Downtown Museums Collaborate to Offer "Letters from Home: Boston Families Correspond"

The House Museum Alliance of Downtown Boston presents its spring 2012 tour series, "Letters from Home: Boston Families Correspond," featuring correspondence from Boston's five downtown house museums. For these special tours, each museum will draw on their rich collections of personal and business correspondence to illuminate life in the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries and exhibit materials rarely seen by the public.

The Paul Revere House, 19 North Square in Boston's Italian North End, is pleased to display three documents written and signed by the patriot. Copies and information about them will be provided by the Curator. A self-guided tour of the Revere House is included.  

The Otis House Museum, 141 Cambridge Street in Boston's Beacon Hill, will highlight correspondence between Harrison Gray Otis and his wife, Sally during the period 1797-1801. Also featured will be decorative arts from the Federal period related to the art of letter writing, such as an early 19^th century copying box, the equivalent of today's Xerox.

The Nichols House Museum, 55 Mount Vernon Street, Beacon Hill, will exhibit beautifully crafted letters and postcards used by members of the Nichols family to share their experiences with friends and relatives. Whether describing the Grand Tour of Europe, afternoon tea, elegant soirées or the suffragist movement, their correspondence reflected Gilded Age sensibilities.

The Prescott House - 55 Beacon Street - will provide a tour showing how the mundane correspondence of the Prescott family regarding the major 1845 renovation has provided a rich source of detail for interpreting and enlivening the house for the modern visitor.  The tour will give people a chance to listen in, through the text of some of these letters, and hear what setting up a household in mid-nineteenth century Beacon Hill was like.

The Gibson House Museum, at 137 Beacon Street in Boston's Back Bay, will show a range of 19^th century correspondence, including wedding and party invitations, calling cards, and other materials illustrating the social life of a Back Bay family in the late 1800s.

$20 per person. Ticket provides one admission to each house museum that may be used on any of the three Fridays.

Tickets may be purchased at the Gibson House Museum or the Nichols House Museum starting April 3, 2012.  

Online tickets may be purchased at www.thegibsonhouse.org