The Fairbanks Museum: A Naturalist's Gift to a Mill Town

St. Johnsbury made its fortune in the nineteenth century on a single invention: the platform scale. The Fairbanks family built that business, and Franklin Fairbanks, businessman, politician, and obsessive naturalist, channeled that prosperity into something unusual. Over the course of his life he assembled a vast collection of birds, insects, mammals, and geological specimens from Vermont and from every corner of the globe. In eighteen ninety-one he housed them in a Romanesque Revival building of red Agawam sandstone on Main Street, and opened it to the public as the Fairbanks Museum.

Franklin collected birds from the Philippines and India, some species now extinct. He collected mounted mammals and meteorite fragments and Native American artifacts. When he died in eighteen ninety-five he donated the entire collection, and the building, to his hometown, describing it as an act of civic faith. That founding gift is still the backbone of the museum today.

The planetarium came later. The Lyman Spitzer Jr. Planetarium opened in nineteen sixty-one, named for the astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer Junior, who had conceived the idea of a space-based telescope in nineteen forty-six, the intellectual grandfather of the Hubble. That connection gives the museum an unexpected link to one of the great scientific achievements of the twentieth century.

The Fairbanks Museum is one of the few natural history museums in the country that still occupies its original building. In an era when natural history museums were almost exclusively the province of large cities, Franklin Fairbanks brought the world to a Vermont mill town along Route Two, and it has been here ever since.