The Blog of Boston Children's Museum
On Boston Children’s Museums’s opening day in July 1913, Delia Griffin began her work as Museum Curator. Miss Griffin wasted no time in creating exceptional experiences for the museum’s visitors, bolstering incredible growth during her time as curator. In honor of Women’s History Month, we are spotlighting the life and work of the incredible Miss Griffin, a woman to whom Boston Children’s Museum owes so much of its history.
The Collections and Archives team may be working remotely these days, but collections care doesn’t stop for a pandemic. Caring for and preserving the diverse array of historical materials at the Museum is a big job and an ongoing task as part of the Museum’s stewardship responsibilities. To help in these efforts, we recruited our team mascot, Hans, to share some of these tasks and explain why they are a priority in our work. Our staff is helping to oversee Hans’s work from afar…
In August of 1918, the first cases of the Spanish flu hit Boston. The Globe reported last week in an interview with Jared Rhoades that museums and schools closed that same month. “They closed the MFA, the Boston Public Library, schools, bars, barber shops, theaters,” Rhoads, the debate program director at the Coolidge Foundation, said. “You name it, it was closed down.”
Boston Children’s Museum, however, remained open.
All objects have stories: of their origin, where they have been, and what they mean to people. Objects can remind us of happier times. They can bring back memories of vacations, loved ones, and home.
Boston Children’s Museum has a collection of late-nineteenth century scrapbooks that range in size, shape, and genre. The scrapbooks have brittle paper, many small parts, and many parts glued in. This can make them difficult to use in the Museum in programs or exhibits, so we worked with professionals at Digital Commonwealth and Simmons University to digitize them so they can be shared and experienced online.
From the 1930s to 2010, the Kit Department at Boston Children’s Museum created and circulated kits covering hundreds of different subjects to surrounding schools.
Sarah Yasuda is the summer Elvira Growdon Intern for Collections and Archives Management. A current student at Simmons University, Sarah is pursuing her Masters in Library and Information Sciences, with…
On the night of October 19, 1942, smoke poured out of Boston Children’s Museum. The 2-alarm fire blazed while Jamaica Plain firefighters sought to extinguish it, and neighborhood children stood…
The Power of Play 