The Dutton House is an exhibit building at Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont; it is also known as the Salmon Dutton House. Dutton House was the first dwelling brought to the museum property. In order to relocate the structure to the museum grounds, builders dismantled the house. Museum workers photographed the house prior to and while the house was being dismantled. Samples of each stenciled border were excised from the plaster walls. These samples were used as models for recreating the stenciled decoration of Dutton House's interior. The sunburst stencil painted motif over a second-floor fireplace mantle was also retained and installed in the re-erected house. Museum workers added dentil molding, copied from a house in Alburg, Vermont, to the structure's cornice. History Salmon Dutton built Dutton House in Cavendish, Vermont, in 1781. Having emigrated from Massachusetts, Dutton worked as a road surveyor, a justice of the peace, and the treasurer of the town of Cavendish. Like many of his contemporaries, Dutton used his house as both a residence and place of business. Continuing his tradition, Dutton's descendants, who occupied the house until 1900, operated Dutton House as a store, an inn, and a boarding house for local mill workers. Although Dutton originally constructed Dutton House in the indigenous saltbox style, he and his descendants expanded the structure as the building's function changed over time. The many additions that extend from the saltbox core reflect the tradition of "continuous" architecture common in New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the late 1940s Redfield Proctor Jr., Dutton's great-great-grandson, offered the house to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. As part of considering the house, architect Frank Chouteau Brown measured and delineated the house and its stencil-painted walls for the Historic American Buildings Survey in 1946. Ultimately, Proctor donated the house to the Vermont Historical Society; however, in 1950 when the Vermont Highway Department's planned road improvements threatened the structure, the society offered it to Shelburne Museum. Wall treatments collection Nineteenth-century American homeowners employed many methods in ornamenting their interiors. Rich paint colors and wallpaper were widely available in America as early as 1725, and by 1830 thousands of trade painters offered wallpapering, mural painting, and stenciling among their marketable talents. Shelburne Museum's collection includes examples of all three types of wall treatments. Members of the upper class often imported French and English