Matthew Stickney had a very good eye

There were many important and influential Salem collectors, and among them Matthew Stickney (1805-1894) really stands out. He remains a revered figure among coin collectors, both for his pioneering activity and the breadth and depth of his collection. He had inherited a large amount of his Continental currency from his Patriot grandfather, which he was determined to supplement with all the most important American (and some foreign) issues, and he worked with the US Mint itself and early brokers to achieve this aim. The most sought-after US coins, including the 1804 dollar (which apparently does not date from 1804 but is still referred to as the “king of American coins”), and the storied 1787 Brasher Doubloon, which seems to have had a Maltese Falcon-like hold on mystery writers and filmmakers in the mid-20th century, were all part of the Stickney Collection.

Coins were his primary passion but Stickney did not confine himself to currency. He collected Americana before there really was such a category. Anything printed—-almanacs, autographs, newspapers, diaries, election sermons, pamphlets and printed images. He collected Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom he must have also known. He was a genealogist and a historian. Stickney was an Essex County native, and spent most of his life at 119 Essex Street in Salem, a building that has not survived. Following his death in 1894, his three unmarried daughters retained his collection for quite some time before consigning much of it to two very noteworthy auctions held in 1907: a coin sale in Philadelphia in the June, and all of the American collections in Boston in November. Both made considerable headlines and set price records. Christian Remick’s perspective of an occupied Boston Harbor seems to have been (re)discovered at this time, and the papers also took note of the pamphlet recording an important debate at Harvard University, A Forensic Dispute on the Legality of Enslaving Africans, held at the Public Commencement in Cambridge, New-England, July 21st, 1773.

Matthew Stickney and his collections are interesting subjects quite apart from their context, but if we widen the lens a bit we can appreciate the “collecting culture” that was present in Salem in the nineteenth century, and later, centered around one of the two founding institutions of the present Peabody Essex Museum: the Essex Institute. We hear more about the role of the other founding society, the Peabody Museum, which was established in 1799 as the museum for the East India Society and operated as a  “cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities” collected by the Salem sea captains on their voyages around the world. The Essex Institute’s origins were in the realms of local and natural history, and like the Peabody, its members were engaged in forming its collections, but also in a vibrant intellectual community focused on scholarship and the presentation of research on these same collections. Matthew Stickney did not go to university: he was born in Rowley, Massachusetts and educated in the public schools there. In his twenties, he headed south to Peabody and Salem and worked as a retailer of West India goods. Presumably he earned enough income to support his continuous collecting and then some: he retired in the 1850s and spent the next 40 years focusing on collecting and working at the Essex Institute. Mr. Stickney had a very good eye, but he was in good company too! He was a founding trustee, frequent contributor to its Proceedings, and according to his obituary, an “honored member” of the Institute who served as Librarian and Curator. I’ve seen the central role of the Essex Institute in fostering civic and scholarly engagement among Salem men and women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries time and time again. After the merger of the Institute and the Peabody Museum and the creation of the present Peabody Essex Museum in the early 1990s, I believe that the former’s historic role could have continued with the retention of its Phillips Library in Salem rather than its removal to a former factory in Stickney’s hometown of Rowley, but that just did not happen. The former buildings of the Essex Institute remain vacant, in the midst of busy Salem.

P.S. One blog post can’t do justice to the life and work of this man! For further research, the Stickney Family papers are located at the Phillips Library in Rowley, MA, of course.