Moses Kimball
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Moses Kimball (October 24, 1809 - February 21, 1895) was a notable showman, close associate of P. T. Barnum, and public-spirited citizen of Boston, Massachusetts.
Kimball was descended from Richard and Ursula Kimball, who came from England to Massachusetts in 1634 and were among the founders of the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Kimball was born in Ipswich to David and Nancy (Stacy) Kimball, and raised in Rockport, Massachusetts but moved to Boston at 15 to seek his fortune.
He was ruined first in the "Eastern Land" speculation, and then again in 1833 in his purchase of the New England Galaxy, one of the earliest weekly newspapers of Boston, which was sold after a few months at a serious loss. Kimball married Frances L. A. Hathaway on June 25, 1834, and in 1836 started the New England Printing Company but it collapsed in 1837.
In 1838 Kimball purchased most of the New England Museum, added to it, made arrangements for a lease of the building on Tremont and Bromfield streets (later the site of the Horticultural Hall, Boston, Massachusetts) in 1840 founded the Lowell Museum, and in 1841 opened his Boston Museum. The museum, rebuilt in 1846 and 1880, displayed a large number of stuffed birds and animals (later owned by the Boston Society of Natural History), several remains of Greek sculpture (now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and several historical portraits by John Singleton Copley. The Museum was immediately successful.
In the late spring of 1842, Kimball traveled to New York City to meet his rival, P. T. Barnum, in person. He brought with him a large oblong box containing a most unusual curiosity: an embalmed mermaid purchased at great price near Calcutta by a Boston sea captain in 1817. If it wasn't a real mermaid, it was a remarkable fraud: the head of a baboon and the upper half of an orangutan was attached to the lower half of a large fish.
On June 18, Barnum and Kimball entered into a written agreement to exploit this "curiosity supposed to be a mermaid." Kimball would remain the creature's sole owner and Barnum would lease it for $12.50 a week. Barnum christened his artifact "The Fejee Mermaid" and began to "puff" her to the skies.
By 1843, Kimball and P. T. Barnum were on the best of terms, and trading objects from their collections frequently. That same year they bought Charles Willson Peale's Museum in Philadelphia for $7,000 when it went out of business, and Barnum wrote to Kimball about the death of a prized live orangutan:
- I am grieved vexed and disappointed [?] hear of the sickness and death (for I know she will die) of the Ourang Outang. D--n the luck -- I have puffed he[r] high and dry -- got a large transparency and a flag 10 [?] 16 feet painted for her -- besides newspaper cut [?] and now curse her -- she must up foot and die. (P. T. Barnum to Moses Kimball, September 1, 1843, Boston Athenaeum.)
That same year, Kimball added a theater to his museum, although he called it a "lecture-room" in deference to the Puritan feeling in Boston. There he staged his own adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin among other productions.
As Kimball's fortune grew, he became an active public citizen. His first appearance in political life was in 1844, as a consequence of a speech by Daniel Webster, in which he urged the revision of the US naturalization laws in reaction to the Irish vote. As early as 1850, he offered a prize for the best essay on the treatment and prevention of croup.
Twenty years later, he established a prize for the best exhibit of shade trees set out in the streets of Rockport, Massachusetts, and for the best loaf of bread exhibited at the annual fair.
Mr. Kimball made three journeys to Europe, in 1867, 1872 and 1877-1878. In his will he left $5,000 for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1903 the famous Boston Museum was swept away.
