Roberrt Booth, director and curator of the Manchester Historical Museum.
COVID brought countless challenges to local museums. But it also marked a shift in leadership at some key museums on Cape Ann, with new directors taking the administrative helm at the Essex Shipbuilding Museum, the Manchester Historical Museum, and the Schooner Adventure in Gloucester. It's brought a new sense of energy and a fresh perspective on the local museums. Let's get to know Stuart Siegel ...
ROBERT BOOTH stepped in as interim director of the Manchester Historical Museum in April after the museum’s then-director, Beth Welin, departed to manage the archives at Hammond Castle Museum.
Six months in, it’s hard not to feel a new hand at the helm of the Museum.
Bob, who became the permanent Director & Curator in May, was not unknown to the Museum’s board, well along in its effort to expand representation and find new stories in Manchester’s past.
Since 2019, Bob had been working on the MHM’s House History program, researching and writing in-depth reports on the early owners and occupants of the town’s houses. So far, he has completed more than 70 histories, giving him a deep insight into Manchester families and their community—both past and present.
Along the way, Booth also wrote The History of the Meeting Houses of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., a monograph about Manchester’s civic and religious life, 1645-1845, as a contribution from the Museum to Manchester’s 375th Anniversary celebration.
Directly after stepping in as interim director, Booth got to work assessing the MHM’s collections and the interpretation of its spaces, getting a handle on administration and fundraising, and looking to the topic of the summer exhibit. He gave the Museum’s spring lecture, on Manchester’s “wandering” houses, examining the early practice of moving entire homes from old sites to new. The practice was common because it saved money and time. It was also something of a community spectacle. And Booth showed how many homes in Manchester today actually enjoyed several previous lives in other neighborhoods before they were hauled away by teams of horses and men. The lecture felt fresh, and new.
Then, the major summer exhibit became the focus of Booth’s efforts. He set his sights on community life 250 years ago, with “Manchester 1772,” long before Gilded Age industrialists made Manchester-by-the-Sea a summer playground. Manchester of 1772 was a working-class town, without a harbor (it would be dredged in 1893), with some farming and a lot of seafaring. The 900-resident community centered its living on salt-cod fisheries—catching the large codfish on months’-long voyages to the banks off Nova Scotia, and, at home, processing and drying many tons of cod fillets to be sold to the shipping merchants of Salem and Marblehead, who would send it to far-off markets in Portugal, Spain, and the Caribbean.
It was a time, Booth said, “when cod was king.” He secured original fishermen’s gear and fish-yard equipment for the exhibit, commissioned the creation of period fish-flakes, and wrote brief essays on various aspects of domestic, religious, and work life of Manchester in 1772, installing them in illustrated panels designed by Melanie Andrews Action Graphics of Marblehead. He also brought in reenactors to depict 18th century life for the Festival By The Sea, and he produced two videos playing at the exhibit, one on farming methos, and one on the rediscovered site of Manchester’s 1760s cod fishyard.
“Manchester was a very small place in the 1600s and 1700s, with an interesting history in the 1600s and 1700s; but it really took off in the 19th century,” said Booth.
"I think there is no small place more interesting, in terms of colorful characters and surprising events, than little Manchester. It is a microcosm of the times—of feminism, the industrial revolution, abolition, Boston’s rise as a center of publishing, the arts, and theatre, and the advent of big money in America after the Civil War. It’s all here, and it’s all possible to interpret through our archives and collections as interesting adventures in the past.”
Booth is a strong “get” for the museum. He is a historian and writer who has published several books. Death of an Empire (St. Martin’s Press), about the struggle of Salem 1815-1830 to maintain dominance as a worldwide trading center, was a Boston Globe best-seller and named “Best Book of New England History” for 2012 by the New England Society of the City of New York.
He also wrote the 2015 non-fiction Mad For Glory about American nation-building and imperialism in the Pacific during the War of 1812, and The Women of Marblehead (2016), a history of that town’s sociology and economy, driven by women in the 19th century. Bob has also served as a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History on exhibits encompassing Black history and Women’s history.
