137 Beacon Street
Boston, MA, USA

Gibson House Museum

The Gibson House Museum is an historic house museum located at 137 Beacon Street in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It preserves the 1860 Victorian rowhouse occupied by three generations of the Gibson family. The house was one of the first to be built in Back Bay, and has an unparalleled state of preservation that includes wallpaper, textiles, furnishings, and family artifacts and collections. Both the public and service areas of the house exhibit a high degree of preservation, and are viewable on tours. The property was designated a Boston Landmark in 1992 by the Boston Landmarks Commission and a National Historic Landmark in 2001.


History

The widowed Catherine Hammond Gibson purchased the newly filled in land for $3,696 in 1859 in order to move away from Beacon Hill. Edward Clarke Cabot designed the building which was finished by 1860 in the Italian Renaissance style with an exterior of brownstone and red brick. She passed it on to her son Charles Hammond Gibson.

Charles married Rosamond Warren in 1871 and brought her to live at number 137. Rosamond was from a very distinguished Boston family and after Catherine's death in 1888 redecorated the house with Japanese wallpapers.

After Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., Catherine Hammond Gibson's grandson, died in 1954, the house became a museum in 1957, and in 2001 was declared a National Historic Landmark. The Gibson House's landmark status is due to its claim that it is the only Victorian era row house in Boston's Back Bay to maintain the integral relationship between the exterior architectural shell and the original interior plan, with its accompanying decorative schemes. Its interior is a composite of family furnishings and pieces added to make it more complete.

Museum

The museum hosts public tours and programming including lectures and receptions.

In 2013, Simple Machine Theatre staged a production of The Turn of the Screw on the Museum's Grand Staircase and front hall before an audience seated in the entrance.

To commemorate Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr.'s reputation as a Prohibition-era party host, the Museum hosts an annual Repeal Day Celebration fundraiser, featuring period cocktails.

In film

The 1984 Merchant/Ivory film The Bostonians contains scenes filmed in Rosamund Warren Gibson's bedroom, in the red study, and on the landing at the top of the grand staircase.

A 2018 promotional film for Boston Ballet's production of The Nutcracker features scenes of Clara in the Museum's Music Room and on the Grand Staircase.

In 2018 director Greta Gerwig filmed scenes in the Museum for Little Women. The Museum served as the boarding house residence of Jo March, while the Museum library was depicted as the office of Jo March's publisher.

National Register of Historic Places - Gibson House Museum

Statement of Significance:

The Gibson House is nationally significant as a rare and possibly unique surviving example of an intact Victorian row house, which serves as a record of urban American domestic life during the decades spanning the Civil War and the First World War. Remarkably preserved, its interior survives as a record of upper-middleclass life from the period of the Gibson family's tenure in the house. Its original interior decorations from the years 1860-1916, along with its collections of family furniture, books, rugs, draperies, paintings, prints, porcelain, decorative objects and utilitarian domestic items, are an important resource for understanding how urban upper-middle-class American households lived in the Victorian era. The importance of the house extends to its architectural interiors, which represent the technological advances being made in row houses at the time. The Gibson House contains elements in its exterior and interior design which were innovative and distinctive for the period.

Three generations of the Gibson family resided at the Gibson House from 1860 to 1954. The house functioned in much the same way throughout the family's tenure, with only minor changes in the use of some rooms. The Gibson House is the legacy of the farsighted vision of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., the grandson of the original owner. As early as the 1930's Gibson sought to preserve his family home as a Victorian relic and a shrine to his literary works.

The house opened as a museum in 1957, three years after Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., died. Presently four of the six floors (basement and first to third floors) at the Gibson House are open to the public by guided tour. The Gibson House offers visitors a rare look into the daily lives of a typical, upper middle-class household in urban Victorian America. As intended by Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr., these floors comprise the essence of the Gibson House Museum. It is noteworthy for its remarkable state of preservation, as well as for having both the family areas and the service areas of the house preserved and open for viewing. The fourth floor has a rental apartment and the museum office. The fifth floor is currently occupied by resident guides.

Photo by Ed Gordon, 2000