Boston Museum (theatre)

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The Boston Museum (1841–1903), also called the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, was a mix of theatre, wax museum, natural history museum, zoo, and art museum in 19th‑century Boston, Massachusetts. It was started by Moses Kimball in 1841. The collection included items from Ethan Allen Greenwood’s former New England Museum, wax figure tableaux, live animals, and artworks by artists such as John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Benjamin West, and Thomas Badger. Early live shows featured acts like music on glass bells and birch-bark whistling. Theatrical performances began in 1843. Notable performers over the years included Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth, Madge Lessing, Richard Mansfield, E. H. Sothern, Mary Ann Vincent, and William Warren.

An 1850 advertisement boasted that the museum was the largest and most valuable in the United States, with seven different museums and additions from Peale’s Philadelphia Museum. It claimed a collection of more than half a million items—the greatest in America at the time—plus a new hall of wax statuary, a vast collection of birds, beasts, fish, insects and reptiles, paintings, engravings and statuary, Egyptian mummies, Peruvian mummies, the duck-billed platypus, the Fejee Mermaid, elephants, and ourang-outangs.

During the Civil War, the museum ran a recruiting office for Company D of the 22nd Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry in 1861.

Architects Hammatt Billings designed the original building at 18 Tremont Street. In 1846, Hammatt and J. E. Billings designed a second building at 28 Tremont Street, next to the Massachusetts Historical Society and near King’s Chapel Burying Ground. The 1846 interior featured decoration by Ignaz Gaugengigl. The Tremont Street building was a granite structure in a Venetian style, with three long balconies along the front. The first floor housed five stores and the Museum entrance. Above, the three-story front held a grand Corinthian Hall containing the collection. The galleries were supported by twenty columns, and a wide staircase led to the rear Exhibition Hall, which could hold nearly two thousand people.