Samuel Bartlett established himself as a silversmith with some difficulty in the unstable Boston climate of the early 1770s. He apprenticed in Samuel Minott’s shop and then married and moved to Concord. He bought the old jail from the town in 1788 and lived and worked there until moving to Cambridge. His largest and perhaps last commission was the communion silver made for First Parish, Concord, in 1792. Fewer than thirty pieces of hollowware by Samuel Bartlett are known, a significant portion of them in the Concord Museum collection.