What Makes History: New Stories from the Concord Museum Collection

TUCKED between the pages of a nineteenth-century ledger are pieces of ephemera that perhaps unexpectedly tell the story of how a small Massachusetts town was defining its role in American history. Kept by Concord resident Cummings E. Davis in 1856, this ledger documented his work to collect objects connected to the town's history, from the battle of April 19, 1775, that launched the American Revolution to the personal belongings of his friend and neighbor Henry David Thoreau. Over the next thirty years, he would acquire hundreds of objects, displaying them to visitors and local residents, first in the Concord courthouse and later in a house on Lexington Road. In 1887, prominent figures in Concord recognized the significance of his collection and purchased it for the newly formed Concord Antiquarian Society, now operating as the Concord Museum. Many of the objects Davis collected continue to be on view at the Museum today. The ephemera in Davis's ledger provide granular details about how he preserved and shared stories of Concord's history. A recipe for ginger snaps was perhaps for those that he sold himself, at a refreshment stand he operated near the train depot. It includes astonishingly large measurements—two cups of molasses and a proportionately gigantic amount of flour, which would have made several dozen cookies, enough for him to sell in vast quantities. Other objects indicate the craft and labor that went into guiding visitors to significant sites in town. Scrap pieces of gilt paper bear the outlines of the ornaments Davis added to frame objects in the collection, while paper patterns of stars are the remnants of those he cut and affixed to trees in order to mark the path to Thoreau's house at Walden Pond. The food he sold, the displays he created, and the paths he marked were inseparable from his collecting practices, and they reveal how he publicized the study of Concord's history among residents, as well as the tourists that increasingly flocked to the town to pay pilgrimages to significant sites for American history and literature. However, the objects he preserved clearly held a more elevated place in his mind. Davis described them as a "Sacred Collection" in large letters at the top of an 1854 manuscript catalogue detailing their "departed worth. " Davis's ledger highlights the contrast between the relics he held sacred and the ephemera he happened not to throw away. A special exhibition, "What Makes History? : New Stories from the Collection, " on view at the Concord Museum from March 22 through August 18, 2024, builds on Davis's legacy by considering the process of telling stories about the past and the role of material objects in determining whose lives are remembered. 1 What objects do we choose to preserve, and who is able to collect them? Why were they once valued, and how can we continue to see them in new ways? What role do museums play in determining what perspectives and experiences are emphasized? "What Makes History" explores the history of the museum, particularly the role of the Concord Antiquarian Society in preserving objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and shaping popular understandings of early American history. It features numerous collections from within the Museum's permanent collection, highlighting the stories of the people who made, acquired, and interpreted them. These items capture the different layers of what it means to make history: they reveal the complex processes of arts and craftsmanship that are involved in making objects. They highlight the people whose lives have been carefully recorded, as well as those whose experiences have been left out. And they illuminate the institutions that create and promote narratives about the past. "What Makes History" invites visitors to think critically about the work of museums more broadly. Viewing pages from an artisan's account book, we consider how to learn more about who made objects and what they were paid for their work. By looking at the individual components inside a timepiece, we explore what we can learn by taking an object apart and looking closely. The exhibition also raises larger questions about how objects from around the globe were collected and brought together in Concord. Through seemingly disparate examples of fans, calling card cases, chairs, timepieces, fireplace bellows, and more, "What Makes History" considers the people and institutions who thought these objects were worth saving, explores the gaps and absences within museum collections, and imagines how we might continue to expand the stories that objects tell. The first section of the exhibition considers the varied figures who have debated what it means to make history in the town of Concord. Early in the nineteenth century, historian Lemuel Shattuck published an extended account of Concord's colonial history and the famous battle of April 19, 1775. Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" (1835) celebrated "the rude bridge that arch'd the flood" and famously announced a "shot heard round the world, " locating not only the first battle of the American Revolution but the very origins of nationhood at the town's North Bridge. As historian Robert Gross has demonstrated, questions about how best to commemorate the town's significance would preoccupy Concord residents throughout the mid-nineteenth century. 2 They were deeply invested in recording their own history, building monuments and writing biographies that would celebrate the lives and contributions of their families. Cummings Davis was an unlikely candidate to establish the town's first museum. Born Elothan Cummings Davis in Brooklyn, New York in 1816, he later reversed his first and middle names (much like his friend Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry). Davis's family moved to Massachusetts when he was around eight years old, and he lived in Groton, Leominster, and Harvard prior to his move to Concord. While Davis attended Groton Academy (later Lawrence Academy), he never attended college and worked numerous odd jobs throughout his life. He moved to Concord around 1850 and soon became a familiar figure on town streets, selling refreshments at the train depot and delivering newspapers. Soon after, he established a museum and began collecting objects from Concord residents, which he displayed to visitors in rented rooms in the Concord courthouse. Despite collective efforts to commemorate the Revolution through monuments and celebrations, Davis seems to have been unique among his contemporaries in recognizing the significance of everyday objects that had borne witness to the Revolution. Many of his neighbors had relatives who had fought in the Revolution, and from these families he acquired treasured relics connected to that first battle, from muskets and powder horns to furniture, tools, and other objects. It is not entirely clear what motivated Davis to establish a museum. His story paralleled the entrepreneurial spirit of the museums established by Charles Willson Peale and P. T. Barnum earlier in the nineteenth century, which similarly aimed to provide both education and entertainment. Perhaps he knew from the newspapers he sold about the economic and popular success of Barnum's American Museum in New York, or even the traveling exhibitions that occasionally made their way to Concord's lyceum. Davis may also have been aware of the antiquarian collections housed at local historical societies in other New England towns, or even the growing collections of the National Institute and Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. Whatever the reason, he was enormously successful at building a collection, and he delighted in sharing stories of Concord history to the visitors who came to view his museum. Davis's "Sacred Collection" reflected his dedication to local history. He collected furniture and household items, including ceramics and textiles, each prized for its connection to an individual or family. Many objects belonged to descendants of Concord's earliest white English settlers, including the Bulkeley, Hosmer, and Cuming families. Davis acquired powder horns and muskets that were carried to the North Bridge on April 19, 1775, as well as furniture that had been used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From his neighbor Lydia Hosmer, he received multiple needlework pictures that she had made as a student at Susanna Rowson's Academy in Boston, as well as other family belongings. Early visitors included Henry David Thoreau, who recorded visits to "Mr. Davis's museum" in his journals and even sent him some taxidermy—a stuffed wildcat that had been captured in a nearby town—to expand the scope of his collection into natural history. Davis would greet visitors, often with his dog Don by his side (Fig. 1), and regale them with stories about the objects on display, much like the narrator of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "A Virtuoso's Collection" (1842). He was known for personalizing his tour for individual visitors, calling their attention to objects especially relevant to their interests. Fig. 1. —Cummings E. Davis and his dog, Don, taken in front of the Concord Antiquarian Society house on Lexington Road, late nineteenth century. Concord Museum Collection; Pi1169a. In some ways, Davis was late to the scene of collecting Massachusetts history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, founded in 1791 by Jeremy Belknap, had already amassed a sizable collection of documents and artifacts; similarly, the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, founded in 1812, had acquired numerous materials connected to early American history and colonial settlement. Both institutions maintained a cabinet of natural specimens in addition to other historical materials, and they also acquired numerous Indigenous archaeological items from local collectors; many of these items were later transferred to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. 3 In addition to these larger institutions, numerous small towns around New England had established historical societies dedicated to local history. Given Concord's growing recognition of its role in national history, it is perhaps more surprising that it did not already have an active historical society. Davis was also distinctive among his contemporaries in preserving objects connected to Concord's Black families. He acquired a looking glass that had belonged to Case Whitney (sometimes called Case Minott), an enslaved Black man who earned his freedom by serving in the American Revolution. The looking glass continues to provide a tangible reminder of the history of slavery in Concord as a rare surviving possession of a Black person living in Massachusetts during the eighteenth century. Davis also acquired a walking stick that had been presented to Jack Garrison, another Black resident, highlighting the role of Black families in the town's social life throughout the nineteenth century, as Garrison's family members participated in the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society and attended public school. Davis's decision to collect and preserve their belongings notably contrasted with many museums of the same era, where Black history was so absent that the writer William J. Wilson wrote a short story entitled "Afric-American Picture Gallery" (1859) that imagined an entire museum dedicated to promoting the subject. Davis instead recognized the Black families in Concord as part of the town's community and preserved their stories in his museum. In the decades following the Civil War, Davis's collection continued to grow. "Whatever belongs to the remote past, " he told a newspaper reporter in 1870, "has an unspeakable charm for me. "4 He also welcomed objects connected to a less remote present. After Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, his sister Sophia stewarded both his literary estate and his personal possessions. She gave many of these objects to Davis for his museum, including the bed he brought to Walden, his desk, and other objects (Fig. 2). Others she distributed among her brother's close friends, including Daniel Ricketson, whose descendants would later give Thoreau's flute to the Concord Antiquarian Society. As Thoreau's reputation grew in the 1870s and tourists began making pilgrimages to the site of his Walden house, Davis helped them along by marking the path with stars, instructing them: "You can Follow these lower Stars to where Henry D. Thoreau's Cabin was where are a pile of stones. And Follow the higher Stars where you can Find Him above in Glory. " Meanwhile, in the rooms of Davis's museum, then housed in the courthouse in the center of Concord, he invited them to view objects and experience "Spirits of the Past that Whisper Pleasant Tales of Long Ago. "5Fig. 2. —Thoreau Room at the Concord Antiquarian Society, early twentieth century. Concord Museum Collection; Ph521. The purchase of Davis's collection by the Concord Antiquarian Society in 1887 marked a significant transition in its evolution as a museum. When the Society was founded the prior year, its members outlined a lofty mission "to collect and preserve objects of antiquarian and historical interest, and to stimulate research into local history and antiquities, especially of the towns included within the old limits of Concord. "6 The town's social elite numbered among its original members, including John Shepherd Keyes, George Tolman, and Edward Waldo Emerson, who were connected to other institutions in town such as the Concord Free Public Library; some were also members of the exclusive Social Circle. The Society transformed the collection from the work of an individual collector—"Mr. Davis's museum"—into an institution, reflecting efforts to professionalize and formalize the study of local history. As part of their purchase agreement, Davis would remain the custodian of the collection, and the Society agreed that Davis would continue to receive any profits from its exhibition and that the Society would otherwise financially support him. Over the next few years, the relationship between Davis and the Society became increasingly fraught, especially as the tensions arose over the ownership—both material and intellectual—of the collection. By September 1891, the Society described "certain inharmonious relations" with Davis, who continued to assert "absolute ownership of the Society's antiquarian collections" despite their purchase four years earlier. 7 After resolving to inspect the rooms, they met with further conflict, after Davis provided them with "a somewhat unsatisfactory list" of the objects at the house and refused entry to "his own sleeping room, " declaring it and its contents to be his private property. 8 A year later, members of the Society called on Davis and reported having to forcibly enter the house, which they found "very dirty and ill-kept. "9 They would later decide to prosecute him "for defacing the sign upon the Society's building" and hired a watchman to take over the house. 10 Following reports of increasingly erratic behavior, Davis was moved to the Massachusetts Lunatic Hospital, where the Society continued to support his medical care. He died there at age eighty in 1896. The declining relationship between Davis and the Society was likely the result of numerous factors, including the question of who would own and tell Concord's history. While the Society's reports cited Davis's individual conduct and possible mental illness as the source of most tensions, they were likely exacerbated by class prejudice and shifting goals for the Society. Their discomfort with the "dirty" rooms and their growing dissatisfaction with Davis as a caretaker possibly reflects concerns about their own institutional reputation. By 1887, when Davis transferred ownership of his collection, the objects he had preserved had taken on new importance in the eyes of town residents. The centennial of the American Revolution in 1875 heightened an interest in preserving relics connected to the war, captured by the creation of the famous Minute Man statue at the Old North Bridge, designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French. Other institutions in town, including the Concord Free Public Library and its Corporation, established by William Munroe in 1873, further reflected the town's aspirations to promote the arts and culture. Davis's "Sacred Collection" was now part of much wider efforts to preserve and narrate the town's history. Perhaps Concord's elites were uncomfortable with how this history was being preserved—and by whom. The somewhat rocky transition from an individual's collection to a larger institution reflected these broader concerns. It also reflected shifting notions about what kind of a museum the Concord Antiquarian Society hoped to establish. As the Society fully assumed control over Davis's collection, it also took on the challenge of organizing and cataloguing the objects he had acquired and promoting historical research. George Tolman served as the Secretary and would later write the first printed catalogue of the collection. It was Tolman who proposed in 1888 that the Society begin asking members to read papers and present research at their monthly meetings; perhaps unsurprisingly, he was selected to go first at the following meeting. The topics ranged from "Our Old Burying Grounds" to "The Way Our Great-Grandfathers Lived, " but all tended to focus on Concord's colonial history and the exploits of Minutemen during the American Revolution. As at many other historical societies, some members also explored their "antiquarian" interests by collecting Indigenous objects, which they employed to reinforce myths of a "vanishing Indian" in New England. 11The reorganization of the Society's rooms in the first decade of the twentieth century reflected the growing impulse to mythologize Concord's early history in print. In 1905, Tolman and others began rearranging the collection into period rooms, presenting an early example of colonial revival interpretation that predated the installations that were later popularized at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even the Thoreau collection was installed as a period room, inviting visitors to imagine themselves at home with his personal possessions. By 1907, the Society reported that "the rooms appeared to advantage in their new dress of appropriate paint and paper. "12 Along with Tolman's catalogue of the collection, published in 1911, these changes reflected the culmination of over two decades of work towards organizing the collection and fully comprehending what Davis had acquired. Over the following decades, the Concord Antiquarian Society played an active role in defining the colonial revival movement, which celebrated early American decorative arts and craftsmanship and expressed nostalgia for pre-industrial life. A leading photographer within the colonial revival movement, Wallace Nutting used the Concord Antiquarian Society as the backdrop of a series of photographs in 1912 (Fig. 3), which feature a woman posed in various rooms within the Reuben Brown House, reenacting everyday activities such as sewing, tending a fire, or winding a tall clock. Nutting's images capture the Society's participation in presenting pleasant stories about everyday life, simplicity, and virtue. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has demonstrated, these representations of white women's femininity contributed to the growing popularity of nostalgic myths about early American life as an "age of homespun. "13 Popular around New England, such approaches frequently erased the continued presence of Black and Indigenous communities and obscuring the region's economic dependence on enslaved and exploited labor around the world. Although the Society continued to steward the objects connected to Concord's Black history that Davis had acquired, the dominant narratives it promoted were increasingly about Concord's white residents. Fig. 3. —"A Divining Cup, " Concord Antiquarian House, Wallace Nutting, about 1912. Concord Museum Collection, Gift of Strawbery Banke Museum; 2022. 24. 1. Such nostalgia continued to inform the Society's presentation of early American history, even as it moved in 1930 to its current location on Cambridge Turnpike. The new building was made of fireproof brick—in response to concerns about fire safety—but with a floor plan intended to imitate the low ceilings and gradual expansion of an eighteenth century dwelling (Fig. 4). The design of the period rooms was led by Russell Kettell, who taught art and art history at the Middlesex School in Concord. Kettell was Vice President of the Society and the author of numerous books on early American furniture, including The Pine Furniture of Early New England (1929). Kettell was so committed to providing museum visitors with an immersive experience in the galleries that he carefully concealed a low-voltage electric light system in objects such as footstools, lanterns, and boxes. Both the lighting devices and the building's fireproof exterior reflected efforts to blend nostalgia for an early American past with modern technology. Fig. 4. —"Pine-Ceiled Room at Concord Antiquarian Society, " Edna C. Rogers, 1936. Concord Museum Collection; 2013. 7. 1. Women also shaped the Society's development through service as members, volunteers, and even curators in the early twentieth century. From the beginning, the Society welcomed women as members and invited them to regular meetings. In 1930, Hazel Cummin was hired as curator and paid an annual salary of 1, 250. 14 Cummin wrote the first handbook to the Society's collection in 1932, which expanded Tolman's 1911 catalogue to provide additional details about the arrangement of individual rooms within the new building and the objects on display. While her contributions to the Society were later overshadowed by the work of her colleague, the historian Allen French, she also published research in Antiques and other journals and was a recognized expert on early American decorative arts. Other Concord women worked as volunteers at the Society and later donated the dresses, hats, and shoes that had belonged to their own families to the collection, recognizing their own contributions to Concord history and ensuring that they were preserved. During the mid-twentieth century, many women also worked as town guides, promoting tourism in Concord and shaping the stories told about historic buildings, people, and events. By the 1930s, the Society's reflections on the early contributions of Cummings Davis had taken on a gentler tone. In the introduction to Cummin's Handbook (1932), Allen French credited Davis with collecting "long before the value of such things was recognized. "15 Cummin's assessment was similar, portraying him as a fairly naïve collector and arguing that "all unknown to himself, he had created there in his attic storeroom a sequence of Concord relics and household furnishings at once instinct with the flavor of the town's historic and literary past, and remarkably significant of the whole course of its social and artistic development. "16 On the one hand, both French and Cummin romanticized Davis's collection, reimagining it as an "attic storeroom" as accidental in its evolution as the ephemera in his ledger. Yet even as they acknowledged his efforts, they sought to distance themselves from his early presentation of Concord history, perhaps mindful of the previous generation's distaste for his "dirty" rooms. In the same tribute, French also characterized Davis as a "showman, " using language that directly echoed descriptions of P. T. Barnum and his American Museum. By contrasting Davis's individual efforts as a collector with the Society's newly modern institution, French echoed the views of many of his contemporaries, including the founders of larger museums, to distinguish their own serious, research-oriented mission from allegedly lowbrow popular entertainment. 17 The evolution of the Concord Antiquarian Society mirrored the transformations that had taken place in museums around the United States, while capturing how such dynamics could inform the study and presentation of local history. By featuring the photographs, ledgers, lighting devices, and other apparatus of early Concord Antiquarian Society history, "What Makes History" highlights the people involved in creating stories within a museum and the biases that have informed what objects were preserved and valued. Through additional historical interpretation and context, these objects offer tangible illustrations of the strategies of storytelling that would determine whose histories were told and whose were effaced. The second major section of "What Makes History" draws on the museum's institutional history to consider how we explore new questions today. Following the Concord Museum's major building expansion in 2018 and the reinstallation and reinterpretation of the permanent galleries in 2021, this exhibition marks an opportunity for reflection about the work of doing history in the twenty-first century. Featured collections—of fans, calling card cases, quilt blocks, pencils, and more—open up different stories about everyday life in New England and the kinds of objects that were prized by individual residents throughout the twentieth century. Compared to the relics of local history that were acquired by Cummings Davis, some of these objects may seem like surprising additions to the Society's later collections. Yet they also speak to the cosmopolitanism of Concord's elite residents and transformations in global trade and exchange during the early twentieth century, which occurred alongside efforts to preserve and even reenact early American history at the Society. These objects offer insight into the everyday lives of residents, the collections they acquired and prized, and the unexpected connections to people and places around the world, illuminating the interests of the individuals whose collections—much like "Mr. Davis's museum"—would find a home at the Concord Antiquarian Society. By featuring groupings of objects, "What Makes History" models processes of close looking to consider what we can still learn from examining collections and, more broadly, from the work that museums do today. The questions posed throughout the gallery—Who made this object? How did it come to the museum? What materials were used and reused in making it? —invite visitors to participate in looking closely and drawing their own conclusions. They are encouraged to draw comparisons, trace patterns, notice outliers, look inside, and add context. On leaving the gallery, final interactive questions ask, "What do you choose to keep? What would you add to the stories we tell? " This approach aims to involve visitors in methods of object-based learning. Much like the figures they encounter, they can become part of a community-oriented process of reconsidering what histories are recorded and told in Concord. Through additional interpretation in exhibition labels written by high school students in Kimberly Frederick's course on public history at Concord Academy, the gallery features numerous perspectives on these objects and incorporates new voices into the process of doing history. Some objects defy categorization and invite interdisciplinary thinking. Like the accidental archive preserved within the pages of Cummings Davis's ledger, a set of unfinished quilt blocks (Fig. 5) blurs the boundaries between text and object. Made around 1840, they offer a glimpse of a work in progress. Each block is composed of seven individual hexagons of fabric attached to a paper pattern, a technique known as English paper piecing. The paper used for the patterns was taken from a copybook, and we can still glimpse the repeated words of a student practicing her penmanship. These blocks were intended to be sewn together into a larger quilt and the paper pattern removed, but they were never finished. The attached paper patterns highlight the process used to create the patterns commonly seen in quilts from the mid-nineteenth century, but they also directly connect practices of sewing and household labor to the schools where a student might have used a copybook. The numerous potential interpretations—as textile, as writing—show how the process of reusing materials blurs categories between objects. Fig. 5. —Quilt piece, about 1840. Concord Museum Collection; 2006. 258. 33. Other collections map the connections between Concord and histories of global trade, colonialism, and consumerism. A set of calling card cases once belonged to Alice Stanwood Willoughby, who bequeathed her collection to the Concord Antiquarian Society in 1952. These cases were produced to hold the calling cards that recorded social visits among white women like Willoughby, who used them to maintain their local social networks. Willoughby was the daughter of Charles Clark Willoughby, an anthropologist and director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard. During his early career, he specialized in making marquetry furniture, using techniques similar to the ones seen on some of these card cases. It is possible that he passed on these interests to his daughter Alice and inspired this collection. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a special student and briefly worked at the Peabody Museum; she is listed as the artist of a model of a Wichita house, made in 1906, along with Samuel Guernsey, who constructed numerous other dioramas for the Peabody Museum. 18 She taught art at the Cambridge High and Latin School for decades, and it is likely that she especially valued the varied designs represented in this collection. These objects, in turn, also connected her to makers around the world. The cases incorporate varied materials such as mother-of-pearl, ivory, and tortoiseshell produced in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and their designs reflect the techniques practiced by artists in China, India, Russia, and