In the Galleries

With one of the oldest collections of Americana in the country, the Museum is renowned for its national treasures. In the history galleries and period rooms of the Museum, visitors discover the famous lantern hung in the steeple on the night of Paul Revere’s ride in 1775, the contents of Henry D. Thoreau’s house at Walden Pond, including the desk on which he wrote “Civil Disobedience” and Walden, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study, where he wrote his influential essays and met with other distinguished writers and thinkers during the American literary renaissance. A nationally significant collection of Concord-made clocks, furniture, silver, and other decorative arts serve to illustrate three centuries of Concord’s domestic life.