History of the Museum
A Display Case with a View; Notes From the Desk of a Small Museum.
I am the director of a small museum—a “cabinet of curiosities”—in downtown White River Jct., Vermont. The Main Street Museum and I been in town for over 16 years now. We have exhibited just about everything—even dirt (“silt from the 1927 flood” to be exact.) The collection here includes sea-monsters and Phineas Gage relics, 19th century botanical specimens and Bad Art, Seminole War Diaries and dead cats nestled amid dried flowers, legendary trees that produced lambs and geese from pods sprouting amid their branches, Civil War uniforms and Elvis’s gallstones—even a large number of Victrola records for our “Giant Orthophonic Victrola”. Visitors come to the museum to socialize, read, hear music but above all, to see the objects. Since the categories here include Fauna as well as Flora, I often feel like I’m an object myself and think that visitors to the museum must find me just as odd as some of the artifacts in the collection. It may be a monkey-in-the-zoo scenario, but I wonder if the visitors realize that the objects—and the curator—are looking right back at them with equal curiosity.
White River Junction, A Magnificent Gallery of Debris
White River Junction, Vermont is an abandoned rail center with much of the urban blight one would expect in a much larger town or city. “Rio Blanco” has been host to many things over the years, many of them none-too-savory. A railroad town will always attract a wide spectrum of humanity. The town’s Urban Renewal plans in the 1960s were opposed by enough of the town’s people that they never materialized. However, the construction of two federal interstate highways through town forever transformed the towns economy and left a great many underused or abandoned structures in the wake of Progress. In short, White River Junction was, and is, a modern ruin. It’s the perfect site for an alternative museum.
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. The building was owned at the time by a notorious local slum-lord, but 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.
I decided that a museum of oddities was a good fit with the downtown’s quirky character. I started displaying objects. Simply putting objects on display changed their meaning—it gave them respect even if they had never been respected before. The museum became a kind of self-esteem workshop for unloved objects. People started giving me things. Art. Old cars. Their kids baby-teeth. The hair that they couldn't bear to throw out after haircuts. And then of course, dead cats. (They are featured on the museum web-site.) I wanted to exhibit them in a way that wouldn't make children cry. I’m not sure if I succeeded. You’ll have to come down and see for yourselves. Like me, you may find that what we save is far less interesting than why we save the things we do. What we do with objects after we have saved them grounds us to the emotional meanings of our world.
If curator and artifacts are sometimes confused within Main Street Museum confines, it is also unclear where the artifacts end and museum display cases, even museum walls and ceilings, begin. And White River Junction itself may be an artifact—a very large, very complex, unaccessioned one,—a kind of giant, hollow, sugar Easter egg,—old and shabby, but with remarkable, if dusty, scenery glued to its insides. This town and this museum have both taught me to love where you are—you may not like where you live, but you ought, at the very least, to love it. And you love a place by knowing it very well. Its history, its things, its people. I hope the Main Street Museum is educational and fun. In our culture, these two concepts are very often mutually exclusive.
“What’s truly saddening is the separation—the Calvinist guilt over fun and where it leads, guilt of our primal, bald-faced, simian desire to stare and marvel and perhaps thereby, oops, learn a thing or two. People do after all, remember the fun they have and it sure beats hell out of the alternative.” —James Taylor, Shocked and Amazed.
We can make our own culture, we can actively participate both in our democracy and in our history. (We’re making history right now, we just don’t realize it.) We can decide the value of things ourselves. We can evaluate the meaning of objects—ourselves. And never, ever let some corporation, or some academic, some magazine article, or some curator—especially some alternative curator—decide what objects are valuable and which objects are not. Don’t assign dollar values to everything. After all—its up to us. What we do with things is much much more interesting than things.
“The love for relics is one which will never be eradicated as long as felling and affection are denizens of the heart. It is a love which is most easily excited in the best and kindliest natures. Who would scoff at this love? Not one!” — Charles Mackay, Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds, London, 1841.
—David Fairbanks Ford, Curator, Main Street Museum
Mr. Ford has been the director of the Main Street Museum since 1992. A member of several old Vermont families, one branch of which are the “poor cousins” of the Fairbanks family of St. Johnsbury who founded the Fairbanks Museum. He has lectured and curated at the Dartmouth College, Norwich University, St. Michaels College and The University of Vermont. However, taking the Sea-Monster to the historic Tunbridge fairgrounds, as well as having his art-car entered in the (now quite historic as well) Tunbridge Demolition Derby must be considered career highlights.
