Commonwealth Museum

The Commonwealth Museum opened in 1992 as the public face of the Massachusetts Archives, which holds the official records of the Commonwealth dating back to the colonial era. The archives building on Columbia Point was purpose-built to house and preserve the most significant documents in Massachusetts history, from the original 1629 Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter to twentieth-century state records. The museum’s exhibitions draw on that collection to tell the story of Massachusetts government, law, and civic life across four centuries.

Among the highlights is the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 — the oldest functioning written constitution in the world still in effect, drafted primarily by John Adams while he was simultaneously serving as a diplomat in Europe. Adams’s constitution predated the United States Constitution by seven years and served as a direct model for the federal document. The museum also holds original acts of the General Court, colonial land grants, and records of major Massachusetts events including the American Revolution, the abolition movement, and the suffrage campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Columbia Point campus, shared with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, offers a striking setting between Boston Harbor and the University of Massachusetts Boston, giving the museum and archives a context that reinforces Massachusetts’s central role in American political history.