Higgins Armory Museum

John Woodman Higgins was a prominent industrialist in Worcester, Massachusetts who owned the Worcester Pressed Steel Company. He traveled to Europe multiple times throughout the 1920s where he collected arms, armor, and other steel items.[2] One of his most important purchases was eight full suits of armor from the collection of George Jay Gould in 1927.[4] Originally, he stored these items in his house, which quickly filled with anything that he could find made of steel, from suits of armor to automatic shoe polishers.[5] Higgins incorporated his collection as a museum in 1928;[4] the collection grew larger than his house could hold, so he began construction on a steel and glass museum building next to his factory in 1929.[2][5]

"The Museum of Steel and Glass" opened on January 12, 1931[4] with a grand gala. Music was played by members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Higgins' sons dressed in suits of armor.[6] In its original layout, the museum displayed a wide variety of objects constructed of steel including "medieval weaponry, automobile parts, and even ... an all-steel airplane suspended from its ceiling."[5][6] Admission to the museum began with a walk through the armor exhibits and ended with a tour through the production lines to see modern steel manufacturing.[5] The production floor was accessed through catwalks connecting the factory and the armory. Higgins invited visitors to the museum across these catwalks, and he also invited his workers to visit the museum on breaks to get inspired.[7] Higgins died in 1961, leaving the museum a US$17,000 endowment.[2]

The collection today is spread throughout the museum by time period, uniting period armor with artworks depicting armor, such as paintings and sculpture. Each first Saturday of the month demonstrations of armor in various fighting styles from the collection are given, to enable visitors to better place the artifacts in historic context. The museum continues the collection's educational programs on medieval history and arms and armor, ranging from school workshops and teacher education to scholarly lectures. The Olive Higgins Prouty Research Library, founded in 1997 with an initial collection of "several thousand books on arms and armor" also remains in the collection.[4]

The Higgins Armory was a major center of study for Western martial arts. Scholars associated with the museum such as curator Jeffrey Forgeng, William Short, and Ken Mondschein produced monographs and translations, gave papers and sponsored sessions at scholarly conferences, and lectured and demonstrated both in the US and Europe. The Higgins Armory Sword Guild was a study group founded in part by Patri J. Pugliese that conducted research into Western martial arts and demonstrated at the museum and in the community. The former museum also held historical fencing and martial arts classes.[8]

The collection consists of 2,000 objects, making it the second largest arms and armor collection in the country behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The collection includes 24 full suits of armor, a gladiator helmet, and "Helmutt," a dog mannequin dressed in reproduction boarhound armor. The oldest object in the collection is an Eastern Mediterranean dagger from between 3000 and 1500 B.C.[1]

The collection includes gladiator and Corinthian helmets, gauntlets from the Renaissance period, and the helmet of a 19th-century French cuirassier. There are also pieces that depict the courtly life: helmets for jousting tournaments, a crossbow for hunting, a ceremonial gorget, and an anvil that was used to manufacture such pieces.

There are knives and axes from Africa, bow case covers from ancient Islam, a horned kulah khud (helmet) from India, and samurai armor from Japan, among others. The collection also includes examples of armor for dogs and horses. There are also full-scale models of jousts and foot tourneys.

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  Maximilian field armor with visor for ceremony and tournament, south Germany, 1510-1520
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  Helmet embossed in the form of a conch shell (awabi uchidashi kabuto), Japan, 1618. Made by Nagasone Tojiro Mitsumasa; signed "Echizen no kuni ju Mitsumasa; Nagasone Tojiro saku"
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  Folding spetum, Italy, c. 1550; once owned by the Rothschild family.
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  Smallsword c. 1790 by Josiah Wedgwood and perhaps Matthew Boulton
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  Carabinier armor, France, 1863-1865
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  Mail coat, probably Ottoman Turkey, perhaps 1550-1650; the word "Allah" is embossed on each link
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  Reproduction field armor of Archduke Siegmund of Austria 1485 (reproduction 1911-19) with armor for boar hound, German style 16th century, reproduction US 1942. The dog is Higgin's mascot "Helmutt"

Norman Rockwell drew an imagined scene in the Higgins armory museum entitled Midnight Snack for the November 3, 1962 cover of The Saturday Evening Post.[9]

Higgins Armory Museum has been featured on the History Channel on multiple occasions, including a special DVD extra that focused solely on the museum.

In April 2011, the TV show Ghost Hunters filmed an episode at the museum to see if the ghost of Mr. Higgins haunted the building.[4]

• Media related to Higgins Armory Museum at Wikimedia Commons
• Classical fencing and historical swordsmanship classes at the Higgins
• Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) No. MA-1236, "Higgins Armory, 100 Barber Avenue, Worcester, Worcester County, MA", 16 photos, 3 color transparencies, 1 data page, 2 photo caption pages