The Nichols House Museum
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| 55 Mount Vernon Street Boston, MA |
The Nichols House
Museum is a fascinating historic house museum to visit for several reasons;
beautiful architectural design elements, a diverse art collection, an
accomplished and significant owner, and a place in the pages of Boston’s
history. The four-story townhouse was designed by Charles Bulfinch and constructed
by Jonathan Mason in 1804, making it one of the earliest Beacon Hill
structures. It was purchased in 1885 by Dr. Arthur Nichols for his family and
in 1935 ownership was passed on to his eldest daughter, Rose Standish Nichols,
who was a noted landscape architect, writer and suffragist. In 1961, shortly
after Rose’s death, the house became open to the public “as an historic house
museum reflecting the domestic life of a typical family of Beacon Hill at the
turn of the last century.”[1]
Since then, as specified in Rose’s will, the house has remained open for public
viewing, is a contributing resource to the Beacon Hill Historic District, and
was listed in 1966 as a National Historical Landmark.[2]
The house museum’s collection includes fine 17th
to 19th century furniture, art, tapestries, sculpture, and other
pieces of decorative art from both America and abroad.[3]
Everything in the museum’s collection was owned and collected by the Nichols
family, including sculptures by their uncle Augustus Saint-Gaudens.[4]
The mission of the Nichols House
Museum states, “To preserve and interpret the 1804 townhouse that was from 1885
until 1960 the home of Rose Standish Nichols, landscape gardener, suffragist
and pacifist. The house was built by Jonathan Mason and is attributed to
Charles Bulfinch. The museum educates visitors by providing a unique glimpse
into the domestic life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on Boston's
historic Beacon Hill.”[5]
Unlike many house museums in
Boston and its surrounding areas, the Nichols House Museum is open year round,
though with a limited schedule during the winter months. As a visitor, you tour
the house accompanied by a docent and view the world early 20th
century Beacon Hill residents, or “Proper Bostonians”, lived. True to their
mission, the docents aim to provide their visitors with a truly unique glimpse into
this historic life through their tours. You
are shown through five exhibit rooms that have been made open to the public and
curated with the original belongings and art collection of the Nichols family. Each
room is beautifully curated and the docents are wonderful guides and quite knowledgeable
about the house and its history.
The museum also provides basic information about the history of the museum
and access to their online database of collection images, archival finding aids,
and an online catalog of Rose’s book collection on their website. Their collections
management system, PastPerfect, is made publically available online to help
further educate those interested in learning about specific pieces in the
collection. Upon opening PastPerfect the user is brought to a browsing page labeled
“random images”. They have also provided users with three different search
capabilities to help users locate specific collection objects and their
corresponding tombstone metadata; there is an advanced search function, a
keyword search, and a “Click & Search” function.
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| Random Images in PastPerferct |
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| Advanced Search |
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| Keyword Search |
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| Click & Search |
For a small house museum, their
online system and amount of collection images available to view seems fairly
robust though lacking in standardized metadata and proper descriptive titles
for collection objects. For example, a drawing by M. Taylor Greer is simply
titled “drawing”, a title that does not really help the user distinguish from
one drawing to another in their search.
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| Example of collection object record in PastPerfect |
The museum website also provides
access to the finding aids for the archival collections that are owned by the
museum. There are five collections all together and by clicking on the title of
the collection the user is provided with a PDF of the finding aid. Three out of
the five collections are made up of historical photographs, one is the Nichols
family papers, and the last is Rose’s postcard collection. Eventually, I would
love to see the Nichols house digitize the photograph and postcard collections
and make them visible on their PastPerfect web-platform.
In addition to collections
images and archival finding aids the museum has also provided a link to Rose’s
book collection, known as her “Legacy Library”. They use the online platform
called LibraryThing which is “an online service to help people catalog their
books easily.”[6] “Legacy
libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing
members from the Legacy Libraries group.”[7]
According to the Rose Standish Nichols member page on LibraryThing, her Legacy
Library has been in place since 2012 and claims to be the complete catalog of
Rose’s book collection which is housed inside the Nichols House Museum.
On a whole I believe the Nichols
House Museum does an excellent job fulfilling their mission and educating both
the visitors to the house and those who are curious to know about the
collection and museum archives online. I am incredibly impressed with this
small house museum’s presence online and believe they have done an excellent job
making their collections visible to the wider public, not just those who are
able to physically able to visit this incredible house museum.
[1] “A Brief
History of the Museum,” copyright 2010-2016 Nichols House Museum, http://www.nicholshousemuseum.org/.
[2] “History
of the Nichols House Museum,” copyright 2010-2016 Nichols House Museum, http://www.nicholshousemuseum.org/.
[3] “A Brief
History of the Museum,” copyright 2010-2016 Nichols House Museum, http://www.nicholshousemuseum.org/.
[4] Andrew
Doerfler, “For these 11 residencies, home is where there history is,” The Boston Globe, October 21, 2016, N,
11.
[5] “Welcome
to The Nichols House Museum,” copyright 2010-2016 Nichols House Museum, http://www.nicholshousemuseum.org/.
[7] “Member:
Rose Standish Nichols,” accessed March 26, 2015, http://www.librarything.com/profile/RoseStandishNichols.
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