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This Chair Is Made of America
28 Plays4 years ago
Ben speaks with Ellery Foutch, assistant professor in American studies at Middlebury College, about a “relic Windsor chair” assembled by Henry Sheldon (founder of the Middlebury museum named in his honor) in 1884. This unusual piece of furniture was built with woods salvaged from structures with local or national significance—such as the warship Old Ironsides, the William Penn House in Philadelphia, and a colonial whipping post.
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Transcript
Rise of American Museums
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:15
Speaker
The late 1800s was a good time for art museums in America.
00:00:20
Speaker
The Metropolitan Museum and the Boston MFA were both founded in 1870, the Philadelphia Museum in 1876, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1879, etc, etc.
00:00:31
Speaker
Collecting and conservation and connoisseurship were on the rise.
00:00:35
Speaker
Museums were springing up everywhere.
00:00:37
Speaker
And not all of them were major urban institutions with wealthy industrialist financial backers.
00:00:44
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.
00:00:53
Speaker
Now today we're going to take a look at the story of one remarkable example of this.
00:00:58
Speaker
A Vermontian, an amateur historian who took an eclectic fixation and turned it into an important legacy.
Henry Sheldon's Unique Path to Museum Creation
00:01:06
Speaker
Not just his legacy, but the legacy of his community of Middlebury, Vermont, and of communities around him.
00:01:13
Speaker
And at the very heart of that story is one unassuming object, a Windsor chair that, in a very unusual way, tries to tell its own story.
00:01:24
Speaker
So this is the story of Henry Sheldon.
00:01:27
Speaker
And here to tell us about it is Dr. Ellery Fouch, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Middlebury College.
00:01:33
Speaker
Ellery, thanks for joining me.
00:01:35
Speaker
Thanks for having me.
00:01:36
Speaker
Now, Henry Sheldon was born into a farming family in 1821.
00:01:41
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.
00:01:54
Speaker
Now, so I want to understand what led him down that very unusual track.
00:02:01
Speaker
Was there something about Henry that set him apart already as a young person?
00:02:06
Speaker
Oh, that's such a great question.
00:02:09
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.
00:02:22
Speaker
And he had this kind of wide range of abilities and curiosities.
00:02:29
Speaker
He was a great musician and he was from a family that was not especially wealthy.
00:02:36
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 had.
00:02:52
Speaker
have.
00:02:53
Speaker
And so throughout the 1800s, he was working a variety of jobs.
00:02:59
Speaker
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 of
00:03:13
Speaker
for American history and the American colonial past.
00:03:17
Speaker
He purchased his first object that year for a collection, a Roman coin that apparently he paid a dollar for.
00:03:26
Speaker
We still have it.
00:03:27
Speaker
It's framed in its own case.
00:03:33
Speaker
And
00:03:34
Speaker
I love that.
00:03:34
Speaker
Everyone has their starting object.
00:03:37
Speaker
Exactly.
00:03:38
Speaker
The first taste.
00:03:40
Speaker
But just to back up a little, because as you mentioned, he's actually later in life by the time he really sort of comes around to this set of interests.
00:03:52
Speaker
And I wonder if we can say a little more about sort of how his personality came to be attracted to that sort of thing.
00:04:01
Speaker
So he comes to Middlebury as a 20-year-old in 1841, I believe.
Sheldon's Diverse Career and Influence of the Centennial Exposition
00:04:08
Speaker
And then he's doing, as you say, a wide variety of different jobs.
00:04:13
Speaker
I mean, he's working for the Postal Service.
00:04:18
Speaker
What was he sort of up to in those decades before he became the collector that you know him as?
00:04:26
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:04:27
Speaker
He ran a restaurant and helped with a colleague, established a saloon and oyster house.
00:04:37
Speaker
For a while, he worked for the railroad as kind of the station agent, in addition to his duties as a postal clerk.
00:04:45
Speaker
And he eventually became the town clerk.
00:04:49
Speaker
in addition to his kind of passion or volunteer work as an organist for St.
00:04:57
Speaker
Stephen's Episcopal Church here in town.
00:04:59
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.
00:05:16
Speaker
He was maybe an early...
00:05:19
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.
00:05:31
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting.
00:05:33
Speaker
I wonder if there's also a sort of an aesthetic element, just speaking about his musicianship.
00:05:40
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.
00:05:49
Speaker
Oh, marvelous.
00:05:49
Speaker
Like it's almost an epicurean.
00:05:52
Speaker
Kind of.
00:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:05:54
Speaker
Particularly maybe, you know, organ music and an Episcopal church somehow seems very appropriate.
00:06:00
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:06:01
Speaker
And he was involved in the upkeep of church of the church.
00:06:04
Speaker
But I was thinking, too, about the ways in which in some of those years he also owned and operated in.
00:06:11
Speaker
a music business, which dealt not only in sheet music, but also rented out musical instruments to people in the region.
00:06:23
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:23
Speaker
So he would come into people's homes and tune their pianos.
00:06:28
Speaker
There was a Melodian that he frequently rented out.
00:06:32
Speaker
We have an oboe in the collection that has a sticker indicating it was from his shop.
00:06:38
Speaker
So
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, this kind of trade in objects that produce both aesthetic effects of music and are themselves beautifully worked objects in many instances.
00:06:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:53
Speaker
Well, okay, so now we get back to his Roman coin, which he purchased for a dollar.
00:06:59
Speaker
And so he is first showing an interest in what we might think of as sort of more typical kind of collecting.
00:07:08
Speaker
What does that look like?
00:07:09
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.
00:07:20
Speaker
And he soon became an avid coin collector.
00:07:23
Speaker
We also know that in 1876, he did go to Philadelphia to see the Centennial Exposition.
00:07:30
Speaker
Hmm.
00:07:31
Speaker
And he, we have a little notebook where he recorded some of the sites that he saw.
00:07:35
Speaker
There are also these tantalizing sketches of what seems to maybe be a mastodon skull, um, 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.
00:07:56
Speaker
It seems 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've seen in Philadelphia.
00:08:12
Speaker
It's interesting that you would mention a mastodon skull or something like it because, you know, that's obviously it's a natural history sort of object rather than a human history sort of object.
00:08:24
Speaker
And yet, you know, so many of these late 19th century museums seem to bring those two together with specimens alongside artifacts.
00:08:35
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:08:36
Speaker
Absolutely.
The Broad Scope of Sheldon's Collection
00:08:37
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.
00:08:45
Speaker
And Henry was really omnivorous in his collecting.
00:08:48
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,
00:09:03
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.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah, some of the more traditional objects.
00:09:22
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:09:22
Speaker
So where did this idea come from of starting to put a museum together?
00:09:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:28
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.
00:09:41
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.
00:09:54
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.
00:10:05
Speaker
And again, he had this very omnivorous appetite.
00:10:09
Speaker
He was curious about early the kind of trades and crafts that people did.
00:10:15
Speaker
We have several tar buckets, for example, in addition to trying to collect, for example, every
00:10:24
Speaker
item ever printed in the town of Middlebury, the pamphlets, the sheet music, the newspapers, books, and so on.
00:10:33
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.
00:10:48
Speaker
Yeah, there's this really telling quotation from Sheldon in these early years of the museum where he says, I've 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, which I have called a museum.
00:11:14
Speaker
Exactly.
00:11:16
Speaker
It's telling because 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?
00:11:29
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.
00:11:41
Speaker
But then he also says that
00:11:43
Speaker
that the purpose of this is to benefit future generations.
00:11:49
Speaker
Do you have a sense, whether it's concrete or speculative, about what that really meant?
00:11:55
Speaker
I mean, what kind of benefit was he trying to bring to future generations or even to his own generation?
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, this is such a great evocative quotation from him and a wonderful question about his practice.
00:12:11
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.
00:12:27
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
00:12:37
Speaker
a kind of middle class museum.
00:12:39
Speaker
It's not a collection of capital A art, although there are some amazing paintings and especially works of early Vermont furniture.
00:12:49
Speaker
But it's not a collection solely devoted to the kind of highest productions of human craft, or the most finely wrought material objects with
00:13:02
Speaker
kind of silver repoussé candlesticks and tea sets and so on.
00:13:08
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.
00:13:27
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
00:13:47
Speaker
um, military leaders, but everyday life I think is really beautifully encapsulated in this collection.
00:13:55
Speaker
And it, in some ways it seems like he might've known that.
00:13:59
Speaker
Um, 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, um, and quite expansive crossing centuries and continents.
00:14:14
Speaker
He traded that very, uh,
00:14:18
Speaker
noteworthy collection to Middlebury College for their collection of newspapers.
00:14:26
Speaker
And I think that is a really interesting window into what he valued and what he thought had value in all senses of the word.
00:14:38
Speaker
And even as we
00:14:40
Speaker
you know, starting with the microfilm movement and now with digitization, there's perhaps less emphasis on the original original copy, as it were.
00:14:52
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.
00:15:06
Speaker
So I think there was amazing foresight in the ephemera of daily life.
00:15:09
Speaker
So you're saying it really has benefited future generations?
00:15:14
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:15:15
Speaker
I think there's maybe part and this goes to both the motivation.
00:15:20
Speaker
and kind of our, our historical interest in it.
00:15:25
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 at that moment.
00:15:41
Speaker
that paper making mills, for example, are asking people to send in their rags and their old pamphlets to be remade.
00:15:54
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.
00:16:06
Speaker
And I think he sees this change happening and
00:16:10
Speaker
wants to have a material record of it.
00:16:14
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.
Creative Curation and Legacy of Henry Sheldon
00:16:27
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:16:28
Speaker
And one piece that's exhibited in the Henry Sheldon Museum does even more than that.
00:16:35
Speaker
It was actually made by Henry himself, and it looks like a Windsor chair, but it's called the relic chair.
00:16:44
Speaker
What is this and how did it come about?
00:16:48
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:16:50
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.
00:17:04
Speaker
It's painted kind of a light gray blue, but it has two rows, two upper rows of spindles.
00:17:14
Speaker
which are variegated colors of kind of natural wood, which draws your eye to it a little bit.
00:17:22
Speaker
And on closer inspection, absolutely, those two rows, each spindle comes from a different historical artifact, ship, site, landmark.
00:17:34
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.
00:17:48
Speaker
He also explicitly wrote to kind of far-flung correspondents, asking them to send him pieces of wood.
00:17:58
Speaker
Most notably, I think he wrote to Martha
00:18:03
Speaker
Patterson, the daughter of Andrew Johnson in East Tennessee to ask her to send
00:18:12
Speaker
a fragment of Andrew Johnson's tailor shop.
00:18:16
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.
00:18:31
Speaker
Wow.
00:18:32
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:33
Speaker
So I think there's this, it's this really wonderful embodiment of
00:18:38
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.
00:18:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:18:50
Speaker
I love that this is just, it's just plain fun.
00:18:54
Speaker
You know?
00:18:55
Speaker
I think so.
00:18:56
Speaker
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.
00:19:09
Speaker
No, this is taking objects that are by themselves maybe interesting, but probably not interesting.
00:19:16
Speaker
valuable or certainly not the sort of thing that a typical museum would seek out and then transform them and craft them and make something totally new out of it that's just sort of just plain fun it's you know I love that this is such a different concept
00:19:36
Speaker
from the sort of work that happens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, just for example.
00:19:42
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.
00:19:55
Speaker
I mean, what does this tell us about...
00:19:58
Speaker
um about henry's concept of a museum and and the purpose that he saw it serving and and how that might have been different from the purpose of other museums uh of the period yeah i i think it gives us some insight into what was really a creative practice in many ways like you said he wasn't just assembling artifacts and kind of cataloging and classifying them um
00:20:25
Speaker
but remaking them in a lot of interesting ways.
00:20:30
Speaker
Unfortunately, his original arrangement of objects doesn't survive for the most part.
00:20:38
Speaker
We'll maybe get to that later, how the museum has been transformed in the subsequent decades.
00:20:43
Speaker
But this chair, which he referred to as a memorial chair,
00:20:49
Speaker
reveals, yeah, this kind of creative delight in assemblage and in making meaning.
00:20:57
Speaker
He's making a new historical memorial object from this kind of vast array of history.
00:21:04
Speaker
And in that way, it seems almost like a museum in miniature.
00:21:08
Speaker
This wasn't the only time he did this practice.
00:21:12
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.
00:21:24
Speaker
And he included some of the coins from his coin collection.
00:21:29
Speaker
He had them attached to that goblet with chains to represent spans of time and space.
00:21:37
Speaker
And that's a very old tradition of silver drinking vessels combined with coins.
00:21:43
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:21:44
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:21:47
Speaker
No, go ahead.
00:21:48
Speaker
I think I also want to maybe clarify that, of course, Henry wasn't alone in this fascination with relics.
00:21:57
Speaker
A lot of people were collecting fragments from, say, George Washington's coffin or the
00:22:08
Speaker
Treaty Elm from Pennsylvania, connected to William Penn's Treaty with the Lenape, or Connecticut's Charter Oak.
00:22:21
Speaker
And there was kind of a practice for collecting these artifacts and sometimes transforming them into aesthetic objects like
00:22:30
Speaker
acorn-shaped earrings from the charter oak or tiny, tiny goblets.
00:22:36
Speaker
But the practice of relic furniture assembled from a broad variety of sources does seem to be, it's more rare.
00:22:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:49
Speaker
I love these pieces of the true cross, essentially.
00:22:54
Speaker
Exactly.
00:22:54
Speaker
It's a very sacramental element.
00:22:57
Speaker
This is maybe getting back to his Episcopalianism.
00:23:01
Speaker
Indeed.
00:23:03
Speaker
Were people interested in what he was doing?
00:23:05
Speaker
I mean, were there visitors to the museum?
00:23:09
Speaker
Yes, his museum was fairly well attended.
00:23:15
Speaker
It had a fully functional kind of board of directors or board of trustees.
00:23:20
Speaker
And there from looking, I worked with my students on the collection ledgers on transcribing those kind of handwritten
00:23:30
Speaker
19th century ledgers working from scans.
00:23:33
Speaker
We've now made a Excel spreadsheet database kind of thing.
00:23:38
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.
00:23:59
Speaker
I think there was a way in which he was seen as kind of an eccentric.
00:24:04
Speaker
You know, he was a bachelor living in what was a museum and transforming even the objects that he himself used every day.
00:24:16
Speaker
For example, his shaving cup and his shaving brush.
00:24:21
Speaker
are part of the museum.
00:24:22
Speaker
He attached a note to a razor saying it was used the first and last time he had a shave.
00:24:31
Speaker
There's a tiny tin.
00:24:33
Speaker
This is relevant actually because I encourage people to go to magazineantiques.com slash podcast to see pictures because Henry Sheldon himself, he looked eccentric in these photographs we have of him.
00:24:51
Speaker
Bless him.
00:24:52
Speaker
Yeah, including, of course, a Merlin-style beard.
00:24:56
Speaker
Indeed.
00:24:57
Speaker
Exactly.
00:24:57
Speaker
He had a...
00:25:00
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.
00:25:13
Speaker
And he was also becoming increasingly deaf, which I imagine must have been an immense tragedy for him.
00:25:22
Speaker
for a person who loved music so much, to have to give up that aspect of his life and his creative practice.
00:25:30
Speaker
And so I think in many ways, rather than music as a creative output, the museum filled that role.
00:25:40
Speaker
But absolutely for his, I'm trying to remember which birthday,
00:25:46
Speaker
In 1904, he staged a kind of elaborate birthday outing in which he had collected a carriage that former President Monroe had ridden in on a visit to Vermont.
00:26:04
Speaker
And Henry assembled all, let's see, a group of, I think three or four other older men of the village
00:26:13
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.
00:26:28
Speaker
And so this kind of staging of ceremonial spectacle, I think is really remarkable.
00:26:36
Speaker
I think I have an idea for my next birthday.
00:26:40
Speaker
Don't we all?
00:26:45
Speaker
I just want to take a minute to say thanks for listening.
00:26:47
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.
00:26:57
Speaker
This helps new listeners find curious objects, and it helps me to feel really grateful.
00:27:03
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.
00:27:18
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.
00:27:27
Speaker
Thanks again.
00:27:28
Speaker
And here, once more, is Ellery Fouch.
00:27:32
Speaker
One problem with a passion project museum like this is that its well-being depends on the dedication and labor of a single person.
00:27:41
Speaker
And when that person isn't around or able to do the work anymore, things can fall apart quickly.
Challenges and Revival of Sheldon's Museum
00:27:50
Speaker
So tell us about what happened to the Henry Sheldon Museum in the twilight of his life.
00:27:57
Speaker
Yeah, this is a great point.
00:27:59
Speaker
Henry, this really was a labor of love for him.
00:28:03
Speaker
He was passionate about collecting and
00:28:08
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.
00:28:19
Speaker
And so almost every day, there's an entry in his diary of what he's done for the museum that day.
00:28:28
Speaker
And it's sometimes things like
00:28:29
Speaker
painting the walls or settling copying account books.
00:28:35
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.
00:28:50
Speaker
brought into the context of museum labor and museum collections, maybe devalued in one aspect of the world.
00:28:59
Speaker
But then this really important aspect of preservation for the museum itself.
00:29:06
Speaker
But absolutely, Henry was doggedly working on the museum all the days of his life.
00:29:12
Speaker
And after his death, as you suggest, there was kind of this period of uncertainty.
00:29:20
Speaker
He had a board of trustees.
00:29:22
Speaker
People still knew that there were interesting collections there.
00:29:27
Speaker
But after Henry's death in 1907,
00:29:32
Speaker
things kind of, the momentum was gone.
00:29:35
Speaker
There was a custodian who still cared for the collections, but it wasn't really open to the public.
00:29:43
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It wasn't very much of a vibrant part of the community anymore.
00:29:49
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And my friend and colleague, David Stemeshkin is working on a kind of history of the Henry Sheldon Museum.
00:29:57
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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.
00:30:12
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who in the 1930s, I think, were interested, actually, they were motivated by college history.
00:30:22
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They were, Storrs Lee, I think, was working on a book about the history of Middlebury College, and he was told that there was this great collection.
00:30:32
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It is kind of a,
00:30:34
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entertaining or amusing or ironic that in the early years of its founding, the college did not maintain its own archive.
00:30:42
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Most of the early papers related to Middlebury College were collected by Sheldon, in fact.
00:30:49
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So the story is that Storrs Lee
00:30:53
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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.
00:31:10
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And he and Arthur Healy apparently, of course, the 1930s is a big moment for 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.
00:31:33
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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.
00:31:50
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They revived the Board of Trustees and actually had this really active
00:31:57
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group of donors and collectors.
00:32:01
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Arthur Frankenstein from San Francisco was on the board of trustees for a while, which I find really fascinating.
00:32:09
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A man who was interested in a trompe l'oeil painting and the contemporary work of Andy Warhol.
00:32:18
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Yeah.
00:32:19
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And so there was this real energy and vitality around it as well.
00:32:24
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Of course, it's never had that kind of huge endowment or extremely wealthy collector to underwrite that future.
The Role of Small Museums in Preserving Local History
00:32:36
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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.
00:32:46
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So what 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?
00:32:58
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I think for rural communities especially, there's a way in which
00:33:06
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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
00:33:22
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of our current lives and our current experiences.
00:33:27
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Thinking about the losses of the past, whether it's the influenza epidemic of 1918, and how it might parallel our own moment
00:33:39
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with COVID.
00:33:42
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And the kind of, 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.
00:33:55
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And so I think that that role of making meaning of not only the past, but also of the present can be really crucial.
00:34:04
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They often have
00:34:06
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wonderful insights into the lives of daily people of the past.
00:34:12
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And so that bridging of historical empathy, I think, is really powerful as well.
00:34:22
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Are there any other lessons that you think historians and collectors today could take away from Henry's project?
00:34:34
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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.
00:34:46
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He didn't lose track of his own subjectivity.
00:34:50
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He wasn't necessarily...
00:34:53
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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.
00:35:09
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And I think sometimes there's a
00:35:13
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an impulse to be dispassionate and remove ourselves from the story as historians or scholars or researchers or educators.
00:35:27
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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
00:35:43
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creative in recording and crafting aspects of my own story.
00:35:51
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I think back to
00:35:55
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Henry loved playing cards with his friends and he often held these memorial games on the birthday of a friend who had died.
00:36:06
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And he often inscribed even these decks of kind of quotidian playing cards with this is the deck of cards that we used.
00:36:15
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in the celebration of my 70th birthday.
00:36:20
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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.
00:36:29
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And I think that it transforms these decks of interesting ephemera into really meaningful, almost memorial objects that
00:36:42
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are so much more about human experience.
00:36:47
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And I think I keep coming back to grief, unfortunately, and maybe that's just where my mind is right now with COVID.
00:36:57
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But again, that sense of marking time, of
00:37:02
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holding space for human experience, even if it's something as seemingly ephemeral or meaningless as a game of cards.
00:37:16
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An acknowledgement that that can have real and deep and true meaning.
00:37:22
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That's wonderful.
00:37:25
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Plenty of food for thought there, I think, for all of us.
00:37:29
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Thank you, Ellery.
00:37:30
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I really appreciate it.
00:37:31
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Thank you.
00:37:32
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It's been such a treat to get to chat with you about Henry Sheldon.
00:37:39
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That's our program for today.
00:37:40
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Hope you had fun listening.
00:37:42
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Thanks to Ellery Fouch, who again is assistant professor at Middlebury College in Vermont.
00:37:47
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Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:37:51
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Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.