About The Oldest Historical Society In America
The 1st institution devoted to collecting, preserving, and publishing the sources of U.S. history
A historical society is an organization dedicated to preserving, studying, and sharing the history of a particular region, community, or subject area. They collect, maintain, and protect historical documents, artifacts, photographs, and other materials that tell the story of their focus area.
Massachusetts Historical Society, founded in 1791, is the oldest historical society in America. It is self-described as the oldest organization in the United States devoted to collecting materials for the study of American history. Harvard University defines it as the oldest historical society in North America. Boston Common Visitor Center recognizes it as the nation's oldest historical society.
The organization was established on 24 January 1791, when the Rev. Jeremy Belknap invited nine like-minded Bostonians to join him in creating what they would call simply, "The Historical Society". This modest beginning would eventually grow into one of America's most significant repositories of historical materials.
Jeremy Belknap, the society's founder, was a Congregationalist minister who had already established himself as a historian and writer. He envisioned the society as something more than just a collecting institution - as he envisioned it, the society would become a repository and a publisher collecting, preserving, and disseminating resources for the study of American history.
The founding members understood they were creating something unprecedented in the new nation, an organization specifically founded to collect, preserve, and document items of American history.
The society's initial collection came from the personal contributions of its founders. Jeremy Belknap and the nine other founding members donated family papers, books, and artifacts from their personal collections, immediately establishing the Society as a working institution.
This collaborative approach to building the collection would become a hallmark of the institution's growth over the centuries. Interestingly, the organization wasn't initially called the Massachusetts Historical Society.
The newly-elected recording secretary, Thomas Wallcut, reported how the founding members laid out a scheme for their new organization (it did not become the "Massachusetts Historical Society" until it was incorporated by the Commonwealth three years later), meaning it received its current name when it was officially incorporated in 1794.
The society quickly established itself as a serious scholarly institution. Its first manuscript was published in 1792, becoming the first historical society publication in the United States. Jeremy Belknap played a crucial role in promoting the society's mission during its early years, serving as its first corresponding secretary and working tirelessly to expand both its collections and its reach.
Before his death in 1798, through his own contributions and the gifts that he solicited, Jeremy Belknap had developed a substantial base for the Historical Society's extraordinary present-day collections. The society's building was constructed in 1899 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.
In 2016, the Boston Landmarks Commission designated it a Boston Landmark. The institution continues to fulfill Belknap's original vision, maintaining extraordinary collections that tell the story of America through millions of rare and unique documents, artifacts, and irreplaceable national treasures.
The Massachusetts Historical Society's significance extends far beyond its age. As the prototype for historical societies across America, it established the model for how such institutions should collect, preserve, and share historical materials. Its influence on American historical scholarship and public understanding of the past continues to this day, more than two centuries after Jeremy Belknap first gathered those nine friends in Boston to create what would become the nation's premier historical institution.