Concord Museum

The Concord Museum is a great place to start any visit to the historic town of Concord, Massachusetts. The Museum, founded in 1886, serves as a center of learning and cultural enjoyment for the thousands of visitors touring Concord each year, as well as for area residents of all ages.

The Concord Museum collection began around 1850 and was exhibited before the Civil War; only a handful of Americana collections can claim to be as old or as remarkably well-documented.

The Concord Museum collection is a distinguished one containing numerous examples of 17th, 18th, and 19th-century decorative arts -- case furniture, tables, seating furniture, clocks, looking glasses, textiles, ceramics, and metalware -- all with histories linking them to first owners in Concord. The collection has been recognized for its national significance by curators, historians and educators for more than a century

Highlights of the Museum's renowned collection include

The "one, if by land, and two, if by sea" lantern, immortalized by Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride.
Artifacts from the American Revolution, including powder horns, muskets, cannonballs and fifes
The world's largest collection of Thoreau possessions, including furnishings from his cabin at Walden Pond
The contents of Ralph Waldo Emerson's study where he wrote his influential essays