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Flights of Fancy at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium
George Washington’s image is on every American dollar and quarter. It’s hard to be taken by surprise by yet another likeness of the square-jawed and bewigged first president. But last month I came across a portrait that shook me into seeing George in a new light. Actually, George looked pretty shocked too, with his eyes bugging out back at me. Literally. For this depiction of the venerable statesman had been rendered in the artistic medium of insects, from shiny beetles to spread-eagled moths, all carefully arranged by size, texture and color as if in a jigsaw puzzle. On the opposite wall, Abraham Lincoln stared back with the same goggle-eyed gaze from his own buggy portrait.
What does bug art have to do with the progress of science? Who knows? But beginning in the Renaissance, these kinds of oddities were the mainstays of collections known as cabinets of curiosities, precursors of the science centers and museums of today. And so the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium, tucked away in the northeastern Vermont town of St. Johnsbury, stands as a Victorian-era American example of a cabinet of curiosities that eventually became a museum.
As soon as I stepped into the museum’s main hall, I was charmed. The interior felt like the library of a grand Victorian home, cozy and imposing at the same time, with about a dozen or so visitors browsing the various nooks. The indirect glow of northern light diffused in from a two-story arched window. Reflected off the finely crafted oak panels, it seemed to warm the place up. Brightly plumed birds perched in formation on strangely symmetrical branches. Bears and other mammals paraded down the middle, most in glass cases sized to fit each specimen.
I flitted through the main floor’s collection admiring birds I had never heard of before. One particularly fine avian was the great argus. Its fanned tail feathers in brown and white patterns wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a 60s optical art painting. Most poignant was the pair of passenger pigeons, which have been extinct since 1914; our visit was just two weeks after scientists announced that the planet had lost forever the white dolphin of the Yangtze River in China. Was one of the dolphins preserved somewhere, I wondered, floating forever in formaldehyde for memory’s sake? Or perhaps dried and stuffed, like all the other things here at the museum?
Visitors today can thank local industrialist and amateur scientist Franklin Fairbanks, who built the museum in 1891, for the fine feathered displays. As per the custom of the time, he collected his birds by shooting them. Horrifying. But then again, I had to admit that I was grateful that he got his pigeons while the getting was still good so that I might appreciate them a century later.
Upstairs, I had thought the doll collection was the most outrageously bizarre display – it ranged from a set of baby Dionne quintuplets to a full set of racial and ethnic representations. But that was before I reached the bug art.
Between 6,000 and 13,000 common insects went into each obsessively neat insect artwork according to the placard, which identified the artist as John Hampson, mechanical genius, New Jersey resident and one-time Thomas Edison employee. But why was his art at the Fairbanks, of all places?
It was local celebrity meteorologist Steve Maleski – presenter of a sky show projected from the museum’s quaint 40-year-old planetarium – who finally provided the answer. “When the artist died, his daughter started looking for a museum to take [his art] near their home in New Jersey,” he said. “And the story goes that she fanned out in ever-greater circles until finally this museum said, ‘We’ll take it.’” It makes you think – how many other entomological masterpieces wound up in landfill just because museums had something against kitsch?
Today’s science centers are all about interactive learning. And no wonder. When I was a child, picking things up and playing with them seemed oodles more fun than looking at a bunch of old stuff sitting behind glass.
But then again, when I was a kid I knew diddly-squat about intellectual and cultural history (not to mention other things that make life worth living such as organic heirloom tomatoes, red Burgundy and sex). Maybe the Fairbanks Museum is just a repository of random useless things: bug art, century-old snowflake images by Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley and tiny Chinese ladies’ shoes from the days of footbinding. But I prefer a different view. Like the regional Vermont birds in its collection, the Fairbanks is itself a rare specimen of its time and place.
*****
How to get there:
The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium is located in the town of St. Johnsbury in the northeastern corner of the New England state of Vermont, almost 40 miles northeast of the capital, Montpelier, along U.S. Rte. 2. The museum is located at 1302 Main Street across from a couple of grand churches and near Victorian houses and storefronts. Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and kids, under 5 free. The planetarium show costs $5 (1:30 p.m. on weekend days for most of the year; daily during July and August). There are money-saving combination packages for families. The planetarium is the first and oldest in the state of Vermont, according to the museum’s website.
Take in some art across town:
For over 150 years St. Johnsbury was home to the E & T Fairbanks Company, a manufacturer of platform scales that came to dominate the global market by 1860 – a nineteenth-century Microsoft of measurement, as it were. Though the business moved nearly 20 years ago, the years of prosperity have left their architectural and cultural mark on the landscape. Another destination worth at least a half-hour visit is the Athenaeum, the oldest art gallery in the United States still in its original condition. Franklin Fairbanks’s more artistically inclined brother Horace built the library and gallery in 1878, and today it still houses the grand painting “Domes of Yosemite” by Albert Bierstadt as its centerpiece. Ask the docent on duty to point out the nineteenth-century interior gas lighting system and marvel at how the building never blew up.
