WORCESTER—Where can you see tea from the Boston Tea Party? Where is there a collection of Civil War cartoons that includes more than 600 items? Where do you go to find more than 500 billheads representative of what was printed between the 1780's and 1900 or about 50,000 issues of amateur newspapers or 350 miniature books? Where can you look at a collection of more than a thousand calling cards or about 10,000 maps or 350 lottery tickets from the mid-1750's to the late 19th century?
All this and more can be found at The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, “The Fort Knox of American history collecting.”
An independent research library founded in 1812 in Worcester, the library's collections document the life of America's people from the colonial era through the Civil War and Reconstruction.
“We have always collected the everyday, the mundane, the commonplace, not just important government documents or editions of books that shaped the country,” said Ellen S. Dunlap, president.
Collections focus on a variety of topics including dated books and dated pamphlets, broadsides, almanacs, miniature books, American institutions, theology and religion, literature, graphic arts, photographs, music, newspapers and periodicals.
“We are committed to the long-term preservation of these items,” Dunlap said. “You don’t know what’s authentic in the digital world so holding collections as original evidence is important. Things get changed in the world of Photoshop.”
The society was incorporated by act of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1812 in response to a petition from Isaiah Thomas and his colleagues that they might establish an organization to "encourage the collection and preservation of the Antiquities of our country, and of curious and valuable productions in Art and Nature [that] have a tendency to enlarge the sphere of human knowledge."
The research library is located across the street from The Goddard-Daniels House, a house that was constructed in 1905 and extensively reconstructed in 1915, which is now used by the society for administrative offices and program space.
“This place (for research) is incredibly generous with the help it offers people and the enthusiasm shown for people’s work,” Dunlap said.
The use of the library is free to researchers who are working on specific projects that require the use of the collections. Its catalog is online at http://catalog.mwa.org.