St. Johnsbury Athenaeum: America's Oldest Unaltered Gallery
Vermont
In eighteen seventy-one, industrialist Horace Fairbanks gave St. Johnsbury a Victorian library filled with eight thousand books. Two years later he added an art gallery to hold his prized purchase: Albert Bierstadt's monumental painting The Domes of the Yosemite, ten feet tall and fifteen feet wide, which still dominates the room today.
The gallery has never been significantly altered. Its skylights, woodwork, and collection of Hudson River School masterworks by Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, and Sanford Gifford remain exactly as Fairbanks arranged them in eighteen seventy-three. That is why the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum is often called the oldest unaltered art gallery in the United States. It became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-six. The combined library and gallery still serves the community on Main Street.
