History
Electra Havemeyer Webb’s desire to provide a suitable setting for the carriage collection of her father-in-law, Dr. William Seward Webb, provided the inspiration for founding Shelburne Museum. She searched Vermont for a building to house these fine carriages and found a unique horseshoe-shaped dairy barn near Georgia, Vermont. When the owner declined to sell the barn, Electra Webb directed her staff to create a copy of the structure. Over a two-year period they located, moved, and assembled hand-hewn beams from twelve Vermont barns and stone from two gristmills to construct their own horseshoe barn on museum grounds.
Completed in July 1949, the massive structure, which is 238 ½ feet long and 32 feet (9.8 m) wide, incorporated 745 timbers, posts, and braces, 17,000 feet (5,200 m) of plank and other boarding, and 9,000 square feet (840 m2) of slate. Carpenters specially cut new clapboards for the exterior siding with an up-and-down saw (see Scroll Saw) to recreate the markings found on the original building.
In 1957, after the addition of 150 more vehicles to the transportation collection, the museum constructed the Horseshoe Barn Annex to exhibit key examples from the collection using a combination of old and new materials.
Read more about this topic: Horseshoe Barn And Annex
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Andrew Jackson (1767–1845)
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)