Sharing History: Historic New England Objects on the Move

Historic New England’s collections support exhibitions, publications, and research around the world, extending the reach of our historic sites and stories around the world. In the first post in a two-part series, we share how loans from our object collection helped tell powerful stories about queer history, childhood, and community from Boston to Los Angeles in 2025. In the second post, we’ll explore the many ways Historic New England’s archival holdings are used beyond our sites.

One of the best ways to make objects in the Historic New England collection accessible is through our loan program. Each year, we are approached by a wide range of institutions who want to use our museum objects or archival materials in their exhibitions. Last year, our museum objects traveled the short distance from the Haverhill Center for Preservation and Collections to the Old North Church in Boston’s North End and to the opposite coast to the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

The Old North Church’s exhibition space, Old North Illuminated, borrowed a number of objects for their ongoing exhibition Unearthing Childhood: 300 Years of North End Kids, open May 2025-December 2026. This exhibition explores experiences of childhood in Boston’s North End through the stories of children associated with Old North between 1720 until 1920. These stories highlight how childhood is impacted by differences in socioeconomics, gender, and race. Some of the other objects in the exhibition are on loan from Boston’s City Archaeology Program from digs conducted in the North End. The objects provided by Historic New England offer helpful examples of what intact versions of those objects might look like, bolstering Old North Illuminated’s interpretation. Last summer, the objects used in the exhibition were a doll and writing slate. When the exhibition reopens to the public in early April 2026, the exhibition will include another example of a porcelain doll and two toy soldiers.

The loan to the J. Paul Getty Museum coincided with its exhibition, Queer Lens: A History of Photography, put together by Curator of Photographs Paul Martineau and on display at the Getty Center from June 17-September 28, 2025. The more than three hundred works included in the exhibition featured both makers and subjects from the LGBTQ+ community to boost visibility for queer individuals who shaped art and culture through photography practices. Among these was a platinum print of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields taken around 1900 by Martha Usher Osgood at 148 Charles Street in Boston. The story of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields’ partnership is one we tell at the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine, though they were seldom at the house together and more often at the Boston home featured in this photograph. Queer Lens recognized their partnership as a prominent example of a “Boston Marriage,” a term historically used to describe the cohabitation of two unrelated women and provides an excellent example to visitors of queer domesticity and female partnership in the nineteenth century.

Written by Julia Foster, Registrar