We awoke on my 60th birthday yesterday to a gorgeous day, with a clear blue sky, light north winds and mild temperatures. Our celebration began with breakfast at the Shelburne Farm Inn, which started in the late 19th century as one of the 40+ estates of the third-generation Vanderbilts. This location consolidated 33 private Vermont farms into a 4,000-acre retreat on Lake Champlain. Today’s inn was the beautiful family home and the surrounding land is a working farm and educational center with day use and residential programs. The ten miles of walking trails are open to the public at no charge.
Next was the Shelburne Museum, an incredible collection of 38 buildings on 45 acres, with art, artifacts and memorabilia of all kinds, including multiple galleries, historical buildings, a carousel, covered bridge, lighthouse and the 220-foot side-wheel steamboat Ticonderoga. The museum’s creator and benefactor was Electra Havemeyer Webb, an heiress to the Domino Sugar fortune and wife of a Vanderbilt descendant. The scale of the display is jaw-dropping, as were the costs of acquiring, dismantling, relocating and reassembling large and complex objects. We were impressed, entertained, educated and grateful that we got to see this museum, but were also very aware of where the vast wealth came from to make it happen. The Vanderbilt money was created from shipping and railroads, in an era of little government regulation and nonexistent labor laws. Domino Sugar, originally the American Sugar Refining Company, relied heavily on slave and immigrant labor, working and living under harsh conditions, and enjoyed a monopoly in its US markets.
We were museumed out, but I still had more birthday left and great weather to enjoy it, so we made a mad dash east in the rental car to see the Vermont State Capitol in Montpelier, then 15 minutes later we were in line for the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Factory tour in nearby Waterbury. Montpelier, population 8,000, is the smallest state capital in the country, and its gilded-dome state house and grounds are lovely.
The Ben & Jerry’s visit was okay—you don’t see that much during the 30-minute guided tour, but there are free samples. A cute display outside the factory is the Flavor Graveyard of discontinued varieties that didn’t sell. Ben & Jerry fun facts: Ben had a poor sense of taste and smell, so bold flavors with lots of chunky ingredients were necessary to get him excited about a new variety. The company is now part of Unilever, but the two founders refused to sell unless their board of directors remained independent and all of the milk for their two Vermont factories would continue to be sourced from local farmers.
No comments:
Post a Comment