Ask Maggie: 14 Questions About the World Famous Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum

Following the debut edition of Ask Maggie, wherein Upper Valley readers ask me Upper Valley questions and I try to find Upper Valley answers, several people inquired about the origins of the World Famous Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum, a small purple trolley that appeared this summer on the front lawn of KIS Thrift on Route 5 in Wilder. As the museum’s founder, I thought this was a great idea!

One of the people who wanted to know more about the museum was Honor Hingston-Cox, the Lebanon woman behind the Milkweed Mug Exchange and the subject of my first column. At my request, Honor was kind enough to email me a thorough list of questions. But instead of fine-tuning my answers at my own laptop, I skipped reading what she wrote and forwarded it to Chico Eastridge, the museum’s general contractor and also my husband. I asked him to sit in as the question-asker and record our conversation, which I subsequently asked some robots to transcribe. 

Before we get to that, thank you for all your fascinating questions thus far! You can email your queries to me at [email protected] or, better yet, fill out this form. 

Here’s the transcript of my conversation with Chico, which I edited for length and clarity, including reordering questions. 

Chico: How did the trolley housing the museum come to be?

Maggie: The trolley is a wooden structure built on a trailer, like for a truck to tow around, that I bought off of a guy who was living in a homemade castle in Canaan. I found it on Facebook Marketplace probably five years ago. This guy had built it to cart around his tools. He had a handyman business called Joseph Olisky & Daughters Home Repair, and he also sometimes used it to drag around a motorcycle. And I think he occasionally rented it out for weddings. He said that it used to be red, and after one wedding, it came back blue.

I bought this thing in part to cover up a patch of Japanese knotweed growing in our yard. I just wanted to put something more interesting on it. And we were kind of drowning in salt and pepper shakers because somehow somewhere along the line, I collected a few hundred of them. And so that's essentially how the museum was born. 

Chico: Is there something about the size that makes the museum kind of unique?

Maggie: I think the size makes it interesting and attractive, kind of an oddity. There is a much bigger, really cool Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. They have more than 20,000 sets and it takes up a whole building. It was this European woman who has since passed and she was, I believe, an anthropologist studying in the Americas. And she realized that salt and pepper shakers have all of this historical and cultural significance to Americans, and she started to collect them, and then she had 20,000 sets. The World Famous Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum has I think 300 sets, so it's a totally different thing. 

My museum draws a ton of inspiration from the World Famous Crochet Museum in Joshua Tree, California. An artist named Shari Elf — it’s her collection of little crocheted animals, either toys or sometimes they have utilitarian functions like wine bottle holders or toilet paper holders. She's collected them and put them into a vintage drive-thru photo booth, which I think is roughly comparable to the size of the World Famous Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum. I discovered that museum in January 2020 while on a road trip, and I just loved it. That's a direct connection between the World Famous Crochet Museum and the World Famous Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum.

Chico: Do people mail salt and pepper shakers to you? 

Maggie: People who are mailing them to me are my friends who are sending me gifts. Although, when the museum went viral recently, somebody offered to send me them from Australia and from other faraway places. But so far, I have not gotten any from afar.

Chico: How do you feel about pepper grinders or salt pigs? 

Maggie: What's a salt pig?

Chico: I do not know.

Maggie: I have no feelings on salt pigs besides curiosity. What I like about salt and pepper shakers is that someone has taken an object or an animal or whatever and transformed it into this little utilitarian tool. So it's not so much really about salt and pepper; it's more about the characters and how many things people have designed to be salt and pepper shakers. Cats, dogs, vegetables, household objects, types of vehicles, places, volcanoes. Whatever you can think of, somebody has made it into a salt and pepper shaker. 

Chico: You already have a collection that is pretty chock full. Are you still seeking out new salt and pepper shakers?

Maggie: I don't necessarily seek them out so much as I see them and cannot control myself and buy them, or people give them to me. People will be out in the world and see a really cool set, but they don't need many sets of salt and pepper shakers in their house, so they'll just buy it for me and it ends up in the museum. 

Chico: Do you have any salt and pepper shakers that are your white whales? Something that you highly covet and want to find out there? 

Maggie: No, but people ask me that a lot. But I am not a collector who has any interest in the value of each set. I try to spend just a few dollars on each set at most. The most that I've ever spent is 15 bucks when I was in Memphis and I got a kangaroo with a baby kangaroo in its pouch. 

Chico: Do you have any shakers that are singles ready to mingle?

Maggie: Yes, and sometimes I pair them together and make new little couples. We have two blobs — I think we've guessed sushi for one of them and a croissant or turtle shell for the other. Those are now a pair. We've got some cat-like dogs or dog-like cats that are now a pair. So yeah, I'll take them if they're lonely. 

Chico: If there was an impending disaster, like a fire or a bomb threat inside the museum, and you could only save one set, which one would you grab?

Maggie: Whose question is this?

Chico: We're still on Honor’s. 

Maggie: Wow, that's a really good question. I do know, and we've talked about this, there's some likelihood that the museum will get destroyed someday, either by vandals or weather or something. But if I were there and had to choose … The three that are coming to mind are lady and refrigerator, these really cute little frogs with leaves behind them, and then dog hugging trash can. And I guess I would just grab whichever one I was closest to.

Chico: I think the bolt and screw are pretty good. They would probably survive a disaster. They're pretty industrial. 

So with all these incredible salt and pepper shakers in your museum, what salt and pepper shakers do you use at home? 

Maggie: You know the answer to this question. 

Chico: I do.

Maggie: We don't use any at home. Chico just salts things perfectly because Chico cooks all the food in the house. And to the extent that we use salt or pepper at the table, we just use the Morton salt container —

Chico: Or Adobo.

Maggie: Yeah, or Adobo. But we don't really have a table set. 

Chico: All right, Nancy Gregory writes: “As a collector of many types of items myself, i.e. hats, jewelry, antique clothing, etc., I'm curious about what starts people collecting certain items. In your case, I would like to know how you got started on salt and pepper shakers. I finally looked at your museum and love it. I'm glad that someday my bare-breasted salt and pepper shaker will join your collection.”

Maggie: I feel like first I need to address the bare-breasted situation. Nancy is a long-time shopper at KIS Thrift and she has a salt and pepper shaker set that — it's like a topless lady with her back on the ground. Each of her boobs, one is salt and one is pepper. But she had lost one of the boobs, or maybe it came without it. I connected Nancy and Mary Arnold from Victory Pottery, and Mary sculpted the other boob. And so Nancy has promised that when she passes, which we hope is never, then that set is going to make its way to the museum. 

Chico: Do you remember the point where your sets became a collection?

Maggie: I get asked that a lot and the answer is no. But growing up, my family did have a table set and it was Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. So that was our standard day-to-day set, which I still have. I keep it at home, along with two other sets from my childhood. One was a pair of turkeys, which would come out for Thanksgiving dinner. And the other is from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and the Tin Man are one side of the set and the Lion and Scarecrow are the other side of the set. So I guess that on some level, the Cassidy family liked salt and pepper shaker sets. 

I really don't know when it started to spiral. I think maybe my grandfather had gotten me a set when I moved into a new apartment. It was just from, like, JCPenney; it wasn't a collector's item, it wasn't anything fancy, they're actually pretty plain. But I remember that vaguely maybe being the start of something like, huh, I have four sets now, and somehow from there like, oh no, I have 304 sets now. There are people out there who have hundreds or thousands of salt and pepper shaker sets, no big deal, but not everybody has bought a trolley and put them on display for everyone to see.

Chico: Recently you had a little bit of an internet sensation, and you got featured on a big account that had the hook that you run the largest salt and pepper shaker museum in the world. 

Maggie: Right. Incorrect. 

Chico: Yeah. How did that come to be, that whole viral thing?

Maggie: That super viral account with 42 million followers had picked up on a video made by a woman named Liza, who is a moon photographer from New Hampshire, who was in the Upper Valley during the recent lunar eclipse. And while she was driving around during the day with her boyfriend, they passed by the museum and she saw this weird purple trolley out of the corner of her eye and made him double back. And she made this video that went viral. 

She took the video of the museum, but people were very much reacting to her reaction to the museum. She was just totally charmed by it and she was like, ‘am I gonna cry?’ because she thought it was so cute. We went from something like 148 Instagram followers to nearly 3,000, which is funny, because part of the joke of the museum is being really bad at Instagram. I don't usually post with the algorithm in mind; I just post things that I want to post. So for someone else to come along and have a pretty genuine reaction to it while they're out chasing the moon and that's what goes viral, I thought was really fitting.

Chico: Are there any future plans for the museum? Things that you'd like to implement? 

Maggie: I don’t know. It took me a long time to kind of get going on the museum. I bought the trolley and then it sat for years. You're the one who kind of unblocked that mental log jam by just getting going on building the shelves, and then I started painting. But it took me forever. So I think the museum has been an exercise in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, which is to say it's better to do it and have it be less than perfect than for me to fret about perfection and just be paralyzed.

Chico: Lastly, are you secretly overloaded and would like to stop?

Maggie: I'm probably secretly overloaded, but I don't really want to stop.

The World Famous Salt & Pepper Shaker Museum will celebrate its grand opening in Wilder on Saturday, Nov. 7. Keep in touch on Instagram via @world.famous.shakers.

Curious about something in the Upper Valley? Ask me about it. Email [email protected] with your name, town and question, or fill out this brief form. 

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Maggie Cassidy is the former editor of the Valley News and managing editor of VTDigger. In addition to creative endeavors in film and other media, she is the marketing manager at KIS Clean Outs and KIS Thrift, and, as you now know, serves as the proprietor of Wilder’s largest salt and pepper shaker museum. She can be reached at [email protected].