Arkell Museum

The Arkell Museum in Canajoharie exists because of baby food and a man with excellent taste in American painting. Bartlett Arkell was the first president of the Beech-Nut Packing Company, whose factory made Canajoharie one of the best-known names in early twentieth-century grocery stores. Arkell used the proceeds to build an art collection, and in nineteen twenty-seven he added an art gallery to the village library to share it with the village.

The collection he assembled contains three hundred fifty paintings and sculptures by American masters, including twenty-one works by Winslow Homer, along with works by John Singer Sargent, Albert Bierstadt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Edward Hopper. For a small Mohawk Valley village, it is a genuinely remarkable collection, the kind you would expect to find in a major city, built here because one industrialist believed his neighbors deserved access to great art.