Shelburne Museum

Electra Havemeyer Webb grew up surrounded by fine art, the daughter of collectors who helped bring European masterpieces to America. But she developed her own eye, and it turned toward the handmade objects of ordinary American life: a cigar-store figure, a pieced quilt, a hand-carved decoy. In an era that dismissed such things, she saw a national artistic tradition worth preserving.

When she founded the museum in 1947, she did something unusual. Rather than build galleries, she moved entire historic buildings onto the site to house and to be part of the collection. A general store, a schoolhouse, a meeting house, a jail, a covered bridge, and more were relocated to Shelburne, saving them and creating a setting like nowhere else.

The mix of high art and folk art was deliberate. Webb wanted visitors to see the craft and imagination in a weathervane as clearly as in a painting, and the museum still argues that case building by building.

The most astonishing object at Shelburne is the Ticonderoga, a 220-foot side-wheel steamboat that once carried passengers up and down Lake Champlain. When its working days ended, Webb was determined to preserve it, and in the 1950s the boat was moved two miles overland from the lake to the museum grounds.

The move was an engineering feat, floating the vessel onto a specially built railway and hauling it across fields and a highway to its permanent berth on dry land. It remains one of the last walking-beam side-wheel steamers in existence, and visitors can go aboard and explore its restored decks and cabins.

Seeing a full-sized steamboat sitting in a Vermont field is the kind of surprise that captures what Shelburne is all about: preservation carried out with imagination and nerve.

Each structure holds a different world. One building brims with quilts and hooked rugs, another with carriages and sleighs, another with hand-carved carousel animals or hunting decoys. A dedicated gallery houses the Impressionist paintings, where a Monet or a Degas hangs a short walk from a room of weathervanes.

There is a working carousel, a round barn, a covered bridge you can walk through, a lighthouse moved from the lake, and a hand-painted circus parade that stretches down a long gallery. The variety is the point, and the connections between fine and folk art are left for the visitor to draw.

A modern gallery building anchors the campus with changing exhibitions and stays open later into the year than the historic structures, giving the museum a presence beyond the summer season.

Summer is the peak, when all thirty-nine buildings are open and the grounds, gardens, and lilacs are at their best. It is the season to see the museum whole.

Fall brings foliage across the campus and thinner crowds, a lovely time to wander the grounds. The historic buildings begin to close as the cold sets in.

In the off-season the modern gallery carries the museum with exhibitions and events, and the snowy campus has a still, storybook quality, though most of the historic structures rest until spring.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.