Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Small, specific collections run by people who care far too much.
Jericho, VT
Wilson Bentley became the first person to successfully photograph a single snow crystal in 1885 and went on to create thousands of images. The Old Red Mill preserves his equipment, photographs and story in the Vermont community where his fascination with snow began.
Manchester, VT
This specialized museum preserves rods, reels, flies, art and archival material documenting the history of angling. Its intense focus on a single outdoor pastime makes it a strong niche museum stop rather than a general regional-history museum.
Windsor, VT
Inside a nineteenth-century armory, this museum preserves early machine tools and manufacturing technology tied to interchangeable parts and precision production. The dense collection of unusual industrial machinery makes it one of Vermont's strongest mechanical-history stops.
Huntington, VT
Hundreds of life-size wooden bird carvings fill this small museum, each painstakingly shaped and painted to represent species found in Vermont and beyond. The collection blurs the line between natural-history display and obsessive folk craftsmanship.
Glover, VT
Bread and Puppet Theater preserves decades of enormous masks, political puppets and handmade performance figures inside a converted barn. The collection is dense, theatrical and intentionally rough-edged, with seasonal performances continuing on the surrounding farm.
Brattleboro, VT
Brattleboro once produced hundreds of thousands of reed and pipe organs under the Estey name. The museum occupies part of the old factory complex and preserves instruments, manufacturing history and machinery from a company whose organs were shipped around the world.
Post Mills, VT
The late balloonist and inventor Brian Boland assembled an eccentric collection of experimental balloons, airships, machinery and aviation debris at Post Mills Airport. Public access is limited, but the surviving collection remains a remarkable monument to homemade flight and mechanical experimentation.
St. Johnsbury, VT
Founded from Franklin Fairbanks's Victorian natural-history collection, this museum still feels like an enormous old curiosity cabinet. Tens of thousands of specimens include taxidermy, birds, insects, ethnographic material and scientific objects displayed inside an equally distinctive nineteenth-century building.
Middlebury, VT
Founded in 1882, this long-running local museum grew from Henry Sheldon's intensely personal collecting habits. Its holdings mix documents, household objects, art and regional artifacts into the kind of broad nineteenth-century collection that predates today's highly specialized museums.
White River Junction, VT
This small museum operates more like a cabinet of curiosities than a conventional historical collection. Its eclectic holdings mix local artifacts, natural-history specimens, odd objects, ephemera and items whose significance comes largely from the stories attached to them.
Glover, VT
This self-service museum gives ordinary objects the kind of attention normally reserved for fine art or major historical artifacts. Rotating exhibits have examined everything from pencils and matches to locks, toothbrushes and other objects people usually overlook.
Grafton, VT
The Nature Museum keeps an old Feejee-mermaid-style specimen made from combined animal remains, part of the long tradition of sideshow creatures presented as impossible zoological discoveries. It is not always on regular display, so visitors interested specifically in the mermaid should contact the museum before traveling.
Shelburne, VT
Rather than fitting its collection into one building, Shelburne Museum spreads art, Americana and historic structures across a large campus. Its stranger holdings include an entire steamboat brought inland, a lighthouse, circus material, historic houses and other full-size structures collected as museum objects.
Barre, VT
Housed in a former granite manufacturing shed, this museum explains how Barre stone was quarried, carved and shipped around the country. Tools, machinery and stoneworking displays make it a useful companion stop to the city's unusual granite monuments and cemeteries.
Stowe, VT
Historic skis, snowboards, clothing, photographs and Hall of Fame material trace Vermont's unusually important role in American snow sports. The museum documents both technological changes and the personalities who turned skiing into a defining part of the state's identity.
