Henry’s Relics

To early Christians, “relics” were the holiest of items: fragments of objects once possessed or touched by a saint—or even fragments of the saints’ very bodies. Tiny chips of bone, swatches of cloth, or splinters of wood were encased behind glass and mounted in elaborate sculptures. These objects are still among the most venerated objects in Catholic churches, although some have since been transferred to museum collections.

To many nineteenth-century Americans, the notion of a “relic” had changed to connote fragments of the civic, historical past: objects related to a significant event or person. Rather than serving as tangible connections to miracles or religious saints, these objects boasted ties to important military battles or the “Founding Fathers”—the Shroud of Turin replaced by a scrap from a U.S. flag flown during the Battle of Baltimore, or a piece of wood from George Washington’s coffin. 

While some relics are themselves objects that are significant for their rich materials or finely-crafted design (e.g. the silver inkstand used to sign the Declaration of Independence, or the carved wooden pineapple seen here, an architectural fragment from Middlebury’s Episcopal Church), other objects would be quotidian—or “junk”—if not for their associations with famous people or dramatic historical events: what would seem to be mere scraps of wood bear tags in Henry Sheldon’s handwriting, distinguishing them as originating from the Tennessee tailor shop of former President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875); what looks like a piece of gravel is actually a chip from Plymouth Rock (see “Cabinet of Curiosities,” first floor).

As seen on these shelves, the practice of collecting wooden relics—whether from historic trees, buildings, or ships—was especially popular, but many other items also attest to this impulse to preserve. The “Cabinet of Curiosities” downstairs includes chunks of glass melted in the Boston Fire of 1872, and Sheldon also collected many bricks from historic sites (e.g. from Philadelphia’s Christ Church, founded 1695, and from Fort Ticonderoga). Sheldon seems also to have experimented with fabric relics; the stripes painted on rectangular swatches of fabric (third row) suggest he was in the process of creating U.S. flags out of the lining of a baptismal gown that had been in his family for generations.

While Sheldon and many nineteenth-century collectors amassed these objects as collections in their own right, they were sometimes assembled into more compositions. In 1884, Sheldon constructed a “Memorial Chair” (to your right), whose spindles were crafted from wooden relics he had collected. Additional relics related to this project are seen in this case, such as a horn comb from Robert Torrance’s house, a leaf from Connecticut’s “Charter Oak,” scraps of wood from the Benson, Vermont Whipping Post, a cane made from wood of the USS Congress, and a fork and knife whose handles derive from the William Alden House. In 1893, Sheldon experimented with metal relics, creating a “Memorial Bell” by melting down metal from some 120 different historic objects, including ancient coins, bullets, and filings from historic swords, keys, and bells (in the third row of this case). 

While the practice of “relic collecting” might seem antiquated, there is continuity into the present with the practice of souvenir keeping: for example, fragments of the Berlin Wall might seem like otherwise unremarkable chunks of concrete, but they take on special resonance (and cost) due to their historic significance. These fragments also sometimes serve as memorials: objects connected to the tragedies of September 11, 2001, for example, have taken on reliquary resonance in the twenty-first century.