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Notes -
In St. Johnsbury, Vermont, a town of 7k, there is the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. It was founded by an industrialist who was part of a family who got wealthy thanks to industrial weighing scales and I imagine 0% of the public in the US has heard of the guy (his brother also founded a museum that is in St. Johnsbury). Even so, the place is astounding. It has so many collections and so much stuff that it's impossible to process it all in a day. It would take many trips to really grasp everything that the Athenaeum has. You could spend hours just staring at this Bierstadt painting of Yosemite (it's 10' by 15'). These brothers were not wealthy to the level of Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, etc. and yet they spent money to build museums and collections that are still amazing 150 years later.
In contrast, the current richest man spends his time complaining about stuff on Xitter and proposing to have a computer make a movie.
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