By STEVEN JUPITER
PROCTOR—The Vermont Marble Museum has announced the hire of Molly Wickes as its new Director, effective July 1, the date of its re-opening after several years of closure. Ms. Wickes comes to the Museum with much experience in museum operations and collections management, having been Director of the Carpenter Museum, a local-history museum in Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and Director of Education at the Providence Preservation Society, among other positions in the field.
Ms. Wickes has a B.A. in history and an M.A. in historic preservation, both from UVM. She is currently completing an M.A. in Library and Information Sciences at Simmons University in Boston.
Ms. Wickes arrives at the Marble Museum at a key juncture in its existence. It has been closed since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. It occupies a building in downtown Proctor that had originally belonged to the Vermont Marble Company, once one of the biggest producers of fine marble in the world. The company’s marble and finishing work can be seen in numerous buildings and monuments in New York and Washington, D.C., including the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Museum celebrates the history of the company and the town that it built. Proctor was carved out of Pittsford and West Rutland in the late 1800s specifically to be a “company town” where workers could live and raise families in an almost self-sufficient bubble. There were schools, stores, a hospital, even a church with Tiffany stained-glass windows. The company was sold in the 1970s and eventually dissolved in the 1990s. There’s a lot of history in Proctor to commemorate.
“I brought the community back into the Carpenter Museum and that’s what I’d like to do in Proctor,” said Ms. Wickes. “There’s a really rich history and a story to be told.”
Wickes also stated that her plans include closer relationships with other local museums, expanded volunteer opportunities and recruitment, and increased focus on the history of the immigrant workers that drove the company’s success.
“There are still a good number of people in Proctor whose families worked for the Vermont Marble Company,” said Wickes. “I want to reposition the Museum as a community museum and not solely a company museum.”
“She’s very excited to be coming back to Vermont,” said Kevin Thornton, vice-president of the Museum’s board. “Turning around the Carpenter Museum was a career highlight for her and she’s eager for the opportunity that reopening the Marble Museum presents. She understands the challenges that face small museums, so we’re glad to get her.”
The Museum has a large collection of artifacts relating to the company, its executives, and its workers. Wickes’s experience managing the collection at the Carpenter Museum will be invaluable in organizing and sharing the collection in Proctor, especially since the Museum’s building was recently sold and the new owners will be using the bulk of the space for hemp processing, requiring the Museum to downsize from 40,000 square feet to roughly 10,000.
Though the Museum board says it’s not being rushed by the new owners, the sooner the transition is settled, the sooner the Museum can resume its normal operations and focus on programming to draw in the community.
“Local history museums are important,” Wickes said. “They can really become the soul of a community and have a place in people’s day-to-day lives. They don’t have to be a place you visit once a year.”
