Old Sturbridge Village’s collection consists of over 60,000 artifacts made or used by rural New Englanders between 1790 and 1840. Members of the Wells family, who were local industrialists, founded the museum in 1936 to display the extensive collection that they assembled. About half of the objects in the collection today were acquired by the museum’s founders, brothers Albert B. Wells, Joel Cheney Wells and Channing Wells, from the 1920s through the early 1950s. A.B. Wells collected a wide range of artifacts from a Hadley chest to a gear-driven wood lathe, with especially strong collections of early lighting devices, woodenware, and scientific instruments. Joel Cheney Wells focused his collecting activities on clocks and paperweights. From this foundation, Old Sturbridge Village has built the best collection of early 19th-century rural New England artifacts in the world.

The following pages represent a selection of artifact records from the OSV collection, organized by use or material. These pages are updated, with new records added, on a regular basis. The initial launch of records includes objects that have been fully photographed and documented, representing some of the museum’s most popular artifacts.

To start your search, choose a category of artifacts that interests you, or type in a word or phrase to search for. The search function will search an artifact's name, description, keywords and materials fields for the search term.