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THE DIME MUSEUM 24 Early Museum Shows Ethan Greenwood was a typical showman-entrepreneur of the early nineteenth century. In 1818 he abandoned a career in portrait painting. For the next twenty years, he owned and managed the New England Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts in Boston and two other museums in Portland and Providence . Much of his time was spent in purchasing items for the collections, arranging for taxidermists to mount fish and animals, advertising in the local press, and traveling from Boston to Maine and Rhode Island. The staples of all his museums were the wonders of nature, preserved or sometimes live, waxworks , and fine art, supplemented by occasional special attractions like the ‘‘Wonderful dwarf,’’ hired for a few weeks. Ethan Greenwood’s journal for June 1824 outlined his activities. Georgia Brady Barnhill, ‘‘ ‘Extracts from the Journals of Ethan A. Greenwood’: Portrait Painter and Museum Proprietor,’’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993): 166–67. June 1st., 1824. A Mermaid arrived here last week & I agreed to exhibit it. Busy setting up Shark. 2nd. Purchased some Indian Curiosities. 3rd. Bought four figures of an Italian $4.00. 5th. Bought four Busts of Voltaire, filling up jars of reptiles. . . . 7th. Artillery Election good run of business & in the eve a ‘Glorious House’ $342.75. Best day since the Museum began. 10th. Bought a young Shark. 12th. Preparing articles for Portland, closed exhibition of the Vampyre [of the Ocean (bought three weeks earlier for $150 in cash)]. 14th. Dexter with his hand cart moved the Linnean Coll. After the Museum we rallied 15 men and removed the Vampyre into the lower hall of the Museum, this was a heavy job & took nearly 2 hours. 18th. Got ready to go to Portland. . . . 19th. Went on board at daylight & arrived in Portland on the 20th . . . . Last Friday I bought the Egyptian Mummy together with the cases & c for $350.00. 23d. Got out bills for the Mummy exhibit. . . . 26th. Went on a boat to Peake Island, & got 2 jaw bones of a Whale 14 feet long, out in a violent storm, got wet, & at one time in great danger. Put one bone in Museum here, & the other on board for Boston. 27th. On board Sloop for Boston. Salem was one of the major seaports of the early republic; shipping generally , and especially the import-export trade with China and the East Indies, made it one of the wealthiest small cities in the country. On the Fourth of July Early Museum Shows 25 1838, Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded his impressions of his visit to temporary sideshows on Salem common. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne’s Lost Notebook, 1835–1841, ed. Barbara S. Mouffe (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), 66–69. A very hot, bright sunny day; town much thronged. Booths on the common, selling gingerbread &c. sugar-plums and confectionery, spruce-beer, lemonade. Spirits forbidden, but probably sold stealthily. On the top of one of the booths a monkey, with a tail two or three feet long. He is fastened by a cord, which, getting tangled with the flag over the booth, he takes hold and tries to free it. The object of much attention from the crowd, and played with by the boys, who toss up ginger bread to him which he nibbles and throws down again. He reciprocates notice of some kind or other, with all who notice him. A sort of gravity about him. A boy pulls his long tail, whereat he gives a slight squeak, and for the future elevates it as much as possible. Looking at the same booth by and bye, find that the poor monkey has been obliged to betake him self to the top of one of the wooden joists that stick up high above.—Boys going about with molasses candy, almost melted down in the sun.—Shows, a mammoth rat; a collection of pirates, murderers &c. in wax. Smell of cigars, from Spanish down to immense long nines, smoking among the crowd. Constables in considerable number, parading about with their staves, sometimes communing with each other, producing an effect by their presence without having to interfere actively. One or two old salts or others rather the worse for liquor; in general people very temperate. At evening the aspect of things rather more picturesque; some of the booth keepers knocking down the temporary structures, and putting the materials in wagons to carry away; other booths lighted up; and the lights gleaming through rents in the sail-cloth top. Customers rather riotous, yet funny, calling loudly and...

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