St. Johnsbury Athenaeum: The Oldest Unaltered Art Gallery in America

The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum opened in eighteen seventy-one, a gift from Horace Fairbanks, whose family's scale-manufacturing company had made this corner of Vermont prosperous. The building, designed in French Second Empire style with a mansard roof and spiral staircases, opened with eight thousand volumes selected by one of the era's leading bibliographers.

Two years later, Fairbanks added an art gallery to house his centerpiece purchase: Albert Bierstadt's The Domes of the Yosemite, a canvas measuring ten by fifteen feet. The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum is often described as the oldest unaltered art gallery still standing in the United States. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety-six. The library still serves the community today, and Bierstadt's luminous Sierra Nevada light still fills that Victorian room.