On Vacation at Mount Holyoke's Skinner Museum

Skinner Museum student worker Victoria Gannon '00 takes a look at some of the objects on display in the museum.

An assortment of glass and ceramic objects at the Skinner Museum includes an open-mouthed face, perhaps used as an ashtray.

Summer is a time when many of us leave the area for a change of scene or to revisit the past, but if you're staying put this year don't despair. Through the Skinner Museum's collections of more than 5,000 objects, ranging from a piece of the Colosseum to a chunk of a meteorite, you can experience everything from ancient Rome to outer space--without ever leaving South Hadley.

Much like the Smithsonian in miniature (but without the crowds), the Skinner Museum offers visitors the chance to step back in time through an eclectic array of objects. A documents collection contains papers signed by John Hancock and George Washington; a collection of pewter spans two centuries and three continents; and an assemblage of North American Indian artifacts, mostly from nineteenth-century Plains Indians, is one of the largest and rarest on the East Coast. Included in the fifteen collections are rocks and minerals, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tools, and 360 mounted bird specimens. Among the thousands of intriguing objects are a 300-year-old model ship, the key to the old Northampton jail, and a stuffed carrier pigeon.

MHC benefactor and board member Joseph Skinner bequeathed the collections to the College in 1946. A scion of a wealthy Holyoke-based manufacturing family, Skinner began collecting rocks and minerals as a boy and continued amassing treasures throughout his life. The museum represents a combination of his interests, his sense of what was important to preserve, his efforts to emulate the collectors of his day, and his belief that his collections should be used to educate.

The Skinner Museum still looks much the way it did in 1932, when Joseph Skinner opened its doors to the public. Although Skinner and a curator, hired in the 1930s, made efforts to organize the collections, there is little in the way of structure or interpretation to guide visitors. "We are reluctant to rearrange things," says Wendy Watson, curator of the MHC Art Museum, which administers the Skinner Museum. "Part of the charm and the wonder of the museum is that it is arranged the way it is--the way Skinner arranged it."

The museum's collections are housed in four historic buildings located on Route 116 near the Orchards Golf Course. These structures are also part of Skinner's collecting legacy. In 1930, he had the Congregational Church (1846) of Prescott, Massachusetts, now the museum's main building, moved to South Hadley from Prescott. The village was abandoned to provide the flood plain for the Quabbin Reservoir. Skinner had a copy of Prescott's school constructed next to the church with wood taken from a nineteenth-century Prescott home. Behind the church stands a stable shed that is thought to have been moved with the church. The carriage house on site may have been moved from, or constructed with, wood from Prescott. Another theory is that is belongs to the "Thirty-five Woodbridge Street" complex, an eighteenth-century home used by Skinner as a museum building.

Plan to visit the Skinner Museum as part of your vacation this year. It is open Wednesday and Sunday from 2 pm to 5 pm, from May through October. Are we there yet?

Photographs by Nancy Palmieri