Robbie Harold
In a particularly frigid mid-February, things look pretty deserted outside the Vermont Granite Museum, just west of downtown Barre. The museum is open to visitors only from early May through late October; its vast open space, the length of a football field’s play area, is mostly unheated.
But in the classroom, office, and meeting areas of the former Jones Brothers granite shed, you’d find lots of intriguing things happening even in the dead of winter, promising an enriched, lively visitor season to come. Executive Director Scott McLaughlin walked me through the work in progress.
The museum’s onsite collection (encompassing more than 5,000 objects) is getting a facelift. With its spring reopening, the first of several themed exhibits in the mid-building will focus on the war memorials promoted by, and created for, both the Union and the Confederacy by the Barre granite industry between the Civil War’s end and about 1920.
The exhibit will highlight their locations, the significance to their communities, and recent controversies about Confederate monuments. (As a Civil War aficionada, I’m looking forward to this one.)
Later on, the industry crafted memorials for the Spanish-American War and World War I, including the local landmark Youth Triumphant in downtown Barre. Dedicated on Armistice Day in 1924, it was largely fabricated on the Jones Brothers property where the museum now sits.
Work during the winter on the museum’s 50 or more discrete permanent exhibits includes redesigning signage, improving images and quotes, providing content tables, and adding interactive elements.
The exhibits cover all aspects of the industry: quarrying, manufacturing, transportation changes over time, the labor force and its unions, and the vital role of immigrants not only in building the industry but to the community of Barre itself, which McLaughlin says will receive additional emphasis.
Substantial refurbishment of the windows in the classroom spaces is complete, and improvements to the museum store will better reflect the Barre community and the industry. Its goal, says McLaughlin, is to have merchandise with a full range of price points so that all visitors who wish can come away with a souvenir of their visits.
With many tour operators yet to respond, bus tour bookings are already at 75% of last year’s record volume of 88 tours, McLaughlin says. These run from the May opening through October but are concentrated in foliage season. They provide about a fourth of the museum’s operating income and originate from as far away as the Dakotas and Louisiana.
Bus tours typically combine a museum visit with a McLaughlin-led tour of Hope Cemetery. The tours give visitors an overview of the entire process of creating a monument, from the raw granite blocks on the museum’s grounds, to viewing sculptors crafting the artwork in the museum itself, to observing, via the Hope tour, that “there are no limits to monument art except the imagination.”
Tour bus visitors, says McLaughlin, typically ask two questions: Is there a gift shop? (Yes.) How do I buy one of these monuments for myself? (Through your local monument dealer; most dealers nationwide have a close working relationship with the Barre monument industry.)
Chris Miller will once again serve as sculptor-in-residence, continuing work on his all-granite version of a 1950s panel van under a tent on the museum grounds. The completed “vehicle” will be shipped to a corporate headquarters in Maryland.
Sculpting interns at the Stone Arts School, an integral element of the museum, will work alongside Miller on smaller, simpler projects. The Stone Arts School will offer some public classes this summer in such areas as painting, drawing, plaster casting, and carving in soft stone.
The museum’s website, its year-round online presence, is getting a major upgrade too. Sixteen volunteers are digitizing all the records of Barre’s three municipally managed cemeteries: Elmwood, founded in 1797; and Hope Cemetery and St. Monica’s, both founded about 1895.
Once this database is complete, historians and families researching their ancestors will have complete online records of the 17,600 burials in the city’s cemeteries. In addition, one of the museum’s interns is writing brief histories of all three cemeteries.
The museum’s collection includes more than 150 historic films, which volunteers and interns have now remastered and digitized. From the early 1900s to the 1920s — the silent film era — and continuing through the 1980s, the archive contains promotional films for the Barre Granite Association.
The films cover local and industry history, the geology of Vermont granite, and immigration as a driving force in the development of the Barre community. These, too, will soon be viewable online. Last year, an intern created an orientation film for museum visitors — bus tours, school groups, summer camps, and individuals.
Enhancing the museum’s website is part of an effort to make its abundant resources more useful and accessible to a broad range of people. Interns are creating, among other things, a visitors’ guide to central Vermont, an information portal with the museum as centerpiece. The guide also covers hiking, biking, and canoeing opportunities as well as other points of interest such as the Statehouse, the Vermont History Center, and walking tours of downtown Barre and the cemeteries.
For my third and last column on the museum, I’ll tell you more about Scott McLaughlin and the museum’s many partnerships with arts and community organizations.
