Two of St. Johnsbury’s most striking landmarks are getting glamorous make-overs. Both are legacies from the Fairbanks family, whose scale company brought prosperity to this Northeast Kingdom town at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The Fairbanks Museum is getting cleaner and brighter, and a former Fairbanks home is being restored to its Victorian splendor.
At the museum, hammers and saws fly in the majestic domed first floor gallery on a frigid afternoon. Exhibits and dioramas are being dismantled, glass is being cleaned, and some cases are being replaced. New LED lighting will bring stuffed woodland creatures, a giant polar bear, and rare birds out of the dust and twilight. But first the animals must be evacuated.
"Yes, the woodchuck’s burrow became a mobile home,” said Museum Educator Bobby Farlice-Rubio. He was helping two volunteers and Museum Director Adam Kane lift a muskrat diorama onto the floor.
“Each individual animal will look brighter and more accurate to its natural counterpart with this better lighting too ... We will use less electricity also, so a lot of talking points for the kids to talk about different subjects,” Farlice-Rubio said.
A trustee donated $45,000 for the LED lighting. The museum will also get $11,500 in rebates from Efficiency Vermont — and save $5,000 in electricity each year. And this elegant rose-colored stone edifice is moving into the past as well as the future. Vintage display cases from the 1950s will be replaced by older examples of what founder Franklin Fairbanks called “cabinets of curiosities,” circa 1880.
“[It’s] a style where, generally speaking, wealthy philanthropists or naturalists would go out and collect things or have things sent to them, and display their cabinet of curiosities, usually in their homes,” said Director Adam Kane.
“So they could invite visitors or their friends or relatives in and they could look at things — specimens that were collected around the world — and have a window on the rest of the world,” he explained.
Strolling through the downstairs gallery, dodging tool boxes and sawhorses, Kane pointed out a polar bear on an iceberg. Half the faux ice was still dingy, but the other half has been gently scrubbed. Under new lights in glass cases lining the walls, exotic birds seemed to pop from branches. Where an octagonal reception table once gobbled up space in the center of the room, there will be an antique movable desk.
All in all, Kane hopes the exhibit space will become less cluttered and more sweeping, as captured in an old sepia photograph.
All this housekeeping will keep the museum doors closed to the public through January.
Updates at Brantview
At the other end of Main Street, another historic Fairbanks property is also getting a facelift: the Brantview mansion.
“I remember my first ride down Brantview Drive when I was coming up from Providence, Rhode Island and I saw that building,” St. Johnsbury Academy Headmaster Tom Lovett recalled in his office. Brantview is the elegant mansion he lived in with his family when he started teaching there in 1984. The ornate castle had been donated for student and faculty housing by another Fairbanks benefactor, Joseph, in 1931.
“Brantview always has a mystique,” Lovett said. “Part of it was the ghost stories that you could always tell about the ghosts in the attic. But part of it is to just live in a place that is modeled on a mansion, looks like a mansion, and has Italian hand painted leather work on the ceiling of the common room. It’s a classy place.”
Brantview was named after an English estate and built to look like the Vanderbilt estate in New York City. Pretty fancy digs for Northeast Kingdom high schoolers. But Lovett says dorm residents have been pretty good stewards of this architectural gem. After renovation, the rooms will be more similarly sized, so no boarder gets to live more like a king than any other.
The academy is launching a fundraising campaign to restore its original splendor, and add the insulation and heating systems it needs to keep modern fuel bills under control.
