BBB Destination - Middlebury

The Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History is the oldest chartered community history museum in the United States, welcoming visitors and researchers since 1882. Arguably Middlebury's most famous inhabitant, Henry Sheldon (1821-1907) was the town clerk, a lifelong bachelor, and a first class pack rat. Henry Sheldon was not wealthy, so instead of preserving steamships for posterity, he preserved ticket stubs and his own extracted teeth.

Most of the Museum space has been devoted to Vermont History so there's not nearly enough space for Henry Sheldon. Most of Henry's oddball collecting has been compressed into one room, which still offers tantalizing glimpses of what must have been -- and perhaps still is, in a storage unit somewhere -- a much larger collection.

Rumor has it, for example, that two of the museum's more noteworthy displays were a mousetrap that kills mice by drowning them in a cylinder of water, and a pair of Calvin Coolidge's baby shoes. Neither have been sighted in recent times but the careful observer will find a cigar holder made from a chicken leg; a hook embedded in hind quarter of cow; an adult-sized cradle, built for a woman named Aunt Patty, who "was said to have been not right in the head;" and "a Cornwall lady's cat" stuffed by a Middlebury College student in the 1890s.

One excellent exhibit is the small "petrified Indian boy," discovered by a party of rabbit hunters in 1877, purchased it for a hundred barrels of whiskey, and exhibited in Boston until it was exposed as a fraud, whereafter it was exhibited in Canada. Sheldon bought it and put it on display in 1884, but it scared local schoolchildren so much that he moved it to the basement. Even today, it's hit or miss whether you'll see it, since it tends to shuffle between exhibits and storage status.