Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium with Photos and Videos

The Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium is a combination museum and planetarium located in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. It was founded in 1891, by Franklin Fairbanks. The museum and its building are on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

There is also a planetarium and weather forecasting department entitled Eye on the Sky weather station. Meteorologists broadcast their unique weather forecasts for Vermont (and the areas immediately around the state) on Vermont Public Radio and Magic 97.7 daily. The museum also produces daily weather forecasts for three newspapers: The Caledonian Record, the Times Argus, and the Rutland Herald.

The Museum's exhibits include natural history specimens, a seasonal wildflower table, a native butterfly house (summer), an observation beehive (summer), bug art, dioramas (moose, bison, flamingos, birds of paradise, snakes, woodchucks and opossums), and ethnographic displays from around the world. An audio tour of the exhibits is available to visitors.

Construction on the museum building began on July 4, 1890 when the cornerstone was laid and was finished in June 1891. Designed by Lambert Packard, the building features red sandstone and limestone laid in Richardsonian-Romanesque style. The museum was opened in December 1891 and was expanded in 1895 to hold Franklin Fairbanks's full collection

In part, the museum's tradition of reporting the weather and atmospheric conditions comes from Fairbanks's own practice of doing it. Much of the main collection in the museum comes from Fairbanks's own collection.

The planetarium was completed and opened in 1960, located in the second floor overhanging the front entrance.

The museum is organized into 3 different departments: Natural Science, Historical, and Ethnological. The entire collection includes 160,000 objects.

The museum was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. The listing included one contributing building and two contributing objects.

In 2010, Yankee magazine named Fairbanks as the second best history museum in New England.

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