I recently visited a most unusual museum. Unlike other institutions by that name, I’m not sure that the Skinner Museum is “visited” so much as it is explored. For starters, although it sits at the edge of the Mount Holyoke College campus in staid South Hadley, Massachusetts, it’s in an old church building from a town that no longer exists. Once home to praying Congregationalists in Prescott, Massachusetts, the structure’s original location was drowned beneath the Quabbin Reservoir. Although the exterior was saved, the church’s interior was never replaced providing a sense of incompleteness, almost as if it were never finished. Its dislocation and half rebuilding lend the building a kind of ghostly air.
Opened in 1932 by wealthy mill owner Joseph Skinner, the Museum is the last refuge of an inveterate collector. It is the attic of a wandering and insatiably curious mind that clearly cherished the very physicality of objects. It is arranged like a delightfully cluttered tag sale with only rudimentary relationship between pieces and little explanation of what things are or why they are there. A docent who’s worked there for two years says she discovers something new every time she enters.
In glass cases, on shelves, standing on the floor, arranged on tables, hanging from walls and the ceiling are musical instruments, Indian stone implements, shells, minerals, model ships, a bicycle for two, clocks, swords, china, pewter and an extensive group of watches. There are bottles, a meteorite, and letters from famous nineteenth century Americans like Ralph Waldo Emerson, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 
Included are guns and a wooden water pipe carved from a log. There is are extensive toy and lamp collections, Panama Canal sand, a wide array of chairs, and enough antique farm equipment to outfit several medium sized farms from two centuries ago. Obscured by various displays is a sword engraved to Lt. General U.S. Grant. Not far away is an elaborate Chinese opium pipe. The museum is a time capsule of a man’s imagination filled with connections that somehow complete a world.
At the Skinner Museum you can never see it all, not only because there is so much in the collection, but because there is stuff behind stuff. Unlike many other museums, this place is not proselytizing a particular message. Instead, it playfully keeps you guessing. It stirs you to be inquisitive. Such is its principal virtue.
Ultimately, this museum is more about Skinner than the objects which it contains. They were collected at a time of rapid change in this country. The collection points to what was important to a man who, as an industrialist at the height of the industrial age, was among those who shaped the nation. Here are many bits and pieces of a world that was rapidly disappearing due to the culture-changing effects of industrialization. Shards of the past and slices of nature were hoarded like memories against the onslaught of pavement and technology, two of the forces that Skinner and his fellow manufacturers were in the vanguard of creating. As a result, you never know what you might find.
