Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Deerfield Academy was founded in 1797 and a brick building, designed by Asher Benjamin, was built to house the school in 1799. The Academy later expanded and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association purchased the old school building in 1877. The building was renovated and opened in 1880 as the Memorial Hall Museum, displaying a collection of objects gathered by antiquarian George Sheldon. Memorial Hall continues today as a museum of Deerfield history and an adjacent building houses the libraries of the PVMA and Historic Deerfield.

The curiosities collection of the Springfield Museums, which goes back to 1859, was at first housed in City Hall and then in the City Library. It was later displayed in the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum‘s Hall of Ethnology. This collection soon grew so large that a seperate building was constructed in 1899. Originally established as the Springfield Ethnological and Natural History Museum, it is now the Springfield Science Museum.

The George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum is one of the four (soon to be five) Springfield Museums. The Springfield Museums Association traces its origins to the varied collections of the Springfield City Library Association, gathered in the nineteenth century. Money was raised to construct a seperate art museum building after the association was promised, in 1886, the vast collection of George Walter Vincent Smith and his Springfield-born wife, Belle Townsley Smith. A wealthy carriage manufacturer, Smith had settled in Springfield in 1871 and focused on collecting Asian decorative arts, American and Italian paintings, rugs and textiles. The museum, completed in 1895, was designed to resemble an Italian villa. The ashes of the Smiths are interred inside a wall on the second floor of the museum.

Opened in 1934, the Michele & Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts is one of the museums on the Springfield Museum Quadrangle. The Art Deco style building was built in response to the bequest of Dr. & Mrs. James Philip Gray, who left their estate for the “selection, purchase, preservation, and exhibition of the most valuable, meritorious, artistic, and high class oil paintings obtainable,” the construction of a building to house them. The museum collections include art by American and European artists. The museum was recently named after Michele & Donald D’Amour. Donald D’Amour, who has donated a significant sum to the museum, is chairman and CEO of Big Y supermarkets.

The Connecticut Valley Historical Society, based in Springfield, was incorporated in 1876. The Society originally held its meetings and housed its collections in the Springfield City Library, until a museum building, known as the William Pynchon Memorial Building, was constructed, next to the Springfield Science Museum, in 1927. The Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, designed by the Springfield architect Max Westoff, is a Colonial Revival structure, based on a the Colonial homes of the Connecticut River Valley. The main entrance of the museum, with its broken scroll pediment, is modeled on such homes as the Samuel Porter House in Hadley and the Josiah Dwight House, originally built in Springfield and later moved to Deerfield. The Historical Museum formally joined the Springfield Museums Association in 1948.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts began in 1870 with space in the Boston Athenaeum. In 1876, the museum moved to a Gothic building on Copley Square. In 1907, the museum began planning its next move to a new location on the Fenway, where an interconnected building complex would be constructed over several years. Designed by Guy Lowell, the first section of the Classical Revival structure to be completed was the one on Huntington Avenue (above), finished in 1909, which features a central Greek temple portico with two symmetrical wings on either side. The next section was the Robert Dawson Evans Wing on the Fenway (below), completed in 1915, which features a long Ionic colonnade. Between 1916 and 1925, the John Singer Sargent created the art for the central Rotunda and Colonnade. Various additions have been made to the museum over the years, including the Decorative Arts Wing in 1928, the Forsyth Wickes Addition in 1968, the George Robert White Wing in 1970, and the I. M. Pei-designed West Wing in 1981. Currently, the museum is undergoing a new renovation and expansion. (more…)