The story
Most museums put their collection inside one building. Electra Havemeyer Webb did the reverse. Starting in 1947, on farmland in Shelburne, Vermont, she gathered up the 18th- and 19th-century American buildings themselves, moving houses, barns, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a jail, a general store and a covered bridge onto the grounds to hold what she collected.
Webb was the daughter of Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, who had famously filled their New York house with Rembrandts and Impressionists. She went her own way, toward the American folk art the taste of her time still dismissed: quilts, carved duck decoys, weathervanes, painted shop signs and carriages.
Her boldest rescue sits on dry land. The Ticonderoga is a 220-foot Lake Champlain steamboat that she had hauled two miles overland in 1955 rather than let it be scrapped. Today it rests among the 39 buildings a visitor can walk through, one of the last walking-beam side-wheel passenger steamers left anywhere.
