Seasonings: A Calendar of Culture

June 21 through September 14
In the Wallace Kane Gallery

Take a pinch of mud season and a sprinkle of April showers, add a handful of autumnal tints and mix in an icy blast of winter, then cook it all over the high heat of summer. That’s just a taste of what you’ll find in Seasonings, the Concord Museum’s newest exhibition.

Explore some of the nostalgic events, traditions, and rituals associated with each season in American culture through artifacts from the Museum’s rich and varied collection. Opening to the public on the first full day of summer, the exhibition begins by chronicling the season of summer breezes and patriotic celebrations.  Spring, autumn and winter are similarly explored through three centuries of artifacts that bring to mind a very 21st-century sense of time and place: back-to-school, the  bounty of local produce at farmstands, New England’s favorite snow sports, keeping warm, spring cleaning and turning over the garden. Free with Museum admission. Members Free. 

Learn More

A visit begins in the new "Why Concord?" history galleries where questions are posed and answers are sought - - all focused on Concord’s remarkable history from Native American settlement through the 20th century.

Visitors further explore answers in the surrounding period rooms and galleries where the Concord Museum's collection of American decorative arts illustrates three centuries of domestic life.
Special exhibitions in three Graham Gund-designed galleries change throughout the course of the year.
Visit "A Main Street Point of View," an ongoing exhibition featuring contemporary and history photographs of Concord's vibrant commercial district, and our new exhibition, "Seasonings," on display through September 14, 2008.

Why Concord?

Six galleries and an introductory film serve as the gateway for visitors to explore the Museum's collection and the community of Concord. Among the important assemblage of artifacts which tell the story of Concord's history are:

• Native American stone tools
• Puritan household goods
• Revolutionary War military stores such as powder horns, muskets and cannonballs
• The lantern hung in the church steeple on the night of Paul Revere's ride
• A relic of the original North Bridge
• Daniel Chester French's Minuteman statue
• Thoreau's bed, desk and chair from Walden Pond
• The furnishings of Emerson's Study
• Lyceum and Cattle Show notices
• A banjo clock manufactured on Concord's Milldam
• Manufactures and tools from West Concord's factories

Period Rooms

Rich with furnishings from Concord homes, the period rooms offer a glimpse into the domestic lives of men and women of Concord. Elizabeth Stillinger, in her book, "The Antiquers," said, "The Concord Museum has one of the most remarkable collections of its kind... providing a rare and permanent insight into the tastes and customs of one small town over a period of three centuries."

The Early 18th-Century Chamber - Arranged to suggest a portion of a principal room in the house of a prominent citizen of Concord, such as a minister or magistrate, a room like this 1720 chamber would be a semi-public space, where the owner would receive visitors frequently. The furniture, textiles, framed engravings, and expensive ceramics were all intended to convey to the visitor that the owner was a person of substance and learning, exactly the qualities a magistrate needed to command authority.

The Mid 18th-Century Chamber - The eighteenth-century popularity of tea-drinking as social ritual gave rise to the introduction of such specialized forms as the tea table and the ceramics, silver and other accessories needed to prepare and serve it. The mid 18th-century chamber examines this ritual of Concord’s social history, as well as looks at the new furniture storage forms such as the high chest, dressing table and desk which provided much-needed, compartmentalized storage in which textiles and clothing, grooming needs and business and personal papers were readily accessible.

The 19th-Century Chamber - The early nineteenth-century chamber represents the accumulation of household furnishings that probate inventories and other documentary evidence of the period suggest would be found in a Concord home. The furnishings range from the late Baroque style of the easy chair, long a symbol of eighteenth-century prosperity, to the wallpaper of a “most fashionable pattern,” representing the accelerating pace of change in 19th-century American manufacturing.

The 19th-Century Parlor, Set for Dining - Contemporary prints and paintings, inventories and surviving objects all provide details about domestic settings in the past. The formal characteristics of the Neoclassical taste - - a passion for symmetry, uniformity and order - - are echoed throughout the parlor, in the placing of vessels and utensils in a crescent on the table, in the "D" shape of the card tables, and again in the drapery swag motif which appears in the wallpaper and the fireplace surround.