Sights in Northeast Kingdom
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Fairbanks Museum of Natural Science
In 1891, when Franklin Fairbanks’ collection of stuffed animals and cultural artifacts from across the globe grew too large for his home, he built the Fairbanks Museum of Natural Science. This massive stone building with a 30ft-high barrel-vaulted ceiling still displays more than half of Franklin’s original collection. Over 3000 preserved animals in glass cases can be seen, including a 1200lb moose shot in Nova Scotia in 1898, an American bison from 1902 and a Bengal tiger. There are planetarium shows at 1:30pm ($3 per person), and also in July and August at 11am.
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Bread & Puppet Museum
Rolling though the Northeast Kingdom, it’s easy to become jaded at the sight of yet another barn. One in Glover definitely warrants a detour – not for its livestock but for the cosmological universe of the Bread & Puppet Museum, lurking within. Formed in New York City by German artist Peter Shumann in 1963, the Bread & Puppet Theater is a collective-in-training that presents carnivalesque pageants, circuses, and battles of Good and Evil with gaudy masks and life-size (even gigantic) puppets. The street theater of its early performances gave voice to local rent strikes and anti–Vietnam War protests as well as an epic parade down Fifth Ave in the early eighties to prote…
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St Johnsbury Athenaeum
Home to the country’s oldest art gallery still in its original form, the Athenaeum was founded in 1871 when Horace Fairbanks gave the town a library. Comprising some 9000 finely bound books of classic world literature, the library was soon complemented by the gallery, built around its crown jewel, Albert Bierstadt’s 10ft-by-15ft painting, Domes of the Yosemite. The rest of the collection consists of works by such Hudson River School painters as Asher B Durand, Worthington Whittredge and Jasper Crospey as well as dozens of copies of old masters. Bierstadt is said to have returned to the gallery every summer until his death to touch up his masterpiece.
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Maple Grove Farms
Actually a factory, the farms about half a mile east of St Johnsbury have been making maple candy for almost a century and are the world’s largest producers of the saccharine stuff. Stop by to see how the molding process works and satisfy your sweet tooth – the popularity of the Santa Claus–shaped candies transcends all seasons.
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