Middletown Springs, Vermont
The Historical Society
The Middletown Springs Historical Society collects, preserves and exhibits community history at its museum in the historic Adams House on the Green in Middletown Springs and at the Mineral Springs Park nearby on Burdock Avenue
Visit Us
The Adams House is located at 10 Park Avenue. The museum is open on Sundays, 2-4 p.m., from June through October, and by appointment. The Historical Society presents several public events each year for educational and fundraising purposes. It also offers seasonal and ongoing exhibits. The Mineral Springs Park, located at 11 Burdock Avenue, is open to the public during daylight hours year-round.
Video History Series Wins Award of Excellence
Vermont Historical Society Honors MSHS
The Middletown Springs Historical Society won an Award of Excellence from the Vermont Historical Society at the May Annual Meeting of the League of Local Historical Societies and Museums in St. Albans for its Video History and Video Archives project completed in 2025.
VHS Board Vice-President, Dawn Schneiderman, who presented the award said, “The judges praised the videos as very high quality and professionally produced. They thought it represented an innovative model that could be used by others and applauded how it very obviously represented a stretch for that size organization. They really enjoyed watching the videos themselves and thought they would work well for today’s history consumers who want more “bite size” products, making this more engaging to students and younger generations.”
The project is a hybrid blend of informal oral history and documentary video that resulted in approximately 50 hours of raw, unscripted interview footage with Society President David Wright. The footage was transcribed, indexed, and edited into four finished videos. To shoot the project, the team transformed the Society’s auditorium into a set. The video was shot film style. The producers, Sally and David Caras of Ferguson Caras, also shot footage of local scenes and sourced images from a variety of archives. MSHS Collections Manager Mary Lou Willits tapped the extensive MSHS photo and document archives to provide local visual images in the series.
The four video histories, which premiered at the Society’s Annual Meeting last fall, are available on our YouTube channel. Along with access on YouTube, the public can view the series on a large-screen monitor in the first-floor museum room at the Historical Society.
The League of Local Historical Societies & Museums Achievement Awards are presented annually by the Vermont Historical Society to recognize the exceptional work done by individuals and community heritage organizations across the state to collect, preserve, and share Vermont’s rich history, with particular emphasis upon innovation. The Awards of Excellence and Merit are given out for projects completed in 2025, while Individual awards are for an individual’s years of service to the community. VHS receives nominations for the awards, and recipients are determined by a panel of judges. A list of this year’s award winners can be found on the Vermont Historical Society website..
New Exhibit Cabinets of Curiosities Debuts Sunday, June 21 at the Strawberry Festival
This year’s Strawberry Festival, on Sunday, June 21, 2-4 p.m., features a new exhibit of wonder, Cabinets of Curiosities, which will engage both children and adults. Admission to the museum and a related children’s activity are free.
Cabinets of curiosities were the precursor to the modern museum. In 17th and 18th century Europe, they were not just pieces of furniture, but rather whole rooms filled with rare and exotic items chosen by wealthy collectors to entertain and impress their guests. The items ranged from natural specimens to scientific discoveries to artistic objects obtained from around the world.
By the Victorian era, middle class families in Europe and America adopted the idea of creating personal collections, displaying natural, ornate and sometimes strange objects in pieces of furniture called curio-cabinets. Some larger personal collections became the foundational collections for public museums.
In the spirit of public education, museums began to categorize collections and display items in the context of the history being told, rather than simply displaying objects in a glass case. Exhibits became chronological and educational, supported by explanatory text. Today, in an age of declining attention spans, cabinets of curiosity are making a comeback in museums.
Some modern museums like the Vermont Historical Society, Historic Deerfield, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have created rooms of visible storage that resemble cabinets of curiosities to show their large collections. While objects are still shown in categories, the viewer is left to simply wonder, or to interpret with the help of collection software.
The accompanying video history series on view in the gallery provides historical context for this collection of objects. The four videos explore the town’s agricultural history, its intentionally planned layout, the development of manufacturing, and the promotion of tourism. For those who are seriously curious, binders of item descriptions printed from our collection software are available. Those who prefer to use their imaginations can play our Wonder Game to guess what an object is, how it works, and the story it tells.
Peek Inside Our Collections
Flower spray made of human hair and mounted in a shadow box frame, 1850-1870.
This fascinating object is now on display in MSHS’s new exhibit, Cabinets of Curiosities. While decorations and jewelry made from human hair in the 19th century were often associated with mourning, this flower spray is an example of the craft commemorating family or friendships. Each flower is numbered in pencil, and a corresponding list of names appears in handwriting within the frame. There are 12 numbered flowers and the names in order are Wm H. Hull, Rachel Grover, Mary L. Burnham, Rev. T.S. Burnham, Allen C. Grover, Alice C. Lobdell, Luther C. Hull, Emily E. Phillips, D.M. Sherman, Allen Grover, D.M. Grover, and Delena Lobdell. This commemoration of a Middletown Springs family and friends was donated to MSHS in 1987 by Dr. Irene Lobdell.