary people (it might as well be admitted, that many in all of these categories were my own blood relatives). Here then was the first site for the museum. It had been the former home of a renown local restaurant, “Lena’s Lunch”. It was a narrow storefront space which had been a public space for over 100 years—a silent picture theater, indoor miniature golf, and a bowling alley, also a restaurant with transvestite waitresses—yes, submarine sandwiches by day and “Judy” and “Barbara” by night. There ought to be a plaque. Here Elvis impersonators and High-Art all enjoyed equal admiration. (or, High-Art claimed as much admiration as it can, when competing with Elvis impersonators.) Our home was directly across the street from an American Legion Hall; and there are no better critics. They would be completely and utterly potted every night. They withheld nothing. [learn less]
Recent News and our latest pr...
“The Main Street Museum—White River Junction’s answer to the Library of Congress.” —Peter Welch, U. S. House of Representatives, 2007.
Places we Like; Links on the "World Wide Web"
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. [ learn less... ]
Main Street Museum Catalog of Artifacts (Catawiki)
- Objects as Evidence of Human Culture
- Pet Toys
- Two Dimensional Evidence Paper; Archive Collections
- Military History Collection
- Art
- Fauna; Living, or Apparently Once Living, Objects
- Flora; Living, or Apparently Once Living, Objects
- Entomology; Insects
- Minerals; Inanimate, or Apparently Inanimate Objects
- Other
- Vinculum Categories
Miscellanea. Discursions.
- "As in totemism, we participate in each other as we participate in the object." —Sartre, Les jeux sont faits, 1943, and Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, 1966.
