Biographical Sketch

One of the founding members of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Thomas Wallcut was born in Boston on 16 August 1758. At the age of twelve, Wallcut was sent for missionary training to Moor's Indian Charity School in Hanover, N.H., and he later lived at a Native American village near Montreal.

At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Wallcut returned to Boston to enlist, and he spent most of the war serving as steward and wardmaster at a military hospital in Albany, N.Y. After the war, back in Boston, Wallcut began writing political articles and editorials for several local periodicals. He invested most of his savings in an unfruitful land venture in Ohio, which he was forced to sell bit by bit for taxes.

In 1780, Wallcut became an engrossing clerk at the Massachusetts State House, where he was employed for over forty years copying documents. In his spare time, besides writing letters and articles on a wide variety of subjects, he began accumulating a large and valuable collection of historically important books and manuscripts. It was this antiquarian hobby, as well as his liberal ideals and literary interests, which led to his joining the other founders of the Massachusetts Historical Society. He eventually donated his collection to the Historical Society and to Bowdoin College.

Wallcut never married. Impoverished, he died at the McLean Asylum on 5 June 1840, at 82, and was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Mass.