Conservation Assessment of the Elder Henry Blinn Museum Collection at Canterbury Shaker Village

FAIN: PG-280684-21

Canterbury Shaker Village, Inc. (Canterbury, NH 03224-2728)
Renee E. Fox (Project Director: January 2021 to September 2023)

A general preservation assessment of Canterbury Shaker Village’s Elder Henry Blinn Museum Collection, which consists of 300 objects, including natural history specimens, ethnographic materials, historical items, and Shaker relics. A typical late-nineteenth-century New England “cabinet of curiosities,” the collection reflects the collecting practices of a progressive resident and community Elder in Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. These objects fell outside the scope of previous Canterbury Shaker Village assessments, and the collection was inaccessible for many years, but the village has recently made them a priority for assessment and conservation due to their fragility and importance in illuminating Shaker history. NEH funding would support a preservation assessment by Christie Pohl, Associate Objects Conservator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who would examine this collection in order to write a report and make recommendations for storage and display, as well as future conservation work.

Canterbury Shaker Village requests assistance to support a conservation assessment of approximately 300 objects from the late 19th-century/early 20th-century Elder Henry Blinn Museum Collection. Established in 1860 by a prominent Canterbury Shaker leader, the museum contains natural history specimens, ethnographic materials, items of historical interest, and Shaker relics, including a Zulu spear, clay pipes made by the Canterbury Shakers in the early 19th century, coral, a horned toad, rocks and minerals, a piece of the transatlantic cable, sand from the Holy Land, and the hitching post Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee once used. The materials are disparate and many are fragile. This cabinet of curiosities has been a popular element of CSV interpretation over the past decades, and will be used in new interpretive strategies to examine many themes in Shaker and broader American culture and history.