The Friendly Face of the Massachusetts Historical Society

Sometime in the late 1990s, more than a quarter century ago, I paid my first visit to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

I was getting interested in the story of Christopher Seider, using resources from my local library network. But I’d heard about this much richer repository of papers, books, newspapers, and other sources in the Back Bay.

I was in Boston for an A.I.D.S. fundraising walk with colleagues from a job I’d just left, if I remember right. That action deposited us at the bottom of Newbury, so on a whim I walked over to check out this M.H.S. thing.

[Remember having to raise funds to find a treatment for A.I.D.S.? A diagnosis that was once a death sentence became a manageable chronic condition. As of early this year, medical scientists were even seeing the possibility of a vaccine against H.I.V. in the near future. In May, the Trump administration shut down federal funding for that research. But I digress.]

I was in a T-shirt and shorts, footsore and a bit sweaty—not ready for research and somewhat abashed as I was buzzed into this brownstone institution. But the man at the front desk gave me a friendly welcome and explained the M.H.S.’s resources and policies. Only later did I learn that man was Peter Drummey, the society’s Stephen T. Riley Librarian.

I came back a couple of weeks later to look at the plague diary of young Peter Thacher, among other things. Since then I’ve attended and given papers at M.H.S. seminars, used David Mason’s papers there to identify Boston’s missing cannon, used other library resources to write my book, been elected a member and then converted to a fellow, studied a powder horn etched with a name I later realized was one of my ancestors, served on the publications committee, spoken at teacher workshops, worked with Peter and colleagues on a history comic and on an exhibit about a cartoonist, and more.

This month brought the news that Peter Drummey will retire in November after forty-seven years working at the M.H.S.

The society’s press release says:

A native of Duxbury, Mass., Drummey attended college and graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. After graduating from the program to train rare book librarians and archivists in the School of Library Service at Columbia, he returned to Massachusetts, where he was the curator of manuscripts at the New England Historic Genealogical Society before joining the staff of the MHS in 1978. Prior to becoming the Chief Historian, Peter had served as the Society’s Stephen T. Riley Librarian since 1987. . . .

His tenure has been marked by his deep knowledge of the Society’s collections and a commitment to making history accessible to a wide audience. He has supported thousands of researchers, curated landmark exhibitions, and served as a trusted expert for journalists.

And been a most welcoming, encouraging, and cheerful presence for this researcher and others.

The new Peter Drummey Chief Historian at the M.H.S. will be Dr. Kanisorn “Kid” Wongsrichanalai, currently the director of research. He too is cheery and amiable, and will no doubt be helpful to more generations of scholars. But he will still have big shoes to fill.