Other bourgeois cultural institutions.
Alongside Harvard, another important cultural institution of the Boston bourgeoisie was the Boston Athenaeum, a private library, founded in 1807. There were also various societies and social clubs, but the first formal social club--aside from the Masonic Lodge--was the Somerset established in 1852. A second club was formed in the middle of the Civil War in 1863, the Union Club of Boston.
Boston Athenaeum
The Boston Athenaeum was founded by the Anthology Society in 1807 as a private library. Borrowing from European idioms, it sought to cultivate the "high arts" in Boston. After being housed in a mansion owned by a wealthy Boston merchant, James Perkins, on Pearl Street in an area of Boston that was being rapidly commercialized, the Athenaeum moved to its current location, 10½ Beacon Street, in 1847. The move placed the Athenaeum in Boston's bourgeois enclave on Beacon Hill. The Athenaeum offered members a reading room and library that by 1851 contained some 50,000 volumes. It exhibited paintings and sculptures in a gallery that was open to the public upon payment of an entrance fee. The gallery was the forebear of the Museum of Fine Arts that opened in 1870.
Somerset Club
The Somerset Club evolved from “an association of gentlemen” called the Travellers in 1846 to finally become the Somerset in 1852. It was the most prestigious voluntary association of Boston’s wealthiest citizens. Its members hailed from Boston’s elite families—from the Amorys to the Appletons, and the Lawrences to the Perkins—that were later characterized by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. in 1861 as the Boston Brahmins. One could only become a member by invitation. The clubhouse came to occupy its present location at 42-43 Beacon Street in 1870. Previously it was at the corner of Beacon and Somerset streets.
Union Club of Boston
The Union Club of Boston was constituted in February 1863 and Edward Everett elected as its first president. The members rented the residence of industrialist Abbot Lawrence at 8 Park Street for their clubhouse where it remains to this day. The Club was officially inaugurated on April 9 during which Everett delivered one of his famous two-hour orations. And by the end of the year, it had elected 512 members—all “clubbable men,” in other words men of wealth and influence in Boston and its surrounding areas who pledged their loyalty to the Lincoln administration in the midst of the Civil War. The founders called it the Union Club to distinguish it from the Union Leagues across the northern United States that at the time that were more engaged in practical politics. The Union Club of Boston was strictly a social club, not a space to engage in political organizing.
