Museum accessions.(Brief Article)

In July ground was broken in Winchester, Virginia, for the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, a new regional museum that will interpret three centuries of Shenandoah Valley history. Designed by Michael Graves, the museum will be located on the grounds of the Glen Burnie Historic House and Gardens, itself a testament to life in this serenely beautiful part of the country.

The idyllic site that became Glen Burnie was part of a large tract acquired in the mid-eighteenth century by a surveyor named James Wood, who subsequently divided the land and laid out the town of Winchester on part of it. In the 1790s, Wood's son Robert built a Georgian brick residence on the property, and this was altered and added to by succeeding generations of the family. It ultimately came into the possession of Julian Wood Glass Jr., a descendant, who restored the house and filled it with a fine collection of mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American and English decorative arts. Prior to his death in 1992 Glass formed the GlassGlen Burnie Foundation to oversee the transformation of his family's ancestral home into a museum, and as such it opened to the public in 1997.

Glen Burnie tells the story of one family, but the new Museum of the Shenandoah Valley will pay tribute to all those who made their homes in the valley and contributed to its varied cultural patrimony. Certainly among these contributors was the Bell family of potters, who were among the most important and prolific ceramists in the region in the nineteenth century. The inkwell shown below is the work of John B. Bell, the eldest of ten children of Peter Bell Jr., a potter in Hagerstown, Maryland. Father and son, and various other ...