A wall of brooms from the Main Street Museum

The Main Street Museum in White River Junction, Vermont is a collection of, well, junk. As far as I can tell, it’s a bunch of junk arranged in a museum-like setting. I’m talking about “normal” junk, like you see in other museums and “real” junk like you might find in your kitchen “junk drawer.” But, they package it nicely and that apparently makes all the difference:

The Flora and Fauna collections represent invasive species from the infrastructure of an economically marginal Vermont downtown. Our dried cats are not true mummies; they are merely dehydrated. Our local collections of knotweed, dogweed and loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) are presented alongside historic and geographically significant specimens representing the various cultures of the earth. Paving stones from Rome and cobblestones from our local railroad underpass are preserved here as well as asphalt from Los Angeles, New Orleans and Baltimore. Coffee cups and aspirin bottles from now defunct work places in White River Jct. are displayed alongside bricks from Monticello, masonry from the Alamo in Texas (and the Forteleza in San Juan), and dried rose specimens (family Rosaceæ) from Robert Todd Lincoln’s—and Jefferson Davis’s—houses.

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Assigning values to artifacts is increasingly difficult in the environment of most major collecting institutions. The neutrality of theoretical systems utilized by any museum is currently being called into question. As a small independent repository the Main Street Museum has the flexibility—indeed the mandate—to examine the layered and ever changing meanings of objects and their relationships to their surroundings. As the uses for objects are more or less continuously in flux, we analyze these uses through traditional disciplines (art historical, scientific and qualitative methods), but also through psychological analysis as well. Our emotional relationship with objects is formed abstrusely. Therefore the meaning of objects is unlocked only through similar cryptic means.

So, it’s a bizarre, one-of-a-kind museum that’s worth a visit if for no other reason than to form your own opinion of the place.