At the top of Middlebury's Main Street, the Congregational Church has kept time for the town since the early nineteenth century. Its steeple clock, framed by the timber steeple that Lavius Fillmore designed in 1806, once wore enormous lead-coated copper numerals on its face. Those numbers are no longer up there. They are, for the next few months, inside the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, resting in a gallery alongside a set of tiny carved ivory gears and cogs from a watch made in 1865. The distance between the two objects — the public clock face and the private mechanism, the monumental and the miniature — is roughly the distance "Time Keeping" asks visitors to travel.
The exhibition, on view through January 2, draws on the Sheldon's own deep holdings of timepieces, watches, calendars, journals and time capsules, and sets them in conversation with the work of a contemporary artist who has spent a lifetime around clocks. Luciana Frigerio, who lives in central Vermont, grew up in New York as the daughter of an Argentine mother and an Italian father. Her father worked for a company that made scientific instruments, but his real passion was fixing antique clocks — a side pursuit that grew into a local reputation. Frigerio has described sitting on a little stool beside his desk as a child, watching him turn gears on a lathe, refinish cases and inlay wood. "It was beautiful to watch him at work," she told Tupelo Quarterly. That apprenticeship of observation gave her, she said, a fearlessness about taking things apart and putting them back together.
Her series "Clockworks" applies that instinct to the clock case itself. Frigerio builds what the museum calls "magically crafted worlds of paper theater" inside vintage clocks and watch housings — layered collages of old portraits, seascapes and maps of constellations, assembled so that time seems less measured than suspended. The museum frames the pairing as a natural one: Frigerio's collages, it notes, "mirror Henry Sheldon's own passion for storytelling through paper and material culture."
That is not a casual comparison. Henry Luther Sheldon, born in 1821 in Salisbury, was the youngest of four sons of a Connecticut-born farmer and a well-educated Vermont mother who taught him his letters at three and had him reading at four. He built an organ and learned to play it as a boy, kept a detailed diary for most of his life, and moved to Middlebury in 1841 to work in the post office, lodging in the large brick house that would become his museum. He became the organist at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, a position he held for thirty-four years, and worked as a store clerk, a railroad mail agent and a station agent. His collecting began in 1875 with a Roman coin. In 1882 he bought the Judd-Harris House — the three-story brick Federal home that marble merchants Eben Judd and Lebbeus Harris had built in 1829, complete with black marble fireplaces and marble columns — obtained a state charter, and opened his museum to the public in 1884. It is generally described as the oldest community-based museum in the United States.
Sheldon's own words make the case for the exhibition better than any wall label could. "I have spent all my leisure the past year trying to benefit future generations by preserving the handiwork of the articles representing all the different occupations of the early pioneers which I have called a Museum," he wrote in his diary in 1881. "May those who many years hence look at these articles take as much pleasure in doing so as I have in collecting them." A man who assembled one of the richest historical collections in New England — putting Middlebury among the best-documented towns in the region — was, in his way, running a time capsule of his own.
The historical side of "Time Keeping" is deliberately wide-ranging. Alongside the steeple numerals and the 1865 ivory watch works are clocks of various shapes decorated with reverse-glass painting, watch fobs, ladies' reticule purses, and what the exhibition's organizers cheerfully call "truly weird" nineteenth-century calendars. The museum promises stories of immigration and professional collaboration, tales of tragedy and war, and the "skillful beauty of pre-pocket fashion" — a reference to the reticules and pendants that carried a watch before the pocket watch, and later the wristwatch, made such accessories obsolete. One artifact is a Waltham Watch Company pendant, made in Massachusetts between 1890 and 1910 of gold and porcelain enamel, given to Grace Foote by her family when she graduated from the Randolph Normal School; the "F" on its cover stands for her name. Another is a brass-and-paper message roll patented in 1873, a device for recording and preserving written messages — a nineteenth-century answer to a problem the exhibition's time capsule poses again.
The show is curated by Kelly Hickey, with support from museum staff, Ellery Foutch, Colin Boyd and Appelt Clock & Watch Repair. It runs concurrently with "With Time," a photography exhibition at the Middlebury College Museum of Art that gathers portraits and candid images of older adults — Nicholas Nixon studying his own changing face, Ken Heyman's women waiting for fishermen husbands to return — and that the college describes as presented in tandem with the Sheldon's show. Together the two exhibitions make a case that "how time is kept, measured, worked, and recorded both individually and as part of collective history" is a question worth more than a glance.
In an adjacent room, the Sheldon invites visitors to do more than look. They are encouraged to take their own photographs and record their thoughts for inclusion in a community time capsule — the museum's own gesture toward the future, and a deliberate echo of the message rolls and journals in the cases nearby. It is a fitting move for an institution founded by a man who wrote to authors and politicians for their autographs as a boy and never stopped believing that the present moment was worth preserving for strangers not yet born.
"Time Keeping" is on view through January 2 at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury.