Children's Museum - 1950s, and Miss Miriam Dickey

This entry is a two-fer, a short article and an obituary. Newcomers to Jamaica Plain all learn that the Children's Museum was once housed across from Jamaica Pond, but they can have little idea of what the Museum was actually like. We are all probably the same when it comes to the buildings still standing that once contained carriage factories. Unless you were there, it's difficult to imagine the day-to-day goings-on of the carpenters, blacksmiths and leather workers. In this case, I doubt many residents today know that the Children's Museum showed movies for children, or that children came from around the city for regular programs. The Museum was more than glass cases and stuffed animals - it was an active community with a caring staff.

The mention of the Bird Club made me think of Miss Dickey, who was a fixture at the Museum for many years. She was in charge of education programs at the Museum, and led the weekly bird walks over decades. I found the obituary below in a usenet group, and it came without attribution. She was even more busy than I remembered, and lived an active life, dying in her Nineties in 2002. She inspired generations of children at the Museum and around the city, and deserves to be remembered as much as any Curtis or Greenough or Weld.


Jamaica Plain Citizen January 31, 1952


Peck's Bad Boy At Children's Museum Feb. 2


All indications are that young people find "Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus" a very entertaining motion picture. That is why The Children's Museum in Jamaica Plain has scheduled it once more - this time on Saturday, February 2d at 2:30 p.m. Admission is free but limited to those in grade three and above.

At Story Hour this week, it will be a Hans Anderson fairy tale - "The Tinder Box" - that Miss Ruth Green will tell to her little listeners of first and second grade. The stories are always made more vivid by use of objects from the Museum's collection. The boys and girls look forward to the handwork which they may take home afterwards. This program begins at 2:30.

Museum Bird Club members are among those who go on the regular two-hour Saturday Morning Nature Walk. Sometimes they have the thrill of adding a new bird to their list. Anyone of any age is welcome to join the Museum leader at Centre and Eliot streets, Jamaica Plain, at 8:00 a.m.

As a result of the Game-Making Contest, five new Museum Games will be published on February 2d. The names of the winning game-makers are:

James Boyle, Dorchester, Carolyn Glennon, Jamaica Plain, Francis McCusker, Jamaica Plain, Robert O'Connell, Jamaica Plain, and Susam Parmalee, Roslindale.



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In 1969, when Miss Miriam Dickey pulled into the South End, Boston,
Massachusetts, in a shocking yellow hearse called the Plantmobile, she had her work cut out for her.Her mission was to lead a flower walk for kids, but nothing was blossoming on Shawmut Avenue. She eventually found dandelions growing in a vacant lot.

"It's only a weed if it's growing where it's not supposed to," she said. "In the city, it's a flower."Miss Dickey, 94, a teacher and naturalist, who was director of education at the Boston Children's Museum, died May 23, 2002, in Charlwell HouseNursing Home in Norwood, Massachusetts.

In the late 1960s, she and her staff in the Plantmobile, part of the city of Boston's Summerthing program, brought nearly 18,000 plants and trees to neighborhoods, where they were sold at cost - about a nickel a flower - as part of an effort to spruce up the city.The Plantmobile's most popular program was Miss Dickey's wildflower walks for city kids.

One morning in 1969, she led 20 fidgety 4- to 7-year-olds around the South End . . . and there wasn't even a dandelion to be found. But she hit paydirt peeking through the mesh of a yellow fence: a pale magenta plant called a ladies' thumb.She patiently pointed out the "thumb print" on the green leaf to the hooting and hollering kids. Then she plucked a small green plant and distributed its tiny green seeds.

"Does it taste good?" she asked one 5-year-old.

"Oh, it's hot," said the youngster.

That's how Miss Dickey introduced the youngsters to the pepper plant.

Born in Medford, she graduated from Wheaton College in 1932. Soon after graduation, she joined the education department at the Children's Museum. She became head of the department in 1941. At the museum, which was then located overlooking Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain, she was constantly lobbying to upgrade its natural history exhibits of skunks and woodchucks.

"Traditions have to be brought up to date for young space cadets already
dreaming of the 25th century." she said.

But she had both feet firmly planted on the ground.

"For many," she said, "the wonders of nature are limited to what can grow, crawl or fly in a city backyard."

For 27 years, Miss Dickey ran a summer day camp for kids. She also taught natural history classes in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Roxbury, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

"She knew everything about all the birds and plants," said a former student, Frederick T. Atwood, a naturalist and nature photographer who teaches at Flint Hill School in Oakton, Virginia. Atwood, who is now in his mid-40s, took her classes at the Children's Museum when he was 8 years old. He said she cultivated his interest in birds into "a passionate fascination and curiosity with everything about nature.

"She took us to the same places every week: Arnold Arboretum and Jamaica Pond," he said. "She was always enthusiastic and interested in everything. If you brought something to her, she'd gush about it, even if she'd seen it a hundred times."

Miss Dickey continued to teach natural history to preschool children as a volunteer for the Visiting Nurses Center in Dedham, Massachusetts, until her retirement in 1997, when she was 90. The following year, she was inducted into the Massachusetts Hall of Fame of Science Educators.

Children's Museum At The Perkins House - II

This is another follow-up article, this time looking back at the Children's Museum five years after the initial entry. Reading about the collection, I have to wonder what happened to it all. The only item that sounds familiar to me is the narwhal's tusk. I'm pretty sure I can remember it sitting on a wall, perhaps over a doorway. Does the organization still have any of it, or did they dump it all? It's hard for me to imagine that boxes still exist filled with musty dolls, stuffed animals and mineral collections. The powers that be would have had no interest in such things when they "improved" the museum years later.



Boston Daily Globe Mar 2, 1919


This Museum The Children's Own. Started a Few Years Ago in One Room at Jamaica Pond, It Now Fills a Whole Building - Learning Natural Science Here Becomes Play - About 65,000 Visitors a Year.


The camouflage used in the recent world's war was astonishing to most people, yet it has been used for many centuries by animals. Many of the school children of Boston have learned this from visits to the Children's Museum of Boston, a toy institution in Olmstead Park, on the shores of Jamaica Pond, in Jamaica Plain.

The Children's Museum was established in 1914 to educate the children of Boston and vicinity in the natural sciences, and to promote their love of nature and their interest in science. It is kept going by contributions of money and exhibits given by friends of the children and has grown in five years from one room in a park department building to include the whole building of six rooms and soon must find more room for its rapidly increasing exhibits.

Miss Delia J. Griffin is the director of the delightful educational house for children and the Board of Directors is made up of teachers, professional men and scientists. It is a matter of the greatest pride that practically all of the exhibits have been given or loaned by museums and private individuals, and that eminent geologists, botanists and natural historians have volunteered their services to give lectures to the children on subjects on which they are recognized authorities.

While the museum is more generally used by the children living nearby, an effort is made to attract the young people from all over the city. To get there from the Park-st Subway take a South Huntington-av car to Perkins st and then walk west to Olmstead Park. From the Dudley-st Elevated take a Jamaica Plain car to Moraine st and walk west.

Day after day children throng the Museum and on Saturdays and in vacation time there is standing room only and very little of that.

The lower floor of the building is given over to an exhibit of natural history, and there are cases after cases of well-grouped and placarded prehistoric animals, animals of more modern age, shells, sea corals, birds and minerals.

[description of insect collection]

The Museum Game is an interesting mystery, and one started in the Museum very recently. It is played for an hour every Tuesday and Friday and many children flock to the museum just for this. Each child is given a card, each one different, but one of which reads as follows: "The ______ is a furred animal with a bill like a duck and has webbed feet. Find it." The child takes the card and walks about the cases until she or he has discovered the animal; when it is discovered, the delight of the child is very obvious.

On the lower floor are two flower tables which bare flowers or twigs or evergreens, according to the season. Just now junipers, cedars, pine, spruce and evergreens of all kinds are shown. Later, twigs will be shown and, after watching the forcing of buds and blossoms and leaves, the children are taken out of doors and allowed to examine and watch the same game of nature on trees and plants.

The children do a great deal in helping to keep these tables supplied. One table last Christmas was supplied with all greens - holly, hemlock, laurel, club moss and partridge berries.

Dolls of Many Countries

On the upper floor of the museum are various exhibits that appeal to the childish mind. In one case is a collection of dolls, dressed in the native costumes of various countries of South America and Europe. Then there is a model of an old New England doll. It is wooden and painted. There is also an old doll, over 100 years old, with a head of hard rubber, from South America. There is a wax doll made by the Mountain Indians of Columbia, South America. It is marvelously done. There is a doll's bonnet and a trunk which was made in 1825.

In the Philippine case is an exhibit of odd weapons, some native rugs, feather headdresses of the tribes, etc. In the Japanese collection are dolls, crockery and quilts, the star of the collection being O Hara San (Honorable Flower Maiden) which is often used by Miss Griffin to weave stories about to the children.

The China case contains exhibits of chairs, tables, dishes, and dolls, and the children, Miss Griffin says, go from the Japanese case with no chairs and tables to the China case showing those house-hold articles, and exclaim on their discovered mode of life of these two different races, which most children suppose, were practically the same in their mode of living.

From Greenland are shown models of sledges, some skin boots, wearing apparel, a walrus skin boat, walrus trunks, narwhal horn and other curious objects. On these objects no less distinguished persons than Admiral Peary and Donald McMillan have lectured to the children while they sat around on their tiny camp chairs and listened with their eyes on the very objects lectured about.

Other cases are filled with interesting objects selected with a view to childish interest, from the South Sea Islands, Egypt and many other foreign places.

Lectures for Grownups, Too

Miss Griffin says the children are more frank in the museum and with the museum attendants than in school or even at home. They are free in the museum and are taught to consider it their own place to learn and be entertained.

"Many of the articles from foreign climes," she says, "are given to the museum by mothers or fathers of boys who have travelled and, perhaps, have passed out of life on foreign shores. The objects are saved for a time and then are turned over to us as being of special interest to children."

The lectures at the museum supplement the exhibits and are either given in the class room or with the children grouped about the exhibits. On Sunday afternoons there is a lecture given by Miss Griffin or some other lecturer which is attended by the mothers and fathers as well as the children.

Teachers of the public schools send their children to hear the lectures. They come in classes and Miss Griffing, with the aid of the School Committee's list of the courses of study for the various grades, takes care to be ready to lecture to these classes on the very subject that they have been studying in the schools. The number of lectures given last year was 450, which will be much increased this year. The average attendance of children is 150, or about 65,000 a year.

Club Work Important

The club work of the Museum is an important phase. There is the Industries Club, composed of boys and girls of 16 or so. It was established when the children were younger and now contains many charter members. The club is run entirely by the young people and they give up their Saturday afternoons to attend the studies. There are 14 to 16 members of this club. A third grade high school boy is president, and this year the subject of the "Story of the World" is being taken up. Mrs Robert W. Sayles now lectures before this club.

On the third floor is a small room, the meeting place of a club of younger members called the Sons of Nature; and there is also the Kettlehole club. There is a girl's club which meets in the Summer for the study of flowers and birds. Then there is the Busy Bee club of little chaps, which makes the study of insects a specialty.

In one room of the museum there has been started an industries exhibit. Already there is a case filled with shoes, belting and other things made of leather. Cotton manufacturing is also gone into, and other exhibits are expected to be added soon.

There is a good-sized library filled with tiny chairs around a large table and the walls are filled with shelves or books for the children. No fiction is kept, but books on all kinds of instructive subjects for children are at the call of many children are at the call of the many children who roam through the rooms of their "own museum."

Children's Museum: In The Beginning

The original museum, in the old Perkins estate above Jamaica Pond.


For over fifty years, the Children's Museum was one of the central institutions of Jamaica Plain. My family was typical: my parents visited the museum in the 1930s, when it was in the building pictured above, my brother attended the summer day camp in the buildings between Burroughs and Eliot streets in the 1950s, and I followed him in the 1960s. Each year, for a small amount of money, I got a season's pass and spent many hours in the various rooms. I do remember the Perkins building, standing above Jamaica pond, but hidden by trees, but I can't say I paid particular attention to it. I had no idea it had housed the museum until many years later.



Boston Daily Globe March 19, 1914

Children's Museum At Jamaica Pond.

From Small Beginnings This Has Rapidly Become An Important Institution For Teaching, Not Only Natural History, But the Study of Races of the Earth and their Growth in Civilization.


From a modest beginning of two cases of minerals and mammals, seven months ago, the Children's Museum at the Park Building, on the shores of Jamaica Pond, has rapidly developed, until at the present time the large main room is filled with natural history exhibits of every description on the first floor, and a multitude of exhibits, a lecture room and a well-stocked natural history library on the second floor.

The Children's Museum is the only one of its kind in New England, and the second in the country, the other, in Brooklyn N.Y. It had its inception in the desire of a group of Boston teachers who felt that they needed help in the nature study which they were supposed to teach the children, in many cases without the means to properly do so.

The first headquarters of the museum were in the library at Franklin Park, but so insistent was the popularity of the museum among teachers and children alike that the quarters became too cramped, and the teachers were forced to seek a more capacious location.

The Park Commissioners offered the use of a room in their building in Jamaica Park, and the museum moved in on the first of August. The exhibits increased so rapidly that room after room was given over to its use, and finally the commission turned over the entire building to the museum.

It is a matter of the greatest pride to Miss Delia I. Griffin, the curator, and the directors of the museum that practically every one of the exhibits has been either given or loaned by museums or private individuals, and that eminent geologists, botanists and natural historians have volunteered their services to give lectures to the children on subjects in which they are recognied authorities.

The main room on the first floor contains exhibits on mammals, birds, minerals, shells, butterflies, moths and insect life in general, arranged in such a manner as to picture to the children the development from the lowest forms of animal life to the most advanced types of mammals, and the geological periods of the earth. The room contains a number of very valuable casts of prehistoric animals, as well as models of corals and fossils.

One of the most interesting exhibits is the continuous, though ever-changing collections of wild flowers, twigs and branches of trees, and fruits in their season. Practically every specimen of the local fauna and flora may be seen by the children in this room, and they are also shown the animals and flowers of the various foreign countries they study about in school.

On the second floor is a large history room, which is in reality an ethnographical exhibit, which contains a remarkably fine exhibit from the Philippnes, showing the costumes, weapons, instruments and objects made by the various tribes, such as the Negritos, Moros, Igorottes, and also show the work of the tribes which have come under the influence of Spanish and American civilization.

The exhibits are arranged in cases, from the most primitive to the most advanced tribes, and the exhibits are used to teach the children the growth of civilization in the Philipines, and of civilization in general. Other cases show the skill of the primitive tribes in basketry, in metal work and in sewing.

A group of mentally defective children who recently visited the museum gazed blankly at the animals, birds and minerals, but became intensely interested in the samples of primitive sewing, and on their return to the instutition at which they are pupils immediately set to work at sewing with admirable results and still speak of the visit to the museum as one of the red-letter days of their lives.

The room also contains the beginnings of a North American Indian exhibit, and an exhibit showing the costumes and weapons of the Eskimos of Greenland has been promised. In complete contrast to these exhibits of primitive life, Miss Griffin intends to have an exhibit of articles from Japan, showing the daily life, costumes, and domestic utensils of that people, expressed in terms of daintiness and excellence. Nearly all the ethnological exhibits have been placed in the building as a farily permenent loan by members of the Woman's Educational Association.

On the second floor is also the lecture room, where the real work of the museum is carried on. Dr. W.W. Atwood, recently of Chicago, who was lately called to chair at Harvard University, said when he saw this room "This is the heart of the museum." On nearly every schoolday classes come to this room from the various schools of the city, to listen to illustrated talks from the curator or from eminent naturalists who give their services.

Mr Horace Taylor of Brookline, game warden of that town, for instance, gave 10 lectures on bird life last week. Despite the inclemency of the weather, since the opening of the museum over 170 talks have been given, to the children, and in every case the lecture room was crowded to its capacity. Dr Franklin P Dyer, superintendent of schools, and the masters are doing all in their power to aid its work.

Except during the dead of winter, outdoor classes are held, during which children can study nature at first hand, the smallest children study, and incidentally feed the ducks and swans, and the larger children study the birds and trees.

The museum is now open on Sunday afternoons from 1 to 5 o'clock and popular lectures are given at 3 o'clock by a scientist, which are proving exceedingly popular, a large proportion of the persons attending are adults. The museum is open to the public daily from 9 to 5.

The library contains three book shelves filled with books sent by the Boston Library, dealing with every variety of nature study, history and geology, and the personal library of the museum is small but rapidly growing. It is planned to have a member of the staff constantly present after school hours and on Saturdays to aid the children in their studies.

Also on the second floor is a room filled with industrial exhibits, for which no place has yet been found on account of the inadequate accommodations. These show the development of such fabrics as cotton from the crude stage to the finished clothing.

Among the most intersting features of the museum is the Industries Club, made up of children who gather voluntarily on Saturday mornings to study "Features in the Development of Mankind." The class is at present taking up the subject of foods, beginning with the foods of primitive man, and next week will take up the foods of our Puritan ancestors.

A series of bird walks are planned for the Spring, and in the Summer the museum will cooperate with the vacation schools and the settlement schools.

Miss Delia I. Griffing is the curator of the museum, and her assistant is Miss Ruth King, an the board of directors is made up of teachers, professional men and scientists. The growth of the museum has been rapid and its popularity has been intensely gratifying to all interested in its welfare, but the institution is still sadly hampered in its work by lack of funds.


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Some of the writing in the article may tweak the contemporary sensibility. If so, imagine what people will think of Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore one hundred years from now.