Electro's Hobby

Like many other little girls, Electra Havemeyer liked to collect dolls. Her collection eventually included early American rag and wood dolls, dolls made of bisque, china, papier-machE, wax, rubber, rawhide, gutta-percha and celluloid. She also liked dollhouses, and wound up owning 43 of them, some big enough to accommodate people.

Of course, Electra Havemeyer was not quite an ordinary little girl. The daughter of Multimillionaire Sugar Refiner Henry O. Havemeyer, she was mar ried in 1910 to J. Watson Webb, a polo-playing great-grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Webb eventually inherited a house and spacious tract of land by the verdant Vermont shores of Lake Champlain. It seemed to be just the place to house Electra's collection of dolls, dollhouses -- and, in fact, of every last thingumajig and whatchamacallit ever made in early America. In 1947, Mrs. Webb bought eight acres of land near the estate to create the Shelburne Museum as a home for the 125,000 objects in her collection of Americana (see color pages opposite).

Smiths & Sidewheelers. Last month Shelburne was--in a manner of speaking--completed, when J. Watson Webb Jr., her son and president of the museum, dedicated the 35th building on what is now a 45-acre expanse of farmland: a white 1830 Greek Revival-style house designed to display the paintings and furnishings from his parents' Manhattan apartment. (They died in 1960.) The new building joins eight Early American houses, eight barns and sheds, a general store, meetinghouse, schoolhouse, jail, smithy, covered bridge, railroad station, steam locomotive, lighthouse, sawmill, hunting lodge, and the 892-ton Lake Champlain sidewheeler Ticonderoga. Most of the buildings had been dismantled, brick by brick and board by board, transported from their original sites in and near New England, and rebuilt at Shelburne.

Unlike Virginia's Williamsburg or Connecticut's Mystic Seaport, Shelburne (admission: $3.00) is not a tidy, scholarly reconstruction of any one town or period. Only a third of the buildings show objects grouped together in museum fashion (although many are worth it: Shelburne's collection of 500 handmade quilts and coverlets is without peer). Most of the pieces are simply scattered throughout the buildings. "Some collectors have the place and find the piece," Mrs. Webb once explained. "Not I. I buy the piece and find the place." Six of Shelburne's houses, for example, are furnished for imaginary families whose habits and histories were dreamed up by Mrs. Webb to fit the pieces she had assembled. Each house has books, furniture, china and clothing jumbled together in a happy-go-lucky juxtaposition of periods--just as any real family might.

Gone Fishing. Equally haphazard is Shelburne's general store, a zany montage of barbershop, country doctor's office, dentist's cubicle, post office and taproom whose shelves are laden with jars of candy and patent nostrums. A faint smell of peppermint is always in the air, and outside the door hangs a hand-painted sign: "Gone fishing be back Monday mebbe." The schoolhouse combines a dunce cap made from an 1868 newspaper with wall drawings made by Lincoln-era schoolchildren and period mottoes written on the blackboard: "People who are wrapped up in themselves make small packages" and "Nothing is work unless you would rather be doing something else."

Electra Webb loved to talk in such proverbs, and the new memorial building at Shelburne faithfully reflects her homespun, silver-spoon style. The Rembrandts in the living room complement a Chippendale sofa covered in needlepoint, an English secretary and an English gaming table. Mary Cassatt's pastel of Electra's mother hangs in her bedroom. Desk and dresser tops are crowded with silver-framed photographs of her children and grandchildren--and a white satin pillow on the bed bears the red-embroidered maxim: "We live in deeds, not years."

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