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Burning down the house

Lifestyle Features

What? This old thing?

Glossy guidebooks often extol Boston as one of America’s most “European” cities, a euphemism that means that we’re . . . you know, wicked old. But for a town that incorporated way back in 1630, we look pretty damn good for our age — and what’s more, we use our years to our advantage. While other cities bulldoze buildings after only a few decades, we bedeck our centuries-old edifices with bronze plaques, call our crumbling cobblestone streets charming, and use our rich history to rake in the tourist dollars.

But the Freedom Trail, our many museums, and other well-trod tourist stops hardly have a monopoly on historical treasures. Much of the oldest and most valuable stuff ends up at the area’s archives, less-familiar but fascinating institutions that are kind of like our collective civic attic. While you could spend hours rifling through the junk upstairs at your great-aunt Gertrude’s without ever finding even one item worth a 90-second spot on Antiques Roadshow, these carefully cataloged collections allow us to peer into the past (and occasionally lay hands on it) without having to brave clinging cobwebs or the musty stench of mothballs. From the papers of presidents to the diaries of everyday folk whose names have been forgotten, Boston’s archives offer researchers intimate insight into bygone eras. And the treasures they preserve aren’t just rich in history — sometimes they’re downright freaky. We’ve tracked down some of the weirdest artifacts from the archives’ collections, and the strange stories behind them — from a Continental Army cross-dresser, to a Founding Father’s shocking scheme for cooking his Christmas bird, to an author who devoted himself to his story (literally) — are well worth dusting off.

The HOUGHTON LIBRARY has the only known survivor, a 1634 edition of The Christian Warfare Against the Devil, World, and Flesh, a screed brimming with brimstone that escaped its own fiery end thanks to an absent-minded senior named Ephraim Briggs. When Briggs, who’d borrowed the book as part of his theological studies months before the fire, returned the tome to Harvard’s president the day after the blaze, it was quite overdue. Legend (popular among students, but inaccurate nonetheless) has it the president profusely thanked him for safeguarding the treasure — and then, in a show of priggishness that would have made its puritan founders proud, promptly expelled poor Ephraim for his delinquency.