But don’t go in

“Tower” (acrylic on canvas), by Peggy Wilson, in her show “Peggy Watson: Vermont Outdoors,’’ at the Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild, St. Johnsbury, through Nov. 11.

Edited from a Wikipedia summary : In the mid-19th Century, St. Johnsbury became a minor manufacturing center, with the main products scales—the platform scale was invented there by Thaddeus Fairbanks, in 1830—and maple syrup and related products. With the arrival of the railroad line from Boston to Montreal in the 1850s, St. Johnsbury grew quickly and was named the shire town (county seat) in 1856, replacing Danville.

‘Luminescent isolation’

“I Come from a Place Where No One Has Ever Been’’ (oil on canvas), by Ann Young, at Catamount Arts center in St. Johnsbury, Vt. She lives in Barton, Vt., not far from St. Johnsbury, the cultural center of Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom’’.

The center says: Young’s outsize oil embodies a surreal luminescent isolation in both the background landscape and the foreground of a girl’s face. If you go in person, and linger, it may remind you of looking at “Girl with a Pearl Earring’’ (1665), by the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

St. Johnsbury hosts the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium which opened in 1891 as a gift of Franklin Fairbanks, a businessman, naturalist and philanthropist, to the community. His donated collections remain northern New England’s most extensive natural history display, and the National Register-listed building is a splendid example of the Richardsonian Romanesque style.

Aerial view of beautiful by remote Barton

— Photo by King of Hearts 

Reconciling with New England

The Fairbanks Athenaeum, in St. Johnsbury, Vt., the center of culture for the Green Mountain State’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’

“New England haunted the minds of Americans, who tried to read its riddle, as if for their soul’s good they must know what it meant….For it meant much to Americans that this old region should fare well, as their palladium of truth, justice, freedom and learning. They could not rest until they were reconciled to it, and until it was reconciled to them.’’

Van Wyck Brooks, in New England Indian Summer (1940)

— Photo by Doug Kerr on what appears to be an Indian Summer day, which in New England is usually taken to mean mild and calm (or perhaps with a soft southwest wind) days after the first freeze.

Escaping the heat into high culture

Entrance to the museum, which is in St. Johnsbury, in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom.’’ The museum and the town are very interesting places.

“We climb the stone staircase

of the redstone Victorian building,

my father, my aunt, my husband carrying our baby,

escaping from the mid-July heat.

My mother is missing, dead one year.’’

— From “Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium,’’ by Jane Shore