Shelburne Museum

The daughter of a sugar magnate and an art-collecting philanthropist, Electra Havemeyer Webb dedicated her life to amassing folk art before the term had been coined. Her first acquisition, bought at age nineteen, was a life-size cigar-store figure. Her parents were not thrilled, but Electra was going full steam ahead to collecting, well, everything. The result is the impressive, prodigious, and bizarre Shelburne Museum.

Electra always found beauty in everyday craftwork: needlepoint, hand carved spoons, more duck decoys than you could imagine. Her passion for homegrown knickknacks grew, even as she had the means to also collect highbrow impressionist paintings. Today, her legacy is scattered throughout forty-five acres with thirty-nine structures, including one room schoolhouses, a jail, a lighthouse, a carousel, and a 220-foot steamboat.

The restored vessel, a National Historic Landmark, is the last walking beam passenger steamer still in existence. Built in 1906, the Ticonderoga (fondly referred to as the Ti) operated on Lake Champlain for nearly half a century. Hauling dear old Ti two miles overland to the Shelburne Museum was a massive engineering effort, hailed by its new owner as one of the “great feats of maritime preservation.” Ti has since been dolled up to reflect life on board a 1923 steamboat. You’re encouraged to explore all four decks, the galley, the crew’s quarters, and the engine—on your own or with a guide.

From weathervanes and re-created circus ephemera to paintings by Monet and Manet, the Shelburne holds over a hundred thousand artifacts, fully earning its title as Vermont’s “collection of collections.

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