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Dickinson Family (Hadley, Massachusetts)
Prentis House, 1773
Re-erected, 1955
Museum purchase, 1954-674

Built in Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1773, Prentis House was moved to Shelburne Museum in 1955 to serve as a representative colonial home. The building is a classic example of a traditional New England “saltbox” style home. Popular during the Colonial era, this type of building usually consisted of a wood frame structure with two stories in the front and one in the back, a steeply pitched roof, and a sturdy central chimney. Prentis House features six rooms on the first floor including an entry hall, a formal parlor, a dining room, a large kitchen, a “buttery” (or pantry), and a borning room—a small room adjacent to the kitchen in which babies were born and sometimes kept during infancy. The second floor features three sizable bedrooms, referred to as “chambers” during the 18th century. The interiors of Prentis House have remained mostly unchanged since the building was installed on the Museum grounds in 1955, an intact example of the Colonial Revival aesthetic that was so prevalent in museum period rooms during the first half of the 20th century.

Welcome Allen (Dorset, Vermont) & Timothy Rideout (Dorset, Vermont)
Dorset House, 1832
Re-erected, 1954
Museum purchase, 1952-1250

Built in 1832 in East Dorset, Vermont, this grand Greek Revival home was originally meant to function as a duplex for builder Welcome Allen’s two children, Florenze and Lucia. The façade is dominated by a massive cornice, and marble slabs from a quarry located near the building’s original location were used as a veneer for the foundation and porches. Welcome (and later his son, Florenze) were proprietors of a foundry that produced cast iron stove plates, plow points, and kettles. Accordingly, this home was built without open fireplace hearths and instead used closed iron stoves for all heating. Dismantled in 1953 and moved to Shelburne the following year, today Dorset House is home to the museum’s collection of approximately 1200 wildfowl decoys.

Antoine Lorraine (Canadian)
Settlers’ House, 1846
Re-erected, 1957
Gift of Thomas Schermerhorn, 1955-703

Settler’s House Bedroom, 2013

Settler’s House Kitchen, 2013

Settlers’ House offers a look at colonial life in Vermont in the 1790s. The building itself is actually from a later period—it was built in 1846 in East Charlotte, Vermont by Antoine Lorraine, a Canadian immigrant —but it nevertheless exemplifies early American building techniques. The two-room log house is constructed of hand-hewn and dovetailed beech and pine timbers, with the ceiling and floor joists dovetailed into the outside walls. The interior features an open-hearth fireplace, and outdoors there is a vegetable garden, flax field, and clay bake oven used for cooking demonstrations. A reproduction English-style barn, built for the Museum in 2001, serves as a special demonstration site for early American crafts.

Mary Bishop Comstock (Shelburne, Vermont, 1744–1828)
Hooked Flower Vase Bed Rug, 1810
Wool, 87 x 78 in.
Gift of Mrs. Henry Tracy, 1952-607

Made in Shelburne, Vermont, the neo-classical flower-and leaf motif of this 1810 bed rug is typical of the early 19th century, but its enormous scale is not. A more conventional design would have included a smaller pattern, repeated several times. It is the unusual design and the huge inscription that make this bedcover remarkable. Mary Comstock made this rug when she was 66 years old by which time bed rugs, which had been popular in her youth, were considered old-fashioned. Using a hand-woven plaid twill rug with a pile surface, she embroidered the design onto the blanket in a looped running stitch with handspun wool yams. Comstock boldly identified herself, working into the design the words, “Mary Comstock's Rug, Jany 30 1810.”

Unidentified maker (Probably Shaftsbury, Vermont)
Lift-Top Chest, 1810–20
Pine, paint, and brass, 36 5/8 x 37 3/8 x 16 15/16 in.
1959-281

High-style furniture was skillfully imitated in both urban and rural areas using more readily available and affordable materials to reach a broader clientele. Itinerant ornamental painters in Vermont plied their trade with pine and paint on furniture, to create realistically grained exotic hardwoods in the latest fashion. Many craftsmen practiced these skills, explaining the widely different painting styles that emerged across the state during the 19th century.

Ebenezer Wheeler (Rockingham, Vermont, b. 1791–94, d. unknown)
Half Sideboard, 1817
Cherry, yellow birch, tiger maple with mahogany, maple, and rosewood veneers, poplar, and eastern white pine, 47 ½ x 47 x 21 ½ in.
Museum purchase, 2013-11

Full-sized Federal sideboards are not common in Vermont. Instead, a smaller modification of this form survives in many areas of the Green Mountain State. Advertised as a “locker” in period newspapers, it combines a bureau with flanking bottle drawers and often features highly figured woods. The blocked front and exuberantly spool-turned corner columns, combined with the vigorously scrolled apron, add to cabinetmaker Ebenezer Wheeler’s eccentric interpretations of this high-style piece made for Sarah Smith (1786–1866) on the occasion of her May 6, 1817 marriage to Reverend Isaac B. Bucklen (1794–1875).

Nahum Parker (Middlebury, Vermont, 1789–1876)
Sofa, ca. 1830
Mahogany, white pine, with mahogany veneer, and brass, 35 x 84 x 20 ½ in.
Gift of J. Brooks Buxton, 2018-9.35

In an 1829 advertisement in the National Standard, Middlebury, Vermont furniture maker Nahum Parker specifically publicized that he had on hand “two Sofas, trimmed in elegant style.” Could this be one of them?

Upholstered sofas, requiring specialized skills, were one of the most expensive furniture forms in New England households during the 1830s. The lyre design was a popular component of the Greek Revival style of the period and is found in a variety of furniture forms including table supports and chair splats. Parker incorporated the entire face and façade of a lyre clock in the arm supports of this sofa. The quality and quantity of the high relief carving on the legs and leg supports is exceptional, and its placement on front, back, and side surfaces suggests that this impressive seating unit was meant to hold court in the center of a parlor.

Edward Lamson Henry (American, 1841–1919)
Old Clock on the Stairs, 1868
Oil on canvas, 20 7/8 x 16 ½ in.
Museum purchase, acquired from Maxim Karolik, 1957-690.41

Edward Lamson Henry’s Old Clock on the Stairs depicts a domestic interior where the iconography of time, both past and present, fills the scene. The columned hallway frames the private domestic space and leads the viewer to the focal point of the painting: the antique, grandfather clock with its characteristic carved details indicating an origin in Philadelphia. Time bears witness to human activity and confronts the viewer with the slow but inevitable passage of life.

The clock as the eternal witness to the cycle of life also plays a part in an 1845 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” which was the inspiration for this painting. The refrain “Forever—never! Never—forever!” repeats after every stanza, as if the words replace the constant tick-tock of a clock. Henry’s Old Clock on the Stairs, while nostalgic, also urges America to reclaim the time lost during the Civil War. Efficiency through the industrialization of the modern world offered the possibility to “gain” time.

Green Mountain Iron Company (Brandon, Vermont, 1810–55)
Parlor Stove, ca. 1840–50
Cast iron, 41 5/8 x 25 x 17 ¾ in.
Gift of David Wells, 1979-37

The business of the Green Mountain Iron Company, formed in the 1840s at the Forestdale Ironworks in Brandon, Vermont, was largely devoted to the creation of cast iron parlor stoves. More compact than larger stoves used for cooking in the kitchen, parlor stoves served to warm homes using wood or coal with more efficiency than traditional open fireplaces. They were also more formal—notice the lyres, foliate motifs, and classical columns on this example—than simple pot-bellied stoves found in more casual domestic settings. The rise in popularity of these stoves complemented the arrival of the steam train in Vermont, as both the railroad and the parlor stove sought to more efficiently use fuel as 19th-century forests were cut for the state’s significant lumbering trade and shipped to eager customers across New England and southern Quebec.

Henry Bacon (American, 1839–1912)
The Quilting Party, 1872
Oil on panel, 6 ¾ x 11 1/8 in.
Museum purchase, acquired from Harry Shaw Newman, the Old Print Shop, 1959-223

A native of Haverhill, Massachusetts, Henry Bacon spent most of his life as an expatriate artist in France. In 1872, he forwarded this small oil study of a larger work in progress to his New York dealer Samuel Avery, asking him to secure a buyer for the painting and to arrange for its exhibition in the United States. Noting that he thought it his best picture and that he wanted “eight hundred dollars gold” for the painting, Bacon wrote “the subject is a New England quilting party about 50 years ago.” Strongly influenced by small French genre scenes featuring groupings of figures in anecdotal, everyday moments, in this painting Bacon celebrates an American middle-class domestic scene of about 1825 with humor and nostalgia for the past.

Ann Robinson (Norwich, Connecticut)
Applique and Pieced Cornucopia and Floral Medallion Counterpane, 1814
Cotton, 95 x 100 in.
Museum purchase, acquired from John Kenneth Byard, Silvermine Antiques, 1954-439.1

This extraordinary counterpane was created over the course of just four months by Ann Robinson of Norwich, Connecticut. While many American bedcovers at this time were made primarily with chintzes  that featured images of birds or flowers on light-colored backgrounds, Ann chose to use a large variety of newer-style, flat patterned fabrics for her project. In fact, the only traditional chintz in this bedcover was used for the red birds in the bottom section. The dates stitched into the bedcover—October 1, 1813 and January 27, 1814—are especially valuable because they provide insight into the kinds of printed cotton fabrics that were available for American consumers during the second decade of the 19th century.

Albertus Del Orient Browere (American, 1814–87)
Rip Van Winkle Chased from Home by Dame Van Winkle, 1880
Oil on canvas, 38 x 50 1/8 in.
Museum purchase, acquired from Maxim Karolik, 1959-265.10

Born in Tarrytown, New York—the backyard of novelist Washington Irving—Albertus Del Orient Browere eventually made his name by painting pictures inspired by American literature. Between 1879 and 1880 Browere painted four scenes from Irving’s famed 1819 story “Rip Van Winkle.” According to Irving, Rip is “one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy.” Unfortunately for Rip, his wife, Dame Van Winkle, always seems to be after him to take responsibility for his situation. The first painting in the series, Rip Van Winkle Chased from Home by Dame Van Winkle, depicts the ill-fated character as he walks away from home—and his cares—into the forest. Two additional scenes—Rip Van Winkle at the Inn, Rip Van Winkle in the Mountains—continue to follow our ill-fated protagonist, even as he wanders farther from home and into the woods. The final scene, Rip Van Winkle Asleep, presents a slumbering, bearded, somewhat scraggly Rip who has drunk a bewitched beverage and is peacefully dreaming—but will soon awaken to a world that has been transformed.