Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: We're off this week, so I thought I'd share an episode that some of you probably haven't heard before.
Speaker: It's about a really offbeat object, something that might not fit the conventional stereotype of a fine antique, but in its own eccentric way, it really captures the storytelling spirit that draws so many of us to love old things.
Speaker: I hope you enjoy.
Speaker: The late 1800s was a good time for art museums in America.
Speaker: The Metropolitan Museum and the Boston MFA were both founded in 1870.
Speaker: the Philadelphia Museum in 1876, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1879, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: Collecting and conservation and connoisseurship were on the rise.
Speaker: Museums were springing up everywhere.
Speaker: And not all of them were major urban institutions with wealthy industrialist financial backers.
Speaker: Some of them were the efforts of small groups or even of individuals who just had a passion or what some might call an obsession.
Speaker: Now, today we're going to take a look at the story of one remarkable example of this, a Vermontian, an amateur historian who took an eclectic fixation and turned it into an important legacy.
Speaker: Not just his legacy, but the legacy of his community of Middlebury, Vermont, and of communities around him.
Speaker: And at the very heart of that story is one unassuming object, a Windsor chair that
Speaker: in a very unusual way, tries to tell its own story.
Speaker: So this is the story of Henry Sheldon.
Speaker: And here to tell us about it is Dr. Ellery Fouch, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College.
Speaker: Ellery, thanks for joining me.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Now, Henry Sheldon was born into a farming family in 1821.
Speaker: And, you know, I just want to point out in a dramatic understatement that museum studies was not a typical career path at the time, particularly not for someone with his background.
Speaker: Now, so I want to understand what led him down that very unusual track.
Speaker: Was there something about Henry that set him apart already as a young person?
Speaker: Oh, that's such a great question.
Speaker: I think in many ways, Henry Luther Sheldon was kind of a displaced Renaissance man, a man of many talents and interests and curiosities.
Speaker: And he had this kind of wide range of abilities and curiosities.
Speaker: He was a great musician and he was from a family that was not especially wealthy.
Speaker: They were comfortable, but he didn't have the kind of massive fortune that so many of the collectors or museums that we think of as founded by an individual were.
Speaker: And so throughout the 1800s, he was working a variety of jobs, and it seems like his interest in collecting really was sparked around 1875 and 1876, this time of a lot of national enthusiasm and interest.
Speaker: for American history and the American colonial past.
Speaker: He purchased his first object that year for a collection, a Roman coin that apparently he paid a dollar for.
Speaker: We still have it.
Speaker: It's framed in its own case.
Speaker: And I love that everyone has their, you know, starting object.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: The first taste.
Speaker: But just to, you know, to back up a little, because, you know, as you mentioned, it's he's actually later in life by the time he really sort of comes around to this set of interests.
Speaker: And, you know, I wonder if we can say a little more about sort of how his personality came to be attracted to that sort of thing.
Speaker: um because you know he so he comes to middlebury as a 20 year old in in 1841 i believe and then you know he he's doing as you say a wide variety of different jobs i mean he's working for the postal service um what you know what was he sort of up to um in those decades before he uh became the collector that that you know him as
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: He ran a restaurant and helped with a colleague, established a saloon and oyster house.
Speaker: For a while, he worked for the railroad as kind of the station agent, in addition to his duties as a postal clerk.
Speaker: And he eventually became the town clerk.
Speaker: in addition to his kind of passion or volunteer work as an organist for St.
Speaker: Stephen's Episcopal Church here in town.
Speaker: And I think in some ways that kind of exposure to or work with a lot of paper, like with the postal service, with the post office or the railway or recording births and deaths and things like that.
Speaker: He was maybe an early...
Speaker: It's anachronous to talk about this interest in data, but I think he did have this kind of interest in the ephemera of daily life and making some sort of more permanent record related to it.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really interesting.
Speaker: I wonder if there's also a sort of an aesthetic element to speaking about his musicianship.
Speaker: I would say, you know, a disproportionate number of the antique collectors that I know are either musicians or have some kind of musical interest.
Speaker: Oh, marvelous.
Speaker: Like it's almost an Epicurean kind of.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Particularly maybe, you know, organ music in an Episcopal church somehow seems very appropriate.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And he was involved in the upkeep of church, of the church.
Speaker: But I was thinking too about the ways in which in some of those years, he also owned and operated a music business, which dealt not only in sheet music, but also rented out musical instruments to people in the region.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he would, he would
Speaker: come into people's homes and tune their pianos.
Speaker: There was a Melodian that he frequently rented out.
Speaker: We have an oboe in the collection that has a sticker indicating it was from his shop.
Speaker: So yeah, this kind of trade in objects that produce both aesthetic effects of music and are themselves beautifully worked objects in many instances.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: So now we get back to his Roman coin, which he purchased for a dollar.
Speaker: And so he's first showing an interest in what we might think of as sort of more typical kind of collecting.
Speaker: What does that look like?
Speaker: Yeah, he had started collecting autographs, I think, as a younger man, as many young people in the 19th and maybe even early 20th century did.
Speaker: And he soon became an avid coin collector.
Speaker: We also know that in 1876, he did go to Philadelphia to see the Centennial Exposition.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: And he, we have a little notebook where he recorded some of the sites that he saw.
Speaker: There are also these tantalizing sketches of what seems to maybe be a mastodon skull, that he's, he's looking at a lot of the displays and objects and artifacts and realizing maybe the kind of stories that objects can tell.
Speaker: And it seems to
Speaker: to me at least, that there's this excitement about the possibility of telling the story of a small town and its founding alongside these kind of grand national narratives that he might have seen in Philadelphia.
Speaker: It's interesting that you would mention a mastodon skull or something like it, because, you know, that's, um,
Speaker: Obviously, it's a natural history sort of object rather than a human history sort of object.
Speaker: And yet, you know, so many of these late 19th century museums seem to bring those two together with specimens alongside artifacts.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: There wasn't this kind of division that we usually think of today with the two cultures of art and science being so separate.
Speaker: And Henry was really omnivorous in his collecting.
Speaker: He invited people from across the town and maybe I'm getting ahead of ourselves here, but he invited a whole range of objects, his early collection ledgers, both the list of purchases,
Speaker: And the list of donations include things like meteorites, coral, shells, alongside things like a musket used in the French and Indian War, a sword from the Battle of Bennington, things like that.
Speaker: Yeah, some of the more traditional objects.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: So where did this idea come from of starting to put a museum together?
Speaker: Well, it seems like he started this kind of private collection of the coins and the autographs and things like that, and maybe started sharing it with friends.
Speaker: And then I think through his work as town clerk, he became really passionate about recording the history of the town, not just its history.
Speaker: kind of eminent people and first white settlers of the town of Middlebury, but some of the records of everyday life, the births, marriages and deaths.
Speaker: And again, he had this very omnivorous appetite.
Speaker: He was curious about early, the kind of trades and crafts that people did.
Speaker: We have several tar buckets, for example.
Speaker: In addition to trying to collect, for example, every
Speaker: item ever printed in the town of Middlebury, the pamphlets, the sheet music, the newspapers, books, and so on.
Speaker: And so he often solicited things either in the newspaper or from talking to his friends and started amassing them and organizing them in this boarding house that he had been living in.
Speaker: Yeah, there's this really telling quotation from Sheldon in these early years of the museum where he says, I spent all my leisure the past year trying to benefit future generations by preserving the handiwork of the early settlers of Middlebury, books and all printed matter manufactured articles representing all the different occupations of the early pioneers.
Speaker: which I have called a museum.
Speaker: And it's telling because, you know, it speaks to what you're talking about, which is this omnivorous quality, this sense that almost, I mean, it's a hoarding mentality, right?
Speaker: It's the sense that everything is important in some way, in one way or another, and that keeping it, storing it, preserving it is somehow a self-justifying act.
Speaker: But then he also says that
Speaker: that the purpose of this is to benefit future generations.
Speaker: Do you have a sense, whether it's concrete or speculative, about what that really meant?
Speaker: I mean, what kind of benefit was he trying to bring to future generations or even to his own generation?
Speaker: Yeah, this is such a great evocative quotation from him and a wonderful question about his practice.
Speaker: I think in many ways, there is this interest in preserving for posterity, the things that you don't even yet know might be important to the future, if that makes sense.
Speaker: One of the things that I love about this museum and collection is its eclectic nature and the ways in which it was very much a
Speaker: a kind of middle-class museum.
Speaker: It's not a collection of capital A art, although there are some amazing paintings and especially works of early Vermont furniture.
Speaker: But it's not a collection solely devoted to the kind of highest productions of human craft
Speaker: or the most finely wrought material objects with kind of silver repoussé candlesticks and tea sets and so on.
Speaker: But again, things like the kinds of tools that people developed for their cider presses and their apple coring processes, the tar buckets that they used, the kind of material culture of everyday life in Northern New England.
Speaker: that actually with the kind of material turn in the study of art and history and also the growing interest over the course of the late 20th century in the people's history, history not just of kind of eminent folks and political leaders or
Speaker: military leaders, but everyday life, I think, is really beautifully encapsulated in this collection.
Speaker: And in some ways, it seems like he might have known that.
Speaker: One of the other parts that I think is fascinating is that late in life, he traded his coin collection, which by that point was massive and quite expansive, crossing centuries and continents.
Speaker: He traded that very
Speaker: noteworthy collection to Middlebury College for their collection of newspapers.
Speaker: And I think that is a really interesting window into what he valued and what he thought about, what he thought had value in all senses of the word.
Speaker: And even as we
Speaker: you know, starting with the microfilm movement and now with digitization, there's perhaps less emphasis on the original copy as it were.
Speaker: It was still that collecting impulse, that desire to archive a copy of every day of every page of the newspaper that now enables so much of our historical research.
Speaker: So I think there was amazing foresight in the ephemera of daily life.
Speaker: So you're saying it really has benefited future generations?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I think there's maybe part, and this goes to both the motivation
Speaker: and kind of our historical interest in it.
Speaker: So much of what he's preserving too, I think in one of his notices asking about early pamphlets, you get a sense that he realizes that a lot of this history is endangered.
Speaker: at that moment, that paper making mills, for example, are asking people to send in their rags and their old pamphlets to be remade.
Speaker: And there are so many important buildings, historical buildings that are being demolished to make way for parking lots or urban expansion and new buildings.
Speaker: And I think he sees this change happening.
Speaker: And
Speaker: wants to have a material record of it.
Speaker: So, you know, it's a curious thing about passion project museums like this one that often, you know, intentionally or not, their collections reveal the idiosyncratic interests of their creators.
Speaker: And one piece that's exhibited in the Henry Sheldon Museum does even more than that.
Speaker: It was actually made by Henry himself.
Speaker: And it looks like a Windsor chair, but it's called the relic chair.
Speaker: What is this and how did it come about?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: There is this really marvelous, eclectic, kind of funky looking chair that is the form of kind of a comb back Windsor chair currently on the second floor of the museum.
Speaker: It's painted kind of a light gray blue, but it has two rows, two upper rows of spindles.
Speaker: uh which are variegated colors of kind of natural wood which draws your eye to it a little bit and on closer inspection absolutely those two rows each spindle comes from a different historical artifact uh ship site landmark
Speaker: It is absolutely this, as you mentioned, a relic chair that Henry Sheldon designed over the course of 1884, assembling different pieces, different fragments of wood from different historical sites.
Speaker: He also explicitly wrote to kind of far-flung correspondents, asking them to send him pieces of wood.
Speaker: Most notably, I think he wrote to Martha...
Speaker: Patterson, the daughter of Andrew Johnson in East Tennessee to ask her to send
Speaker: a fragment of Andrew Johnson's tailor shop.
Speaker: And she had the Green County court clerk in East Tennessee, William H. Piper, ship off a fragment of that kind of log cabin looking edifice to Henry Sheldon all the way up in Vermont.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think there's this, it's this really wonderful embodiment of, you know,
Speaker: assembling these different fragments of the historical past, many of which were kind of under threat of being demolished at that moment and assembling them together.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that this is just it's just plain fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, this is not an attempt to sort of take precious historical objects and preserve them and conserve them and put them in the most flattering possible display case.
Speaker: No, this is taking objects that are by themselves maybe interesting, but probably not valuable or certainly not the sort of thing that a typical museum would seek out.
Speaker: And then transform them and craft them and make something totally new out of it.
Speaker: That's just sort of just plain fun.
Speaker: It's, you know, I love that this is such a different concept.
Speaker: from the sort of work that happens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just for example.
Speaker: The director of the PMA is not going around and collecting bits and bobs from random places and cutting them up and making things out of them and putting his own handiwork in the cabinets.
Speaker: I mean, what does this tell us about Henry's concept of a museum and the purpose that he saw it serving and how that might have been different from
Speaker: the purpose of other museums of the period.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it gives us some insight into what was really a creative practice in many ways.
Speaker: Like you said, he wasn't just assembling artifacts and kind of cataloging and classifying them.
Speaker: but remaking them in a lot of interesting ways.
Speaker: Unfortunately, his original arrangement of objects doesn't survive for the most part.
Speaker: We'll maybe get to that later, how the museum has been transformed in the subsequent decades.
Speaker: But this chair, which he referred to as a memorial chair,
Speaker: reveals, yeah, this kind of creative delight in assemblage and in making meaning.
Speaker: He's making a new historical memorial object from this kind of vast array of history.
Speaker: And in that way, it seems almost like a museum in miniature.
Speaker: This wasn't the only time he did this practice.
Speaker: Some of the delight of going through the collections has been finding other artifacts he made, like a silver goblet he purchased from Gorham for his sister's wedding.
Speaker: And he included some of the coins from his coin collection.
Speaker: He had them attached to that goblet with chains to represent spans of time and space.
Speaker: And that's a very old tradition of...
Speaker: you know, silver drinking vessels combined with coins.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: No, go ahead.
Speaker: I think I also want to maybe clarify that, of course, Henry wasn't alone in this fascination with relics.
Speaker: A lot of people were collecting fragments from, say, George Washington's coffin or the
Speaker: Treaty Elm from Pennsylvania, connected to William Penn's Treaty with the Lenape, or Connecticut's Charter Oak.
Speaker: And there was kind of a practice for collecting these artifacts and sometimes transforming them into aesthetic objects like
Speaker: acorn-shaped earrings from the charter oak or tiny, tiny goblets.
Speaker: But the practice of relic furniture assembled from a broad variety of sources does seem to be... it's more rare.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love these pieces of the true cross, essentially.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So a very sacramental element.
Speaker: This is maybe getting back to his Episcopalianism.
Speaker: Indeed.
Speaker: Were people interested in what he was doing?
Speaker: I mean, were there visitors to the museum?
Speaker: Yes, his museum was fairly well attended.
Speaker: It had a fully functional kind of board of directors or board of trustees.
Speaker: And there from looking, I worked with my students on the collection ledgers on transcribing those kind of handwritten
Speaker: 19th century ledgers working from scans.
Speaker: We've now made a Excel spreadsheet database kind of thing.
Speaker: And we got a sense of the really wide range of contributions that he was receiving from people not only in Middlebury, but kind of traveling salesmen, would bring things by extended relatives from Sheldon's own family, would bring things in for a family reunion.
Speaker: I think there was a way in which he was seen as kind of an eccentric.
Speaker: You know, he was a bachelor living in what was a museum and transforming even the objects that he himself used every day.
Speaker: For example, his shaving cup and his shaving brush.
Speaker: are part of the museum.
Speaker: He, uh, attached a note to a razor saying it was the, used the first and last time he had a shave.
Speaker: Um, there's a tiny tin.
Speaker: And this is relevant actually because, um, uh, you know, I encourage people to go to magazineintiques.com slash podcast to see pictures.
Speaker: Um, because Henry Sheldon himself, he looked eccentric.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: in these photographs we have of him and bless him.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Including of course a Merlin style beard.
Speaker: Indeed.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: He had a, uh,
Speaker: There's a small tin where he collected four of his teeth that had been extracted over the years with the kind of dates that he went to the dentist.
Speaker: And he was also becoming increasingly deaf, which I imagine must have been an immense tragedy for him.
Speaker: For a person who loved music so much to have to give up that aspect of his of his life and his creative practice.
Speaker: And so I think in many ways, rather than music as a as a creative output, the museum.
Speaker: filled that role.
Speaker: But absolutely for his, I'm trying to remember which birthday, in 1904, he staged a kind of elaborate work
Speaker: birthday outing in which he had collected a carriage that former President Monroe had ridden in on a visit to Vermont.
Speaker: And Henry assembled all of, let's see, a group of, I think, three or four other older men of the village.
Speaker: lent them top hats from the museum collection and a banner, I think a flag that was flown at the Battle of Plattsburgh from the War of 1812 and paraded through the town.
Speaker: And so this kind of staging of ceremonial spectacle, I think is really remarkable.
Speaker: I think I have an idea for my next birthday.
Speaker: Don't we all?
Speaker: I just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening.
Speaker: If you're a fan of the show, there's one really quick and effective way to help us out, and that's to go to the podcast app where you're listening right now and leave us a rating and a review.
Speaker: This helps new listeners find curious objects, and it helps me to feel really grateful.
Speaker: As always, you can see pictures of the relic chair, Henry Sheldon's excellent beard, and more at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, or on the magazine's Instagram at antiquesmag, or on my Instagram at objectiveinterest.
Speaker: And if you'd like to get in touch with ideas for new episodes or thoughts about this episode, you can reach me at curiousobjectspodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: Thanks again.
Speaker: And here, once more, is Ellery Fouch.
Speaker: One problem with
Speaker: a passion project museum like this is that its well-being depends on the dedication and labor of a single person.
Speaker: And when that person isn't around or able to do the work anymore, things can fall apart quickly.
Speaker: So tell us about what happened to the Henry Sheldon Museum in the twilight of his life.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a great point.
Speaker: Henry, this really was a labor of love for him.
Speaker: He was passionate about collecting and
Speaker: Actually, I think in many instances, reading his diary, there's this really fascinating collapse between domestic labor and the labor of the museum.
Speaker: And so almost every day, there's an entry in his diary of what he's done for the museum that day.
Speaker: And it's sometimes things like,
Speaker: painting the walls or settling copying account books.
Speaker: But repeatedly, there's this invocation of ironing newspapers and then sewing them into bound volumes, which I just think is such an interesting collapse of kind of domestic labor.
Speaker: brought into the context of museum labor and museum collections, maybe devalued in one aspect of the world, but then this really important aspect of preservation for the museum itself.
Speaker: But absolutely, Henry was doggedly working on the museum all the days of his life.
Speaker: And after his death, as you suggest, there was kind of this period of uncertainty.
Speaker: He had a board of trustees.
Speaker: People still knew that there were interesting collections there.
Speaker: But after Henry's death in 1907,
Speaker: things kind of, the momentum was gone.
Speaker: There was a custodian who still cared for the collections, but it wasn't really open to the public.
Speaker: It wasn't very much of a vibrant part of the community anymore.
Speaker: And my friend and colleague, David Stemeshkin is working on a kind of history of the Henry Sheldon Museum.
Speaker: And he's been working a lot from these manuscripts that were assembled by a man on the Middlebury faculty, W. Storrs Lee, or two men on the Middlebury faculty, W. Storrs Lee and Arthur Healy, who in the 1930s, I think, were...
Speaker: interested, actually, they were motivated by college history.
Speaker: They were, um, Storrs Lee, I think was working on a book about the history of Middlebury college.
Speaker: And he was told that there was this great collection.
Speaker: Um, it is kind of, uh, entertaining or amusing or ironic, uh, that in the early years of its founding, the college did not maintain its own archive.
Speaker: Most of the early papers related to
Speaker: Middlebury College were collected by Sheldon, in fact.
Speaker: So the story is that Storrs Lee
Speaker: managed to convince the custodian to let him into this locked building that had become pretty dusty and out of use, kind of a storehouse more, and was overwhelmed with excitement about all of the collections within.
Speaker: And he and Arthur Healy apparently, of course, the 1930s is a big moment for
Speaker: Another colonial revival and fascination with American history, but in a very different aesthetic than that of the kind of late Victorian era of Henry's kind of cabinets of curiosity almost.
Speaker: And so Healy and Storrs Lee apparently are the kind of duo that revived interest in this collection, thinking it could be a great resource for the community, for the college, and maybe even for the nation.
Speaker: They revived the board of trustees and actually had this really active community.
Speaker: group of donors and collectors.
Speaker: Arthur Frankenstein from San Francisco was on the board of trustees for a while, which I find really fascinating.
Speaker: A man who was interested in a trompe l'oeil painting and the contemporary work of Andy Warhol.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so there was this real energy and vitality around it as well.
Speaker: Of course, it's never had that kind of huge endowment or extremely wealthy collector to underwrite that future.
Speaker: And so it's really relied on kind of community support and again, the kind of passion of the people who work for and with the museum.
Speaker: So what
Speaker: role would you say a small community museum like Henry's play that isn't already served by larger art museums and museums of history?
Speaker: I think for rural communities especially, there's a way in which
Speaker: The Sheldon Museum in particular, and I think other historical societies elsewhere maybe, can serve as this repository for history and also means of helping people make meaning
Speaker: of our current lives and our current experiences.
Speaker: Thinking about the losses of the past, whether it's the influenza epidemic of 1918, and how it might parallel our own moment with COVID and the kind of
Speaker: I think we all very acutely feel that we're living through a significant historical moment, or we hope it's a brief historical period.
Speaker: And so I think that that role of making meaning of not only the past, but also of the present can be really crucial.
Speaker: They often have
Speaker: wonderful insights into the lives of daily people of the past.
Speaker: And so that bridging of historical empathy, I think, is really powerful as well.
Speaker: Are there any other lessons that you think historians and collectors today could take away from Henry's project?
Speaker: One of the things I think is really marvelous about Henry Sheldon is the way that he didn't... I think in some ways it might have been seen as problematic for a while, but in some ways it's kind of wonderful.
Speaker: He didn't lose track of his own subjectivity.
Speaker: He wasn't necessarily...
Speaker: always working with an objective lens and he acknowledged his own interests and excitement and kind of realized the importance of recording his own life as well.
Speaker: And I think sometimes there's a
Speaker: an impulse to be dispassionate and remove ourselves from the story as historians or scholars or researchers or educators.
Speaker: And I think Henry's practice has maybe helped me think about my subjectivity or kind of the place of myself or my own creativity, the place where I could be
Speaker: creative in recording and crafting aspects of my own story.
Speaker: I think back to, um,
Speaker: Henry loved playing cards with his friends and he often held these memorial games on the birthday of a friend who had died.
Speaker: And he often inscribed even these decks of kind of quotidian playing cards with this is the deck of cards that we used.
Speaker: in the celebration of my 70th birthday.
Speaker: This is the stack of the deck of cards that we used for Zacchaeus Bass's, you know, the anniversary of his birthday, the first since his death.
Speaker: And I think that it transforms these decks of interesting ephemera into really meaningful, almost memorial objects that
Speaker: are so much more about human experience.
Speaker: And I think I keep coming back to grief, unfortunately, and maybe that's just where my mind is right now with COVID.
Speaker: But again, that sense of marking time, of
Speaker: holding space for human experience, even if it's something as seemingly ephemeral or meaningless as a game of cards.
Speaker: An acknowledgement that that can have real and deep and true meaning.
Speaker: That's wonderful.
Speaker: Plenty of food for thought there, I think, for all of us.
Speaker: Thank you, Ellery.
Speaker: I really appreciate it.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: It's been such a treat to get to chat with you about Henry Sheldon.
Speaker: That's our program for today.
Speaker: Hope you had fun listening.
Speaker: Thanks to Ellery Fouch, who, again, is assistant professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
