Victoriana in Vermont

St. Johnsbury, Vt., population 6,809, could be the archetypal New England mill town. Except for city cousins and stray tourists, the prim stillness beneath the elms is rarely disturbed by outsiders. The world--and even St. Johnsbury itself--seems unaware that the brooding, red brick building across from the courthouse is the U.S.'s oldest unaltered art gallery still standing.* Founded in 1871, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum grew out of the 19th century fashion for industrial tycoons to dabble in the arts. Horace Fairbanks, whose uncle invented the platform scale, and whose family built the invention into the Fairbanks scale works, made the standard trip to Europe, returning with the usual milky-white copies of classics. Back home, he acquired works by the then-in-vogue Hudson River School painters, built the gallery to house the overflow. Fairbanks' most handsome purchase was Albert Bierstadt's Domes of the Yosemite. The San Francisco Call la mented at the time that the painting "is now doomed to the seclusion of a Ver mont town where it will astonish the na tives." It would have easily astonished sophisticated San Franciscans. Ten feet high and 15 feet wide, the landscape overwhelms the viewer with a vast panorama of nature. The two famed domes in what is now California's Yosemite National Park soar in the background as the 2,400-foot Yosemite Falls plunges in perfect perspective from under the top of the picture frame into the valley below. Painter Bierstadt traveled to the Athenaeum summers until his death in 1902 to gaze at his masterwork, often dabbing here and there where the paint had flaked. As Fairbanks and his kin passed on, the collection grew through bequests, now numbers 87 paintings and ten sculptures, including works by Jasper Cropsey, William and James Hart and Thomas Moran. Today the Athenaeum remains unchanged. The gaslight chandeliers have been electrified, the timeless hush is occasionally broken by construction next door. But the deep-set windows admit the weak northern light just as they did nearly a century ago; the oak and walnut floors gleam from years of polishing. And the statuary from Italy, along with the period paintings from the U.S., still mirrors the comfortable Victorian world of a prosperous Vermont manufacturer.

*Two other galleries were built earlier: Yale's Trumbull Gallery and the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Conn. The former is no more; the latter has incorporated the original into a larger building.

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