A New Concord Museum Experience

By Erica Lome, PhD

Museums do not often get to reinvent themselves, but the Concord Museum seized this once-in-a-generation opportunity after renovating their main building and constructing a new Education Center in 2018. Years in the making, the curatorial team took advantage of over a dozen empty galleries and a world-class collection and embarked on a major project that would transform the Concord Museum and visitor experience. This August, that exciting and challenging process concluded with the opening of ten new permanent galleries.

The earliest phase of this project featured two new galleries: Concord: At the Center of Revolution, which introduces visitors to the history of Concord through ten iconic artifacts, and People of Musketaquid, which brings together the history and artistic traditions of Concord’s Indigenous community. Last year, the Museum opened three additional galleries centered on the revolutionary events of April 19, 1775.

The final phase of the New Museum Experience builds on these narratives while exploring new terrain. Taking advantage of every room, hallway, alcove, and ramp, these latest galleries provide a comprehensive glimpse into the everyday lives of Concord residents, some famous and others almost invisible, beginning with the town’s incorporation in 1635. These galleries also feature the finest and most significant objects from the Concord Museum’s collection and tell stories that are new, engaging, and inclusive.

Chest, 1690-1700. Concord Museum, Gift of Mrs. Selden A. Jacobs and Samuel D. Robbins; F128.

Like their fellow immigrants, the fourteen English families who came to Concord in 1635 aimed to create a society where they could worship and govern without oversight. A royal charter guaranteed that Massachusetts Bay colonists enjoy the same “liberties and immunities” as any English subject. Over the next 140 years, the people of Concord fiercely protected those liberties even when it was considered treasonous to do so. The new galleries explore this theme through multiple revolutions linked by the remarkable coincidence of their date: Concord’s participation in the ousting of the British Governor Edmund Andros on April 19, 1689; to the war for independence sparked in Concord on April 19, 1775; and when members of Concord’s Fifth Massachusetts Regiment marched to join the Civil War on April 19, 1861.

The pursuit of liberty in Concord did not always live up to the ideal. The Concord Museum’s new galleries recognize the town’s historic ties to the slave trade, as well as the violence and dispossession its English colonists inflicted on local Native communities. In the first gallery, a sword which descended in the Clark family of Concord and was worn by a militia officer in the 1600s tells parallel narratives: one of Massachusetts Bay Colony’s restoration of their charter-granted rights in 1689 and another of Native resistance in the wake of escalating disputes over land, resources, political authority, and spirituality in 1675. This sword may very well have been present for both.

Another gallery explores the issue of slavery in Concord, using maps, probate records, and other archival material to bring to life the experiences of the men, women, and children whom the law referred to as “servants for life.” By 1830, when the institution of slavery had ended in Massachusetts, Concord was home to 30 African American inhabitants, including the Garrison family. Jack Garrison (1768-1860) arrived in Concord in 1810, having fled enslavement in New Jersey. Two years later, he married Susan Robbins Middleton, who had grown up in Concord. Jack Garrison became a familiar sight around town and was gifted a walking stick at the age of 92 to honor his longevity. This walking stick, displayed in the gallery along with his portrait, acts as one entry point to explore the African American experience in Concord. Included here are artifacts associated with the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, established by Mary Merrick Brooks in 1830 to raise awareness and rally funds to support the abolition of slavery and immediate emancipation for enslaved people. Susan Garrison was a member of the Society and worked with her neighbors to make Concord into a hub of antislavery activism, attracting notable speakers like John Brown and Frederick Douglass.

Jack Garrison, carte-de-visite, 1866. Concord Museum, Gift of Mrs. Olive Brooks Banks; Pi1103.2.

The lives of two of Concord’s most prominent and influential intellectuals, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, feature prominently in these new galleries. In 1930, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association decided to move the furnishings of Emerson’s study to the Concord Museum so that people could visit it year round. The Museum’s new re-installation includes an interactive element, allowing visitors to learn more about the objects on display in his study and the people who visited Emerson in Concord. Nearby is a bust of Emerson made by Concord sculptor Daniel Chester French. Emerson sat for the young artist over 30 times and this is arguably the best portrait sculpture—the most detailed and lifelike—of the famous writer. Emerson’s face, as French recalled, beheld “an infinity of detail, the delicacy of which evinced the refinement of the soul that evolved it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson by Daniel Chester French, 1905. Concord Museum, Gift of William T. Loomis and Leslie Becker; 2013.11.

The Concord Museum has long been a site of pilgrimage for readers of Henry David Thoreau, and two new galleries celebrate his life and works as never before seen. In one, visitors stand in front of Thoreau’s desk and are immersed in a media presentation based on a series of quotes from his writing. An elegant text treatment of these quotes animates on individual screens and at times across all screens, surrounding visitors on all sides. Filled with texture and evocative imagery inspired by the natural, spiritual, and social world in which Thoreau was steeped, this presentation expresses his philosophy and viewpoint of a world in which boundaries between the individual and the universal are blurred.

Silver cream pot by Samuel Bartlett, Concord Museum, Gift of the Decorative Arts Fund, in memory of Ruth S. Kondon; S150.

Another gallery features the highlights from the Concord Museum’s collection of over 250 objects related to Henry David Thoreau, half of which came to the Museum, directly or indirectly, through a single source: Sophia Thoreau, the author’s sister. Guided prompts and interactive media accompany the visitor as they encounter artifacts Thoreau made or used himself, such as his flute. Thoreau once described his approach to playing this flute as “unpremeditated music,” improvising against his own echo while on the water. The flute is inscribed with the initials “JT,” which stands for John Thoreau, Henry’s brother, as well as “Henry D. Thoreau.” This flute originally belonged to John and was given to Henry before John’s untimely death in 1842. Another set of galleries explores daily life in Concord through objects drawn from the Museum’s collection. These objects provide insight into such people of the past as a silversmith plying his craft in a workshop on the Milldam, a Black yeoman farmer at work in his fields, a wealthy magistrate welcoming visitors to his parlor, or a family secretly preparing for rebellion on the eve of April 19, 1775. Taken together, these galleries showcase decorative arts made and sold in Concord and provide a glimpse into the homes of men and women who lived at both ends of the economic spectrum.

Flute, Concord Museum, Gift of Mr. Walton Ricketson and Miss Anna Ricketson; Th40.

Though the reinstallation of these galleries marks the completion of the New Museum Experience, the Concord Museum has many more stories to tell through temporary exhibitions, public programming, social media, and in its Education Center.

In the spirit of the Concord Museum’s founder Cummings E. Davis, who understood the power of objects to shape collective memories of the past and bring people into larger communities of historical belonging, these new galleries will educate and delight a new generation of museum visitors.

Erica Lome is the Peggy N. Gerry Curatorial Associate at the Concord Museum.