History of the Collection

Cummings Davis (1816-1896), the Museum's founding collector, moved to Concord, Massachusetts in July of 1850, a few months after the celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Davis was born in Brooklyn, New York, a descendant of one of the early settlers of Concord. In the 1820s, his family moved to Groton, Massachusetts, where Davis attended the Academy. By 1840, he was married and owned a house in Harvard, Massachusetts, where he worked as a tailor. After moving to Concord, Davis opened a refreshment saloon, first at the train depot and later in the center of town, selling pastries and newspapers.

By 1850, Concord already had a history of celebrating the past. The visit of the marquis de Lafayette in 1824, the fiftieth anniversary of the North Bridge Fight, and the 1836 bicentennial of the town's founding were all made occasions to reflect on the town's past, which was further monumentalized by the 1835 publication of Lemuel Shattuck's History of the Town of Concord. Davis lost no time initiating his own monument to Concord, a collection of mostly colonial artifacts with local histories. By 1860, he had enough of a collection to display to interested visitors.

On September 15 of that year, writer-naturalist Henry D. Thoreau recorded in his journal: "Looked at Mr. Davis's museum. Miss Lydia Hosmer (the surviving maiden lady) has given him some relics which belonged to her (the Hosmer) family." Thoreau visited Davis and his collection several times. Davis's collection began to attract more attention over the course of the 1870s; there were articles on him in the Boston newspapers, and his Revolutionary War relics were displayed in the dinner tent, which sat four thousand people, during the 1875 Centennial celebration in Concord.

Cummings E. Davis, 1875

Davis's interest was the historic old town, and his collection was perceived by his neighbors as an appropriate repository for relics. Collecting was nevertheless a personal undertaking for Cummings Davis. "Whatever belongs to the remote past," Davis is quoted as saying in an 1870 Boston Transcript article, "Has an unspeakable charm for me." In a poem about a tall clock in his collection, Davis invented a charming metaphor for historical association: "Yet, as in the Prophet's vision,/ Angels seem to come and go,/ So upon thy winged movements/ Float bright spirits to and fro;/ Spirits of the past, that whisper/ pleasant tales of long ago." He later used the last line on cards advertising his "antiquarian rooms" in the Concord courthouse.

In 1889, George Sheldon, the Deerfield antiquarian who founded the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, visited Davis and his collection. His subsequent reference to the visit adds the testimony of a kindred spirit to our picture of Davis: "Mr. Davis is a born collector. To him there is little else worth living for. He has put part of his life into every article in his house and every one is precious in his sight. He has done a great work. Very few can fully sympathize with him, I can fully." Within a few years of the Centennial, Davis, not yet sixty-five, began to find it increasingly difficult to care for himself and his relics. He was displaying his collection in rented rooms in the old courthouse in the center of town, owned at the time by the Middlesex Insurance Company.

In 1881, a group of thirty Concordians headed by John Shepard Keyes (1821-1910) offered to pay to rent a larger room at the courthouse, at a cost of about $150 a year, "for the purpose of securing a better place for the arrangement and exhibition of the valuable collection of Mr. C.E. Davis." That effort culminated in 1886 with the transfer of the collection to the newly formed Concord Antiquarian Society. Davis's health continued to fail and in 1893 he was committed to the asylum at Danvers, where he died at eighty.

No complete count of the Davis collection was made when it was transferred to the Society, but it comprised about two thousand objects (most of which are still in the collection) which the Society insured for $2,500. In 1887, the Society bought the house that had belonged to saddler Reuben Brown to display the collection and to house the collector. The initial arrangement of the collection was made by George Tolman (1836-1909), Secretary of the Society and one of the charter members, and by Cummings Davis. No significant change was made to the installation between 1887 and 1890, when Alfred Hosmer photographed the house.

Hosmer's photographs show Davis's collection in an achronic arrangement with little reference to function. Photographs taken by Wallace Nutting in 1912 document a major reinstallation of the collection undertaken in 1907. The 1907 installation organized the material into period room groupings, an early essay in the idiom. Period room settings were retained and augmented with salvaged interior woodwork when the Society built a new brick building for the collection just up the Lexington road from the Reuben Brown house in 1930.

The new building was designed by architect Harry Little under the direction of historian Allen French. The guiding genius of the new installation was Russell Kettell, an avid collector and author of two influential publications, Pine Furniture of Early New England (1929) and Early American Rooms (1936). The Antiquarian House, as it came to be known, "our jewel," as Allen French called it, was cared for over the next thirty years first by Hazel Cummin, who wrote a number of articles on the collection, and then by Mrs. Howard W. Kent, the redoubtable "Mrs. Kent" of living memory.

The Concord Antiquarian Society at the Reuben Brown House

Since the 1980s the Museum has renewed the effort to collect Concord material actively aided in part by the aptly named collectors' group, The Cummings Davis Society.