FAXON: RELICS OF PEALE's MUSEUM. 121 



type was in the Peale Museum ; and that one half of the Peale Museum 

 came to the Boston Museum. 



It is generally believed that little was added to the Boston Museum 

 collection of birds after the accession of the Peale collection in 1S50. 

 It is equally probable that the nucleus of the Boston Museum collec- 

 tion antedating ISoO was, very slight and unimportant. At least four 

 primitive shows of the early nineteenth or late eighteenth centuries 

 were the springs which fed the first exhibition of the Boston Museum 

 in 1S41. Oldest of these was the Columbian Museum, a collection 

 first exhibited in the American Coffee-House in State Street, Boston, 

 in 1791, by Daniel Bowen.^ Removed afterward to the corner of 

 Bromfield and Tremont Streets, where in 1795 it assumed the name 

 of the Columbian Museum, it was destroyed by fii-e in 1803, but was 

 afterward revived at the corner of Milk and Oliver Street, and in 1806 

 the exhibition, under the management of Bowen and ^Y. M. S. Doyle, 

 was moved to a new five-storey building on Tremont Street, near King's 

 Chapel; this building again was burned in 1807 and rebuilt as the 

 "Columbian Hall" during the same year. The Columbian Museum 

 collections were sold Jan. 1, 1825, to the proprietors of the New 

 England Museum for about $5000. 



Woods's Boston Museum, also known as the ^Market Museum, was 

 opened by Philip Woods in 1804 in Market (Faneuil Hall) Square, 

 Boston. This museum, like the Columbian, was sold at auction in 

 1822 to the proprietors of the New England ^Museum. 



The New England Museum, E. A. Greenwood, manager, was 

 chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature and opened July 4, 1818, 

 in the block of buildings on Court Street, Boston, occupying the space 

 between Brattle Street and Cornhill. It commenced with the col- 

 lection of Edward Savage called the New York Museum, which was 

 opened in 1812 in Boylston Hall, over the Boylston Market. J. Mix's 

 New Haven Museum was added in 1821, and, as we have seen above, 

 Woods's or the Market in 1822, and the Columbian in 1825. In 1839 

 Moses Kimball became the proprietor of the New England Museum, 

 and in 1841 it passed into the Boston Museum, located at first on the 

 corner of Tremont and Bromfield Streets, afterward, in 1846, further 

 down Tremont toward Court Street. In 1850 Mr. Kimball bought 

 one half of the collections of the Peale or Philadelphia Museum, the 



1 For facts relating to the old museums of Boston, the reader is referred to Old 

 Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston, p. 41, 42, 132. By Samuel Adams 

 Drake. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1873. Woods' Boston ISIuseum. 

 By Arthur W. Brayley.< T/ie Bosionian. 2, No. 2, May, 1895, p. 125-130. Boston 

 Museum: The Passing of an Historic Playhouse. By John Bouve Clapp. < Boston 

 Evening Transcript. April 25, June 13, 1903. 



