Collection Spotlight: Stereoscope

If you are of a certain age, you might have fond memories of the View-Master. This red toy made by Mattel came with a set of round cards with images on them (mine were dinosaurs); when you inserted the card into the viewer, the images became three-dimensional. So much fun!

These viewfinders mimic a much older object—the stereoscope. An invention of the nineteenth century, the stereoscope plays on our binocular vision to produce an exciting viewing experience. Two images—a left eye and right eye view of the same scene—are printed on a stereograph card, and when viewed through the stereoscope, appear as a single 3D image. The first stereoscope was debuted at the Great Exhibition of 1851, a world’s fair held in London, and quickly became popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Just five years later, more than a half million stereoscopes had been sold.

Stereoscope in the library, Gibson House Museum

Summering in Nahant

There were two social seasons in the elite Bostonian’s calendar: the winter season in Boston, which began in mid-November and lasted until the beginning of Lent; and the summer season, which ran from about May through September. In the summer season, the wealthy decamped for their summer homes on the coast and in the mountains. One of the most popular spots was Nahant, an island community about an hour north of Boston.

The Gibson family owned a summer home on Nahant called “Forty Steps,” named after the beach that the house overlooks. Catherine Gibson inherited the home from her father, Samuel Hammond, in the 1850s, and continued to summer there for most of her life. 

Forty Steps, Nahant (Gibson House Museum)

Thomas Dalton, Boston Abolitionist (1794—1883)

Gibson House Museum( 1992.401.82) 

The women of the Gibson Family—Catherine Hammond Gibson, Rosamond Warren Gibson, and Mary Ethel Gibson Allen—kept albums filled with photographs of relatives and friends. These images were typically studio portraits, traded as part of the custom of leaving calling cards when paying someone a social visit. At the Museum, we find them to be a helpful "who's who" of Boston, and especially the Back Bay, in the nineteenth century.

In two different albums, Catherine included a photograph of Thomas Dalton. Dalton was a free African-American man born on the North Shore in Gloucester in 1794 who became a well-known activist and abolitionist in Boston's Black community. At the age of twenty-three, Dalton moved to Boston, where he first worked as a bootblack. He eventually opened his own used clothing store on Brattle Street and went on to become a prosperous merchant. His store, located near today's Government Center, was at the foot of the west slope of Beacon Hill, the center of Boston's Black community.