The Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake recently sold more than a dozen historic boats in a public auction. Both a former curator and former director of the museum are criticizing the public sale of the artifacts.
The museum in the Adirondacks recently auctioned 16 boats in its collection, including some from the 19th century.
Hallie Bond was the museum’s curator from 1983 to 2012 and is considered an expert in historic small Adirondack boats.
“They’re all different and they all have different stories to tell about how they were used and why they were chosen for that kind of use,” Bond said. “And European-American builders came here and were building these boats. They’re always learning about the past.”
Bond says she broadened the collection to include historically significant boats from outside the Adirondacks.
“That whole understanding of the significance of the boat collection was not considered,” Bond laments. “Several of the boats I suppose were deaccessioned because they were not made and used in the Adirondacks.”
Craig Gilborn was the museum’s director from 1972 to 1992 and is the former president of the New York State Association of Museums. He also served as a trustee of the Shelburne Museum in Vermont for 9 years. He calls the $30,000 the museum netted from the auction a pittance of their value.
“Miss Bond wrote the book on the boat collection. But the museum did not consult her about the disposal of any of that collection. That’s one thing.” Gilborn added, “Thirty-thousand dollars was the amount that they raised. Thirty-thousand dollars is chicken feed.”
Bond is concerned that the sale sends the wrong message to potential donors and appears to show a ‘superficial appreciation’ of the historic significance of the boats.
“Pretty much everything that had been collected, what 30 or 40 years, had been guided by the same policy and so there wasn’t much that needed to be deaccessioned,” Bond said. “Several of the boats that were deaccessioned I think were important to the collection. If they needed that space there were other options.”
Some critics of the sale are concerned that scholars will no longer be able to study the boats. Bond recalls that people would come to the museum to do research.
“When I was there we had builders come to look at tools as well as the boats themselves. We had scholars. We had lots of enthusiasts who’d come and would come and would see the exhibit, but then we also of course have this wonderful research collection that they could then go into and compare these different types of boats and wonder about why a builder did this rather than that boat over there,” Bond recalls. “You know when I was in museum school we were taught to think that objects in a history museum are just like books in a library. You can refer to them and thy have things to tell you.”
In an email to WAMC, Adirondack Experience Communications Director Tara Murphy says that the decision was made to auction several boats because they “were not made or used in the Adirondacks, are duplicates and/or in poor condition.” Murphy notes that the museum has added 25 historic boats over the past decade and now has its largest-ever collection totaling 260. The most recent acquisition is an 1870’s guide boat that “At 19-feet-long, it is the earliest example of a large, freight-style guide boat in our collection and may be the earliest surviving example anywhere.”
The Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake is an underwriter of WAMC.
