Main Page
Contents
- 1 What We Are and What We Do
- 2 Shoppe with Us! The Museum Gifte Shoppe
- 3 Books, Books, Books!
- 4 Hours
- 5 Admission
- 6 Directions and Parking
- 7 Volunteer at the Museum
- 8 Upcoming Events!
- 9 Catawiki
- 10 Publicity and Press Clippings
- 11 Material Culture Studies, Including The Electric Organ
- 12 Links
- 13 The (Virtual) Restroom
- 14 Flo McGarrell In Amatam Memoriam
- 15 Why We Don't Subscribe to the ‘’Valley News’’ Anymore
What We Are and What We Do
The Main Street Museum is a small, public collection of curiosities and artifacts, each one of which is significant and each one of which tells some kind of story about human beings and the complex, sometimes baffling universe we are a part of. Through the intent and focused study of an accumulation of small details, the aim of the Museum is to cultivate among the general public a sense of wonder at the big questions that arise when we take the time to really think about things.
Located in central Vermont, our collections are accessible by visiting us in person, or through our online "wiki" style catalog. As well as studying and cataloging objects we present live music, glass lantern slide presentations, vaudeville shows and Spectacles to the public.
Shoppe with Us! The Museum Gifte Shoppe
The Museum Gift Shoppe has recently undergone a complete re-ordering and features "White River Junction; Its not so Bad!" t-shirts, mugs, souvenirs, a wide variety of books on museums and museum-y things, our own booklets—hand-stitched, rail-road date nails, gumball machine charms and wonky gifts that "must be seen to be believed!"
Books, Books, Books!
Come see our books!
- The new Vermont Monster Guide—Its all part of our in-depth scholarship dealing with cryptids, therespids and the "Other" in aquatic biological classification systems. Signed by the authors Steve Bisette, Joe Citro and Cat Garza the copiously illustrated tome give us schpeels about the Giant Eels, the Connecticut River Monster, (Hydrohippokampos athesphatos lymanae), the Fur Bearing Trout, Fish With Pincers and other anomalies and wonders of the Aquatic Fauna Department of the Museum. In our Gifte Shoppe—only $21.00, us!
- A fine new Pictorial History of the Town of Hartford, Vermont, published this year by Arcadia Press, and full of historic pictures of our town, only $21.99!
- Weird New England, again, signed by the author, Joe Citro. A wonderful book about a Weird Region and all the Weird things in it, like the Main Street Museum. New and very slightly used copies are Yours for only $20.00!
- And our pamphlets, What is It? We Have It? You Want to See It!, and the Description of the Collection both newly and nicely bound with hand stitched bindings! $3.00 and $5.00 respectively.
Hours
The Museum at 58 Bridge Street is open Thursday through Sunday, from 1 to 6 p.m.
Admission
The Museum suggests a $5 donation for visiting our collections. (Members of the Museum are admitted free of charge). Reservations are not necessary. Discounts are available for groups. Children under age 12 are admitted free of charge if accompanied by an adult. No one is turned away for lack of funds.
Directions and Parking
Museum Headquarters are located at 58 Bridge Street, in downtown White River Junction, adjacent to the Lehman Bridge, between the railroad underpass and the White River. Parking for Museum patrons is available on the street nearby on "Railroad Row" or in the Courthouse/Depot Parking lot.
Volunteer at the Museum
The Main Street Museum is a great place to visit, and a great place to volunteer. You can do everything from staffing open hours (Thursday - Sunday, 1 - 6 p.m.), to helping out with arranging and maintaining displays, researching and writing museum labels, bringing the refreshments or setting up for special events like concerts and First Fridays open house nights, or helping create special exhibits and special events. Internships are occasionally available for meaningful projects. Past interns have researched and written labels for a Nitrous Oxide Canister, Tramps and Hobos, White Tailed Deer, FiestaWare and more. Interns also engage in field/study trips around Vermont and New Hampshire—to Burlington, to St. Johnsbury and the Fairbanks Museum, to historic Windsor, Vermont, and to the St. Gaudens National Park in nearby Cornish, N.H.—as well as conducting in-depth tours of the areas' varied thrift stores and other repositories of material culture for collection excursions on behalf of the Museums ever-enlarging categories of artifacts. Whether it be free-wheeling research, carpentry, photography, event planning, landscaping, or music - whatever it is that you like to do, we'd love to talk to you.
E-mail us at info@mainstreetmuseum.org for more information, or call us at 802-356-2776.
Upcoming Events!
Live music from Providence, Rhode Island's Tik Tok comes our way Friday the 16th of April. Here's what people are saying about them, "In a time when acoustic music means anything played on acoustic instruments, it's refreshing to find a band who is consciously trying to bring the music back to the roots, without yielding the tendency to contemporize, or, at the very least, to bury their other influences in the name of perceived authenticity. It is authentic and fun, an album worthy of late night jam sessions, and the cops who come calling when provoked."
Then the next day, Saturday the 17th, its Fat Worm of Error with a additional rockin' thumpin' hardcore bands. For all our music nights doors open at 7:00 PM and the music starts at 8:00 p.m.
On the 24th of April its DJ Shara from 9 to midnight. All events byob affairs!
Check out our full schedule here!
Catawiki
The Main Street Museum's Catawiki is a unique digital initiative in material culture studies utilizing open-source code to describe the artifacts in our collections and to create a completely fluid, adaptive taxonomic structure for their interpretation. The Catawiki uses the same "wiki" code utilized by "Wikipedia" and is able to be modified by users from any internet access point. The categories currently acting as a organizational foundation for these structures are:
- Objects as Evidence of Human Culture, for instance: Pet Toys; Geographically or Historically Significant Items (Relics); Manuscripts; Art; Military History; Textiles and Clothing; Shoes; and "Things, or Fragments of Things Once Owned by, or Associated with, Notable People Particularly Notable Vermonters".
- Biology: Living, or Apparently Once Living, Objects, including
- Flora: "The Invasive and Native Species of Windsor County" for instance, or "Dried Roses from Robert Todd Lincolns House in Manchester, Vermont" and "Camellia Blossoms and Leaves from the Varina and Jefferson Davis Memorial".
- Fauna includes: Homo-sapiens; White-tailed Deer and Other Mammalia; Reptiles; Birds; Entomology (Insects); Corals; Flocked Pets; Other, or Unidentified Species; etc.
- Inanimate, or Apparently Inanimate Objects, or Boxes of Rocks including Minerals, Man-made Minerals, Silt from the 1927 Flood, Round and/or Rusted Things.
- And, of course, Miscellaneous or Other Things.
- Vinculum (or Overlapping) Categories can be accessed from the sidebar to the left and include: Carbon; Color as a Hysterical Reaction; Cute Things; Flocking; Objects Chewed by Pets; Teeth, More Teeth, Things with Nail-holes; "Things Made from Animals or Parts of Animals" and Tramps and Hobos.
Publicity and Press Clippings
Read what we write about ourselves. Read what others write about us.
Testimonials
The Main Street Museum—White River Junction's answer to the Library of Congress.
—Peter Welch, U. S. House of Representatives, 2007.
It is only due to organizations such as yours that the important works of our Country are brought to the attention of the public.
——Marie Reilly, Museum of Bad Art, Dedham, 1998. learn less...!
The Main Street Museum forces one to contemplate the nature of museums and curating. Why do we save what we save? How do we decide what to discard, what to display, what to hide away, and what to destroy. —Joe Citro, Weird New England, 2004
Material Culture Studies, Including The Electric Organ
History is false. It has to be. —Jules David Prown
Its really all about questions. We are a museum. We collect and preserve objects. (And other things too. But objects, mainly.) And then we do what all museums are supposed to do. We discuss the objects. We have conversations with you, the viewer, about the objects. And we have found, over the years, as we do this, that each object raises a number of questions. Sometimes it seems that each object has about five or 10 questions associated with it. And each question we research raises five or 10 more questions. And we might do this five or ten times for each object. And it also seems that we only end up answering about one question for each ten that we ask the object, or the object asks of us. But with so many questions—just multiply 5 to the 5th power—that still means that we have come up with a lot of answers in spite of ourselves. All in all, we think that the questions are more fun than the answers. But you are free to decide for yourself.
Read what we've written about objects. Read what the experts have said as well. This is just a starting point. We have only just begun to really think about things, and our relationships to things.
Our fully functioning blog features discursions on material culture studies, miscellanea and much more! Museumology Blog continues the heartfelt commentary of the previous blog of the Main Street Museum at Blogspot. You can read the latest entries, musing about roadtrips, history, collections and collective insanity, and post your own responses here.
A German critic, W. Bürger, writes "Our Museums...are veritable graveyard-yards in which have been heaped up, with a tumulour-like promiscuousness, the remains which have been carried thither...all are hung pell-mell upon the walls of some noncommittal gallery a kind of posthumous asylum, where a people, no longer capable of producing...come to admire this magnificent gallery of debris. —G. Brown Goode, Museums of the Future, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C., 1891: p. 427
Links
Other Museum-things.
- "As in totemism, we participate in each other as we participate in the object." —Sartre, Les jeux sont faits, 1943, and Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, 1966.
The (Virtual) Restroom
[[Image:Flodance413740.jpg|thumb|Some of the dancers that were to appear at the Museum this summer in conjunction with an exhibition of Coffee-related artifacts from Jacmel, Haiti. See more pictures of Haiti from the eye of Flo McGarrell here
Flo McGarrell In Amatam Memoriam
In January we learned that a talented artist, our friend, our colleague, our son, our daughter Flo McGarrell had been crushed in a horrific earthquake in Jacmel. Sometimes you don't necessarily like the news that the information age drops in your lap(top).
Why We Don't Subscribe to the ‘’Valley News’’ Anymore
The Valley News recently published a puff-piece about a well-known local white supremacist. Here's our response. Read the full letter here.
Hate has no place in the Upper Valley, or anywhere else for that matter. And our neighbors have asked that we don't park on their property, so, please Dont Park at our Neighbors!
For More Information about our neighbors click here...
The Main Street Museum, 58 Bridge Street, White River Junction, Vermont, 05001-1909, info@mainstreetmuseum.org, 802.356.2776
