Fairbanks Museum: A Scales Fortune Becomes a Temple of Curiosity

The red sandstone building looming over Saint Johnsbury's Main Street was the gift of Franklin Fairbanks, heir to the family that invented the platform scale in eighteen thirty and built one of the most successful manufacturing fortunes in New England.

Franklin was a lifelong naturalist who stuffed his house with mounted birds, fossils, insects, and ethnological objects gathered from around the world. By eighteen eighty-nine his collection outgrew every room. So he commissioned this building, opened it to the public in eighteen ninety-one, and handed it free of charge to Saint Johnsbury.

Today it holds roughly one hundred seventy-five thousand objects and claims the only public planetarium in Vermont.