Museum History

Fruitlands Landscape

 

Technically speaking, Fruitlands refers to an experiment led by Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane which took place here in 1843. Today, the name also refers to a museum complex founded by Clara Endicott Sears in 1914. We have the firstShaker museum the largest archive of Harvard Shaker documents in the world. The Native American Gallery a significant collection of artifacts that honors the spiritual presence and cultural history of the first Americans. And, our Art Gallery contains 100 Hudson River School landscape paintings, and significantly, over 230 19th century vernacular portraits, the second largest collection in the country. Sears opened the Tea Room Restaurant in 1939, assembling it from 2 cottages and an old barn.

The Sears Summer Estate

 

Sears maintained a summer estate and “gentlemen’s farm” here along with the museum complex from 1914 to her death in 1960 at the age of 97. Just before her death her summer home, the Pergolas was demolished. She published about 12 books ranging from poetry, romantic novels, and historical research on her collections. She wrote popular songs for World War 1 and ran a cannery and food drying charitable enterprise which sent 2 tons of food to the troops in the trenches of France. In 1930 she set up the corporation Fruitlands Museum which continues her work in historic preservation. Ultimately Sears put together about 458 acres, but during the buildup for World War 2, Camp Devens was upgraded to Fort Devens, resulting in the government seizing by eminent domain, 258 acres in about 1939, land now incorporated in to the Oxbow Wildlife Refuge.

Ancient Glacial Landscape

 

The 210-acre museum property sits on 200 million year old bedrock metamorphosed during continental collisions related to the creation of the Pangean supercontinent. Sediments overlying the bedrock are glacial and post glacial deposits from the Wisconsin glaciation which ended around here about 12,000 years ago. Afterwards, the valley west of us was part of Glacial Lake Nashua, which drained in about 8 different events 6-8000 years ago leaving varved clays and deltaic sand and beach formations at various levels on the property.

Fruitlands Farmhouse

 

The Nashua River valley attracted Native American people for the last 11000 years. They invited the first colonists to the area in the late 1600s. The second generation of these people began ‘improving’ what is now the museum property when the second division lands of Lancaster were laid out in about 1700. These property lines are still visible on our site today. Several of these old Yankee farms survive on our site today, along with archaeological remains of others. In 1805-1818 entrepreneurs in Harvard built the Union Turnpike to link Harvard with Leominster, Obviously 1843 was an interesting year around here. Around that time Thoreau walked Prospect Hill and admired its view. Emerson visited Alcott here. And, Louisa May, then 10, would relate her experiences here in Little Women. Alcott’s experiment failed and initially he and his immediate family went to the Lovejoy’s at what is now the Willard archaeological site on our property. The railroad at the base of the hill started in 1847 and is still in use today.

Clara Endicott Sears

 

After Fruitlands, Joseph Palmer set up a farm called Freelands here as a wayward home for less fortunate members of society. In the late nineteenth century, a brickworks business existed for about a decade on the property, attracted by the railroad and easy access to glacial lake clays. Palmer’s heirs, along with the heirs of other local farming families, sold their lands to Sears when she assembled her estate between 1910-14.

Miss Sears was an early advocate for historic preservation. An imaginative author and poet, Sears looked out over the landscape at Fruitlands, at the time much more open than our tree filled view of today. She imagined the Nashua River valley and recalled the past people who looked upon and contemplated that same vista in the past. She had an interest in the spirituality of those past people. Our common experience of place links us together across time.