Nestled in Vermont's Lake Champlain Valley is a cultural institution unlike any other: among the first and Hnest museum collections devoted to American folk art. Shelburne Museum, founded in 1947, was the creation of the pioneering collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960), who, at a time when most art collectors were snapping up modern masters in Paris, was scouring the attics and warehouses of New York and New England for weathervanes and whirligigs, Amish quilts and Shaker fumiture, carousel animals and cigar-store Indians. A woman of nerve, verve, taste, and wealth, she amassed a premier collection of tin toys and trade signs, cedar brooms and duck decoys - in fact, anything that was handmade and delighted the eye. "In creating Shelburne," she said, "I wanted to do something that had never been tried before." Electra wanted to honor American folk art, "that collective self-expression of the hearts and hands of the people." Read Less