How are you going to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial? Stage an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on your front lawn? Build a triumphal arch? Print your own face on a 24-karat gold coin? While many of the (shockingly real) events and exhibitions planned for America’s 250th birthd ay tend toward the bombastic, the Vermont Historical Society has chosen a humbler, more remedial approach to our past with “The Vermont Firsts Collection,” an exhibition on view through June at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier. The show takes as its starting point a series of paintings commissioned in celebration of the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial by Brattleboro’s First Vermont Bank and created by Bruce K. Mitchell, an artist who lived across the lake in Elizabethtown, N.Y., and died in 2018. Thirteen of the original 44 paintings are displayed. Alongside them, other historical objects from the museum’s collection and extensive labels offer nuance, context and outright corrections to the assumptions underpinning the series. The paintings themselves are competent but stilted, with a palette embracing a bilious yellow-brown combination that luckily never escaped the 1970s. The people pictured are wooden and awkward, as they inevitably must be when the artist is told to envision scenes such as “The First Grafting Wax.” But the show’s strength is that it doesn’t point out aesthetic flaws as much as it does failures of information. For instance, “The Old First Church,” according to the 1976 exhibition catalog, depicts the Bennington structure where the first Protestant religious services in Vermont were celebrated and near where the first Catholic mass took place at what’s now Bennington Museum. The label says that’s wrong on several counts: A later church is the one pictured, and the Catholics held communion in Isle La Motte back in 1666 and built St. Mary’s in Burlington 20 years before the catalog’s claim. Vermont’s first covered bridge, built by Pittsford carpenter Nicholas Powers? Earlier ones were likely built when he was a child in the 1820s. Donald W. Smith of Barre, first Eagle Scout in the state? He was actually the second. First Vermont Statehouse? The painting shows the current third one. First quarry in the U.S.? Awfully hard to know. Despite quibbling about the details, the show does a very good job of achieving the bicentennial project’s aim: inspiring pride in Vermont’s spirit of innovation. Objects from the collection illuminate some actual firsts, messy though they may have been. There’s a child-size green blazer worn by Diane Kearns Duncan, who as a sixth grader advocated for girls to become legislative pages in the Statehouse and, together with her friend Lea Sikora, became its first in 1969. There’s not only an Orvis fly-fishing reel, patented in 1874, but also a simple nylon hand-fishing line wrapped around a cardboard tube, used at Abenaki “fish-in” protests for Native fishing rights in the 1970s. The exhibition may also remind viewers of a key development since the bicentennial: With the internet and a more connected world, it’s now easier to check our assumptions than it ever has been. Going back to examine established fact is a worthy practice, even when, as the introductory wall text puts it, “many of the depicted events turn out not to be the first of something or perhaps even inconsequential to the greater flow of hisory [sic].” Hey, everyone makes mistakes. “The Vermont Firsts Collection,” on view through June 30 at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier. The post History Museum Takes a Second Look at Vermont Firsts appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less