In 1790, Boston minister Jeremy Belknap proposed a "Plan for an Antiquarian Society" that would actively collect materials to document the history of the new nation. A year later, on 24 January 1791, Belknap's "Antiquarian Society" became the "Historical Society" when he invited nine like-minded Bostonians to join him in creating what would become the Massachusetts Historical Society, the oldest organization in the United States devoted to collecting materials for the study of American history. Later the same year, Belknap drafted a Circular Letter, of the Historical Society, in which he announced the Historical Society's formation and purpose: "to collect, preserve, and communicate, materials for a complete history of this country"--a mission that has remained essentially unchanged for more than two centuries.

Who was Jeremy Belknap?

The Rev. Jeremy Belknap was born in Boston in 1744, and educated at Harvard College. He became a Congregational clergyman, settled first in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1767, where during nineteen years of service, he found time to write a three-volume History of New Hampshire. In his research, Belknap demonstrated a fixed determination to examine primary sources, and working in relative isolation in rural New Hampshire, he relied heavily on the collaboration of a wide-ranging network of correspondents to locate and verify information for his History that covered not only exploration, and military and political history, but also the geography and natural history of the Granite State, and the manners and customs of the inhabitants, including Native Americans. After the outbreak of the American Revolution, Belknap traveled to the siege lines around Boston to interview participants and gather information about how the fighting began.

Jeremy Belknap returned to Boston in 1787, where he became pastor of the Church in Long Lane-now the Arlington Street Church. In the metropolis of New England, among men who shared his antiquarian interests, he set out to apply the concepts and procedures for historical research that he had developed in New Hampshire on a wider stage. As he indicated in his letter to Ebenezer Hazard, Belknap acted upon his principles; in what has become a catch phrase for the Historical Society, "keeping a good look-out, not waiting at home for things to fall into the lap, but prowling about like a wolf for the prey." In his letter, Belknap recounts how he had traveled to Connecticut to collect the manuscripts and pamphlets of Governor Jonathan Trumbull, who had died in 1785. Belknap had no way of knowing that in saving Trumbull's papers from becoming "food for worms," he had set the stage for what would become an epic, seventy-seven-year battle between the MHS and the state of Connecticut over whether the manuscripts were Trumbull's personal papers or official Connecticut records. The Historical Society finally-and grudgingly-returned the papers to the Connecticut State Library in 1921. Belknap's vulpine avarice for documents occasionally borders on the unseemly: he greedily anticipates seeing the head of "our old patriot, S[amuel] A[dams]" laid low, so that the Historical Society can get more manuscripts.

Ebenezer Hazard (1744-1817) was a Princeton-educated New York City printer and post office surveyor, who had returned to Philadelphia in 1782 to become the first postmaster general of the United States under the Constitution. Belknap described him as his "guide, philosopher, and friend." Hazard shared Belknap's intense interest in history and historical documents, and, in 1792, was the first person elected a corresponding (non-resident) member of the Historical Society.

Before his death in 1798, through his own contributions and the gifts that he solicited, Jeremy Belknap had developed a substantial base for the Historical Society's extraordinary present-day collections. He also served as the first corresponding secretary of the MHS, and through a series of published circular letters and notices, and his own personal correspondence, attempted to convey news of the founding of the new organization and its purpose "to every gentleman of Science in the Continent and Islands of America."