Been to a lot of neat museums and you guys will eventually mention all of them. British Museum, Smithsonian Museum and untold battlefield museums in Europe and USA.....fantastic aviation museums and western museums.
However, this is one that might be missed if you don't know any history friends that have been there. It is the Shelburne Museum just outside of Burlington, Vermont. Just a tremendous two days with the kids going thru the history of what day-to-day life was in nineteenth century, northeastern America. Just incredible, original, wonderfully preserved structures filled with collections of artifacts. Best description is a "collection of collections." It's like 35-40 comprehensive museums in one. This wealthy lady began collecting the stuff in the early 20th century and putting it on her incredible farm. Fully preserved 220 foot steamboat...merchant shops of every sort. The wagon barn must have 200 wonderfully original and preserved horse-drawn vehicles of types you could never imagine had existed. A circus outfit from the turn of the century. I've just never seen anything else like it anywhere in the USA or Europe. Bits here and there...but never a fraction of what was all brought together in one place.
https://shelburnemuseum.org/about/Shelburne Museum is an unparalleled and unique experience of American history, art, and design. Designed to allow visitors the pleasure of discovery and exploration, the Museum includes thirty-nine distinct structures on forty-five acres, each filled with beautiful, fascinating, and whimsical objects.
She grew up in New York, where her parents, Henry and Louisine Havemeyer, were important collectors of European and Asian art. By the age of nineteen, she resolved to follow in their footsteps but instead envisioned a collection that would celebrate the arts of America. Mrs. Webb saw beauty in the everyday objects that had been part of American life for generationsfurniture, pottery, quilts, weathervanes, and moreand filled her homes in New York and Shelburne, Vermont, with antiques.
When Mrs. Webb founded Shelburne Museum in 1947, it was at first a place to preserve her family's collection of horse-drawn carriages. Before long, however, she realized that she had a rare opportunity to create what she described as a "collection of collections" and "an educational project, varied and alive."
From the countryside throughout New England and New York, Mrs. Webb found historic buildings that would provide appropriate settings for her collections, and she relocated them to the Museum grounds: houses, barns, a meeting house, a one-room schoolhouse, a lighthouse, a jail, a general store, a covered bridge, and the 220-foot steamboat
Ticonderoga. She worked with a landscape design team to situate them within a welcoming environment that today includes a lush gardens and enticing views.
Mrs. Webb created something completely unprecedented for her time: world-class collections in a village-like setting of historic New England buildings and landscapes; a welcoming and informal place for visitors to engage with history through objects that tell stories.
