Smithsonian Press--Legacies--4Mirror of America--Postcard of the Colonial Room, 1930s

Legacies: Collecting America's History at the Smithsonian, by Steven Lubar and Kathleen M. Kendrick

You are here: Mirror of America > Founding Families

Postcard of the Colonial Room, 1930s

Since it was acquired in 1924, this pine-paneled room has been exhibited in a variety of contexts, reflecting changing interpretations of American history and new historical evidence. The room as originally believed to be the parlor from the house of Reuben Bliss, a joiner who lived in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1981 Edward F. Zimmer, an architectural historian, discovered that the room did not match the dimensions and design of the Bliss house. He speculated that the room came instead from the house of the merchant Samuel Colton, constructed in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in the 1750s and demolished in 1916. These findings shaped the new display of the room in the 1985 exhibition After the Revolution.