Rare Shelburne Museum Circus Posters Conserved at NEDCC

The Circus Comes to NEDCC!

NEDCC treats a collection of rare circus posters for Shelburne Museum, in
Shelburne, Vermont


THE DISCOVERY

Removal of old exterior siding during a home renovation in Colchester, Vermont, revealed five vivid circus posters pasted onto the boards beneath the siding. The posters were mounted
on the house when a circus came to town in 1883, and they remained hidden, protected from light and weather, for the next 108 years.

The posters were donated to Shelburne Museum and conservators quickly realized that the safest and most efficient way to salvage the posters was to remove the boards from the house with the posters still attached. The boards, each with their fragmented section of poster, went into storage at the Museum, awaiting funding to have them professionally conserved.

That opportunity arrived in 2010, when the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) treated posters from the collection at the Center’s Andover, Massachusetts, facility.

YET ANOTHER DISCOVERY
It soon became evident that several other advertising posters from a competing circus of
the same time period were pasted underneath
the visible posters. Conservation treatment revealed the hidden images one section at a time, and NEDCC conservator Bucky Weaver was the first to glimpse the images that had been doubly hidden since 1883.

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