You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” says Obi-Wan Kenobi, in Alec Guinness’ clipped British accent, of the notorious Mos Eisley spaceport in the first Star Wars movie — a tableau of smugglers, bounty hunters and unscrupulous types who gamble, drink and listen to jazz clarinet. Had the epic been set on Earth, the Jedi master could just as easily have been alerting Luke Skywalker to the moral perils of an equally reprobate place: rural Vermont.
“Vermont Vice,” currently on view at Bennington Museum, paints a captivating picture of iniquity through the state’s history. Combining art, artifacts and detailed histories, the show explores sex, drugs and money — with some accounts of murder, for good measure — and how public perceptions of them shifted over time, from shock to acceptance, tolerance to outrage. While the concept of “vice” is hard to pin down, the exhibition’s thesis is that it has long undergirded the Green Mountain State’s veneer of wholesomeness. As the introductory wall text puts it, “The boundaries between respectability and transgression have always been porous.”
One of the show’s opening displays offers a particularly poignant illustration of those permeable boundaries: drugs as cure versus drugs as crisis. Thomas Waterman Wood’s 1882 painting “The Quack Doctor,” the Montpelier artist’s most famous work, pictures the good people of the Capital City gathering to hear a snake-oil peddler’s sales pitch. The doctor and his assistant sport vaguely Moroccan outfits, and their wagon advertises “Great Oriental & Panacea Cures.” Wood was never subtle with his messages, and in case a viewer doesn’t see through the charlatans’ theatrics, the name “I.M. Cheatham” emblazoned on the doctor’s cart, and the ducks presumably quacking underneath it, will likely tip them off to his untrustworthiness.
A display case offers 19th-century examples of prescriptions and patent medicine bottles, such as “Dr. B.J. Kendall’s Blackberry Balsam Compound,” in which the active ingredient is neither of those aromatics but rather a presumably quite effective 41 percent alcohol and two grains per fluid ounce of opium. Many Vermonters at the time were addicted to both substances, according to the display’s label, consuming millions of doses of opium monthly by 1900.
We see that opioid crisis reflected in the modern-day epidemic in two of Ray Materson’s exquisite embroideries from 2014, each only a couple of square inches. Incarcerated for drug-related offenses, Michigan resident Materson started making embroideries in prison by unraveling socks and repurposing the thread to create tiny scenes. He produced the works on display, “Ski Vermont” and “Vermont Mother in Despair,” after his release, when he spent time in Vermont as a social worker. Both embroideries address the fallout from heavily marketed drugs such as OxyContin that are not so different from the patent medicines Wood characterized as quackery.
Attitudes toward alcohol are also well documented in the show, starting with one of its oldest artifacts: Ethan Allen’s bar tab. Through stains, spidery cursive and upside-down scribbled tavern math, the early 1770s document shows heavy drinking as accepted behavior among the revolutionaries. Beside it, an accounting of work done at Bennington’s first sawmill includes “Rum Drinkt” as a line-item expense alongside hardware and lumber.
Documents from the following century reveal a darker perception of drink. A harrowing handwritten 1823 account of a suicide attributes the act to alcoholism. Nineteenth-century temperance pamphlets decry alcohol’s many ills, including its production “using the process of decay.”
Of course, some of the show’s best pictures are the ones involving sex.
But Prohibition-era artifacts, such as a copper still found in a Bennington barn, indicate a more tolerant attitude toward alcohol in 1920s Vermont. Wooden road signs, made just before the federal legislation, point visitors to Pawlet (“dry”), Granville (“wet”) and Wells, labeled as a “damp” town, where a prohibition of alcohol was in place but not enforced.
To illustrate money and gambling, the show presents a trove of images and ephemera from Pownal’s Green Mountain Race Track, which hosted horse and later dog racing from 1963 to 1992. At first, the track was seen as an economic boon to the region, bringing jobs and development. But horse-drugging scandals, flagging attendance and rumors of organized crime — mug shots of gangsters involved in the track are on view — all contributed to the racetrack’s closure. The site fell into decrepitude, as seen in a painting by recent Bennington College grad Mattias Van Cleef and a pair of photographs by Middlebury’s Eric Killorin showing the stands as they were in 2025, broken and completely covered in graffiti.
Damien McCaffery, Bennington Museum’s assistant director of engagement and editorial projects, has been working on a comprehensive oral history of the track that will be available online. Visitors at the exhibition can add their own stories at a recording station.
Of course, some of the show’s best pictures are the ones involving sex. Despite the puritanical attitudes apparent in a few 1800s documents on view, by the early 1900s Vermonters seem to have been a randy bunch. A circa-1905 card by James Whalen, shaped like a lemon, advertises ice cream and tobacco in his Manchester Center store by presenting a reclining nude woman draped in a gauzy scarf. William Hayden’s circa-1907 satirical drawing of the “Annual Outing of the Temperance League of America!,” on a glass plate photo negative, pokes fun at such moralizing societies — emphasis very much on pokes — by portraying upstanding ladies and mustachioed gents in a wild orgy far too explicit to print in this paper in 2026.
Three images by noted documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, taken in 1974 as part of her “Carnival Strippers” series, shed light on the “girlie shows” that were once a regular attraction at Vermont fairs. In “Before the Show, Tunbridge, Vermont,” a boy’s eyes seem about to pop out of his head at his first sight of a stripper, while his dad shoves him closer to the stage. In “The Bally Call, Tunbridge, Vermont,” a bikini-clad woman attempts to entice a passerby. Audio clips from Meiselas’ interviews with dancers, spectators and managers accompany the photos, offering both the audible textures of the time and insights into how these women felt about what they were doing. “The men are better performers than the women,” one says.
Their narratives, like many of the items in the exhibition, present a complicated, nuanced story of Vermont that’s as compelling as any trashy novel or prestige TV show. The guilty pleasure is well worth a road trip. ➆
“Vermont Vice,” on view through November 2; a gallery talk by curator Jamie Franklin is October 9, 2-3 p.m. at Bennington Museum.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Sin, Sans Cities | Art and artifacts in Bennington portray the history of vice in the Green Mountain State”
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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