After being acquired by Bennington College and undergoing months of renovations, the Robert Frost Stone House Museum is set to reopen Thursday.
The Frost House was gifted to Bennington College by the Friends of Robert Frost in December. Located in Shaftsbury, V.T. the former home of the famous American poet is about a 5-minute drive from the college. Robert Frost lived in the 18th century house from 1920 to 1929, collecting four Pulitzer Prizes during that time. Bennington College President Dr. Mariko Silver says the school is proud to be the new steward of the Frost House, which originally opened as a museum in 2002.
“We are a place of many things at Bennington College but we are also a place of poets, whether [that’s] Mary Oliver or recent alum Safiya Sinclair and of course our poetry faculty here today. It is very much part of who we are and what we do,” says Silver.
Megan Mayhew Bergman is the director of special programs at Bennington College and the new director of Frost House. She says after 15 years, former Executive Director Carol Thompson and the Friends of Robert Frost Board decided it was time for a change. Bergman says upon acquiring the vital piece of local history, the college worked to reinvent the museum.
“So we have just spent the last few months renovating the home and re-curating and thinking about what it means for a progressive educational institution like Bennington College to run a historic house museum and to support Robert Frost’s legacy but also poetry in general and our local community,” says Bergman.
Vermont Humanities Council Executive Director Peter Gilbert says donors and volunteers have worked to keep the Frost House open as a museum.
“So that it could be available and open to the public and be here for posterity. Now it will still be available to the general public but they’ll also be using it as a center for writing and poetry and for kind of cross disciplinary programs,” says Gilbert.
The Frost House is set to re-open to the public Thursday at 4 p.m. for a special preview. Bergman says she collaborated with students to reinvent the museum. She says college senior Sophie Parker-Goose worked on the landscape.
“The grounds work, really looking at the way that historic landscape links to Robert Frost’s poetry and some of the best known poems in America, and she has been doing tree identification and GIF mapping of the property. I have another student who is also a senior who has been doing some curation work in the house. There was a woodcut artist JJ Lankes, who was closely associated with Frost and illustrated his books for some time and they met for the first time at the Stone House, and we have a gallery of his woodcuts,” says Bergman.
Gilbert says having a physical historic location supporting arts and poetry creates a sense of community pride.
“Define a town, a region, they give us a pride, they give us solidity that comes from particularity by which I mean knowing that you live in a specific place and not just some sort of general town,” says Gilbert.
The preview event includes tours of the grounds, new galleries and speeches by Bergman, Gilbert and Silver. Steven Metcalf, a critic and columnist for Slate, is also scheduled to present his lecture: “Robert Frost and the Language of Rural Authenticity.”
