Shaping America Exhibit Wins National Endowment for the Humanities Award
A new, permanent exhibition at the museum will open May 2014, thanks to an award of $340,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Shaping America: Machines and Machinists at Work will enable the museum to showcase its unparalleled collection of historic precision machine tools and to tell the story of Windsor as an important incubator of the machine tool industry.
The project will explore a strong set of themes, developed over several years of study by the museum's Board of Trustees, its Board of Advisors, and a team of historians, scholars, and museum professionals:
- Innovation – What is it? How does it occur?
- Work – How are technical training, craftsmanship, and skill passed along? How important are these attributes today?
- Machine Tools and American Culture – How did the machinists and tool builders of "Precision Valley" influence American history, helping drive rapid industrialization, the emergence of the U.S. as a world power, and the development of the consumer culture?
A prototype section called Arming the Union: Gunmakers in Windsor Vermont will open in May 2012. The prototype enables the museum to test exhibit methods and techniques before opening the major exhibit in 2014.
The NEH grants are extremely competitive, and all projects are reviewed by an outside panel of experts. That panel gave our proposal high praise—for our site, the collection, the thoroughness of the plan, and the quality of the proposed interpretation.
The museum has committed $199,000 to the project, and the NEH award provides $340,000. The fact that NEH thought the project worthy of support is sure to help the museum raise the remaining funds to complete the project by April 2014, to meet a total project budget of $840,000.