Stock issued by the Boston American League Base-Ball Club (Red Sox), 1912.
By Dana Gerber, The Boston Globe
What do Civil War soldiers in Boston, the Red Sox, and South Station have in common?
At one time or another, they all had to be financed. The soldiers required provisions to fight their battles, the baseball team needed its shares divvied up to get on the field, and the transit hub demanded an infusion of capital to start shuttling passengers. While often opaque, it’s the movement of dollars and cents that is the lifeblood of modern life — and the focus of a museum slated to arrive in Boston’s Seaport neighborhood next July.
“Through the objects, we tell stories. And that’s one way to break through, to really make finance more understandable,” said David Cowen, president and CEO of the Museum of American Finance. “Finance leads the way. Finance is the horse to the economy’s cart, and everything, everywhere is finance. And we have hundreds of objects from Massachusetts to show how you build an economy.”
Objects like an 1897 bond certificate from the Boston Terminal Company that helped fund the creation of South Station. Or a stock certificate from 1912 for 25 shares of the Boston American League Base-Ball Club (better known as the Boston Red Sox). Or a blank check signed by John F. Kennedy that was in the possession of his Secret Service agents when he was assassinated in Dallas in 1963.
All of those and more memorabilia from the worlds of banking, investment, and currency will be on display in a 5,400-square-foot space in the soon-to-debut Commonwealth Pier, a revamp of the old Seaport World Trade Center. The museum signed a 10-year lease in the complex, which is being developed by real estate firm Pembroke, an affiliate of Fidelity.