Collection Highlights
The Concord Museum’s outstanding collection has been recognized for its national significance by curators, historians, educators, and visitors for more than a century. Click through to view some of the highlights of the collection, many of which are on view in our galleries.
Collections
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Paul Revere Lantern
Similar lanterns might normally have helped pedestrians navigate Boston’s dark streets, but this particular example entered the annals of history when it was used as a signal on the night of April 18, 1775. Paul Revere had arranged the signal with the Charlestown militia the week before; one lantern if the British Regulars left Boston over Roxbury Neck (by land) and two if they crossed the Charles River (by sea). The signal worked, and the Regulars’ secret raid on Provincial military supplies turned into the first battle of the Revolutionary War.
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Flute
Henry Thoreau seems to have made this flute a regular companion and seems not to have played it in a conventional manner. Thoreau favored “unpremeditated” music and particularly delighted in the effect of echo, the inverse of sound; one of the earliest notes from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Henry Thoreau Emerson asked his young friend to bring his flute to the cliff at Fairhaven Bay “for the echo’s sake.”
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Bloody Massacre, Paul Revere
Five years of active protest in Boston erupted in violence on the night of March 5, 1770, when harried soldiers of the 29th Regiment fired into a crowd, killing five civilians. Revere’s depiction, after a design of Henry Pelham, includes some biased details including the labelling of the Custom House as “Butcher’s Hall,” the soldiers firing in unison, and Captain Preston’s upraised sword indicating an order to fire.
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Jack Garrison
Jack Garrison escaped slavery in New Jersey in the 1790s and came to Concord, marrying Susan Robbins, one of the founders of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. Jack and Susan Garrison’s children include John, who managed Concord’s Town House and with Henry Thoreau planted a garden for the newlywed Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, and Ellen Garrison, a prominent Boston social activist before the Civil War and a gifted schoolteacher in the Reconstruction South.
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Powder Horn
Amos Barrett (1752-1829) recorded fifty years after the fact a vivid recollection of the fight at Concord’s North Bridge on April 19, 1775, including such details as the “grand music” of the competing British Regular and Provincial fifes and drums marching into town and the sight of three warning shots splashing in the river just before the volley that killed Abner Hosmer and Isaac Davis of Acton.
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Snowshoes
Henry Thoreau bought these intricately woven snowshoes on a trip to Maine in 1853 for the relatively high price of $5, about five days’ work for a laborer. Thoreau may have hoped they would grant better access to Concord’s woods and fields in the winter but after only a few experiments set them aside.
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Thoreau’s Desk
When setting up a school with brother John in 1838, Henry Thoreau acquired this desk, probably from a cabinetmaker on Concord’s Mill Dam for about $2. The humble green desk had an outsized literary career; Thoreau had it at Walden Pond and on it drafted “Civil Disobedience,” A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden.
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Looking Glass
Case Whitney was enslaved by the muster master of Concord’s militia and may have been at the North Bridge fight. Case Whitney served in the Continental Army and by the end of the Revolutionary War was freed of bondage. The glass was re-silvered at some point in its long life and backed by a page from a copy book, which now shows through.
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Thoreau Pencil Boxes
These decorative point-of-sale boxes were made to hold drawing pencils in four different hardnesses. John Thoreau successfully manufactured pencils beginning in the 1820s, at times partnering with sons John and Henry.
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Sampler
Sixteen-year-old Miriam Buttrick worked this elaborate needlework at the age of sixteen, possibly in the Boston academy of Susanna Rowson. Private academies like Mrs. Rowson’s taught women arts, literature, language and more at a time when college attendance was restricted to men.
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Portrait
Eleazer Brooks of Lincoln was a selectman and militia officer who rose to the rank of Brigadier General during the Revolutionary War. Benjamin Blyth may have painted this pastel portrait while Brooks was in Salem in October, 1774, as a member of the first Provincial Congress.
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Pencils
Cabinetmaker William Munroe was the first pencil maker in Concord, beginning the trade during the war of 1812. By 1820 Munroe, although a consummately skilled craftsman, had nevertheless sold his cabinetmaking tools and by 1840 had some $50,000 in the bank, all owing to pencils.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Daniel French modelled this bust in some thirty sittings with Emerson in 1873, two years before French’s first successful public sculpture, the Concord Minuteman at the North Bridge. “That is the face I shave,” Emerson is said to have remarked on seeing the finished work.
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Shelf Clock
The partnership of brothers Daniel, Nathaniel, and William Munroe helped make Concord a center for producing fashionable timekeepers rivaled only by Boston in Federal New England. The Munroes marketed their clocks as far south as Virginia, engineering small refinements that allowed for their safe transport and selling them by the dozen.
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Tea Pot
The Society of the Cincinnati, whose membership consisted of American and French officers who had served honorably in the Revolutionary War, was formed in 1783. In an early instance of direct American trade with China one member procured several tea sets enameled with the Society’s emblem and gave them to fellow members. This extensive service belonged to Benjamin Lincoln, the Massachusetts Brigadier General who received the sword of Cornwallis at the British surrender in Yorktown in 1781.
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Joined Cupboard
This sophisticated, urban form is the product of the joinery shops that were responsible for building the structures and furniture for Harvard College. The interior of a cupboard like this might store valuable textiles and the exterior was suitable for the display of plates and vessels of silver or ceramic.
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Silk Pelisse
This fashionable silk garment was owned by Lydia Jackson (1802-1892), a member of one of the most prominent families of Plymouth, Massachusetts. In 1835 Lydia Jackson became Lidian Emerson on marrying Ralph Waldo Emerson and for nearly sixty years lived in the square white house that still stands near the center of Concord.
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High Chest
This high chest is inscribed with the name of cabinetmaker Joseph Hosmer (1735-1821) who headed the most active cabinet shop in Concord in the 1760s.Neatly made of cherry probably from New Hampshire the chest is related in design to furniture from Boston, Charlestown, Salem and Ipswich with a slight rural accent evident in features like the almost-straight cabriole legs and the circular fan in the top drawer. Joseph Hosmer was at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775 and served in military and town offices throughout the Revolutionary War.
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Bellows
The Ebenezer Davis Bellows Factory, located in the town of Acton, employed numerous Black and women workers in the 1840s to make fireplace bellows. Although a common household item, Davis’s bellows were imaginatively decorated with designs of surprising variety.
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