History
Captain Benjamin Harrington built this structure about 1800 in Shelburne, Vermont. Harrington, who owned and operated a nearby inn, used the building as a distillery to produce spirits to serve at his inn. The building later served as the Shelburne town barn but, after a period of disuse, the town gave the building to the Museum in 1947 when the Museum moved it to its present site.
Constructed of hand-hewn timbers and rough planks, the Museum used the building as a storage and workshop space for several years while deciding how to renovate it as a textile gallery. Adopting the name “Hat and Fragrance,” which refers to the Museum’s collection of hatboxes and herbal sachets used to preserve early textiles, the Museum paneled the interior walls with maple, birch, and beech veneers in decorative patterns. The original structure still maintains this decorative paneling. The museum later built four additional rooms to provide further exhibition space.
Read more about this topic: Hat And Fragrance Textile Gallery
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“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
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“Properly speaking, history is nothing but the crimes and misfortunes of the human race.”
—Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)