FAXON: RELICS OF PEALE’S MUSEUM. 12? 
type was in the Peale Museum; and that one half of the Peale Museum 
eame 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 1850. 
It is equally probable that the nucleus of the Boston Museum collec- 
tion antedating 1850 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 1841. 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 fire 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 W. M.S. Doyle, 
was moved toa 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, 
m 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 
ene half of the collections of the Peale or Philadelphia Museum, the 
‘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 Museum. 
3y Arthur W. Brayley.< The Bostonian, 2, No. 2, May, 1895, p. 125-130. Boston 
Museum : The Passing of an Historic Playhouse. By John Bouvé Clapp. < Boston 
Mvening Transcript, April 25, June 13, 1903. 
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