The Vermont History Center and Leahy Library in Barre recently gained a treasure hunt-like space. With $250,000 in federal funds obtained by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and another $450,000 from the state legislature, executive director Steve Perkins and his staff finally realized a 25-year-old plan to create an “open-storage” room. The display method is an unfussy way to make more of the institution’s collections visible to the public.
For the new Research and Exhibition Gallery, Perkins, along with director of collections and access Amanda Gustin and collections manager Katie Grant, rescued 1,500 items from storage and artfully arranged them in glass-fronted shelving units, banks of glass-sealed drawers and a row of double-sided display racks hung from rollers. Because the objects are generally protected, visitors can pull out drawers at will and browse unsupervised. (Perkins recommends checking in at his nearby office first.)
Open-storage spaces like those at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which built its rows of glass cases in the late 1980s, tend to display dense groupings of similar items — such as dozens of teapots, each efficiently tagged with an acquisition number.
The history center’s display is more playful and interesting: The objects were chosen to reflect the state’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S., which will officially occur on July 4, 2026. (The show will stay in place for three years, Perkins said, through the 250th anniversary of Vermont as a republic.) Each display case has a QR code that brings up catalog details about the items in it. Visitors can access the codes using their phones or a portable scanner linked to two computers in the room.
“I’m glad we’re doing this now because we can improve on the [open storage] of 25 years ago with a thematic installation and digital access,” Perkins said during Seven Days‘ tour of the space.
Grant noted that the digital access makes research appealing, even for kids. “The other day, we had kids running back and forth” between the computers and the displays, “which you don’t usually want in a museum,” she said with a laugh.
The semiquincentennial show is drawn from the 30,000-artifact collection of the Vermont Historical Society, which operates the center as well as the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier.
One shelving tower contains an original Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia pint container alongside a plastic milk jug from Kimball Brook Farm in North Ferrisburgh, carved wood cows made in Proctor before 1938 and an antique butter mold once used at the Rutland Reformatory for Women.
Another section holds a 1920 time clock made by a precursor of IBM. Workers at the Porter Screen Company in Winooski — once the largest window and door screen company in the world — used it to punch their time cards.
The shelf below displays a curved sword and scabbard that belonged to George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron — aka Lord Byron, the English poet who fought for the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. It was purchased by Jonathan Peckham Miller of Montpelier, who arrived in Greece to join the fight just as Lord Byron died, in 1825. Miller later became a famed abolitionist.
“This shows you how deep all these artifacts can go and how they tie into our history,” Perkins said.
The space allows for items to be shown together for the first time, Grant said, including Johnson-born Civil War infantryman Horace Goodwin’s sword, memorial card and daguerreotype in one drawer. The latter two came from the Leahy Library in the same building. The room “brings together the museum and library collection in new ways,” Grant said.
“I hope, by having this facility in here, that more people interested in objects and material and cultural research will come,” Perkins said. “It tells the story of Vermont.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “History Center’s New Research and Exhibition Gallery ‘Tells the Story of Vermont'”
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2025.
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