Our First Archives Crawl

The Special Collections Department hosted its first Archives Crawl in collaboration with our colleagues from other area institutions on Wednesday, September 11, with an inaugural theme of Boston’s education history. We had so much fun chatting with colleagues, folks from other agencies, and public patrons who stopped in for a visit!

On display in the reading room were collection materials spanning over 200 years of Massachusetts history:

• An 1800 grammar school primer
• Early 19th century broadsides of school rules and regulations
• 1851 image and description of the Abiel Smith School, the first school in the nation founded for Black students (which you can still visit at the Museum of African American History!)
• Photographs and scrapbooks from the Community Music Center of Boston Collection
• A Massachusetts education timeline created by Jessica Shrey, State Library Legal Research Reference Librarian
• And more!

Pictured to the right is the title page of one of the displayed items -  A Short but Comprehensive Grammar, published in Charlestown, 1800.

Thank you to everyone who came in for our first Archives Crawl open house - we hope to make it an annual event with changing themes, so stay tuned! While some of the other institutions’ open house events have passed, be sure to check out the ongoing exhibits on the Archives Crawl flyer below!

 
Alyssa Persson
Special Collections Processing Archivist