The Fairbanks Museum: A Victorian Cabinet of Wonders in the Northeast Kingdom

The town of Saint Johnsbury, Vermont made its fortune on one invention: the platform scale. Thaddeus Fairbanks patented it in eighteen thirty-one, and his family became the industrial heart of the Northeast Kingdom. When Franklin Fairbanks, Thaddeus's nephew, inherited both the wealth and the collector's itch that went with it, he did what many Gilded Age industrialists did. He built a monument to curiosity.

The Fairbanks Museum opened in eighteen ninety-one, in a building of red Richardsonian Romanesque sandstone that was, and remains, one of the most architecturally arresting structures in Vermont. Franklin had spent decades accumulating what his generation called "natural history": mounted birds, stuffed mammals, meteorites, gemstones, seashells, fossils, artifacts from cultures across four continents. He wanted Saint Johnsbury to have a place that would teach its residents about the world beyond the Green Mountains.

The cornerstone was laid on the Fourth of July, eighteen ninety, by Franklin's wife Frances. The collection inside is eclectic in the Victorian way that predates scientific specialization, with Inuit tools shelved next to Egyptian amulets, bird eggs catalogued beside Civil War weapons. It is not modern curation, but it is alive with a particular kind of wonder that modern curation often lacks.

In nineteen sixty-one, as Americans were tracking Sputnik and racing toward the moon, the museum added Vermont's only public planetarium. It was a direct response to the space race, a small Vermont town insisting it too had a stake in what was happening in the sky.

Today the Fairbanks Museum runs one of New England's most trusted regional weather forecasting programs, broadcasting daily to Vermont radio stations. A Victorian naturalist's cabinet turned weatherman. Franklin Fairbanks would likely have found that perfectly reasonable.