Help Us Furnish Aunt Polly’s Rooms!

The Alden House Historic Site is updating sections of the museum’s room exhibits for the first time in fifty years! The goal is to make the westerly rooms look “lived-in” with not just a bare minimum of objects but the full Victorian styling of wallpaper, period furnishings and contemporary clutter.

Help us make room for Aunt Polly and her family by donating those heirlooms in the attic you don’t know what to do with. Let your great-grandmother’s treasure achieve a permanent place of honor at the Alden family’s shrine, the Alden House Historic Site .

The criteria is that every item has to be a) on our exhibit accessions list (see below); and b) an authentic pre-1876 object appropriate for the Duxbury Aldens to have owned (no gold-plated tableware, please!).

Preference will be given to those artifacts which have a real Alden family provenance and a tradition or story to go with them than can enrich our interpretation of the Alden family as a whole.

We will be furnishing three rooms: an elderly woman’s room (Aunt Polly, age 87), an older man’s room (Henry, age 60) and the family parlor or “best room.” Many of the items therefore were acquired well before the Civil War. We do not need any kitchen, barn or workroom pieces.