Twenty minutes from downtown Boston, in a leafy corner of Brookline, a Victorian-era carriage house holds something no other American museum can claim: the country's oldest automotive collection, with vehicles dating back to 1899.
The collection belonged to Larz Anderson, a US diplomat who posted to the UK, Italy, Belgium and Japan, and his wife Isabel Weld Perkins, a Boston heiress who inherited around $5 million from her grandfather, shipping magnate William Fletcher Weld. Married in 1897, the couple treated cars as an annual indulgence — between 1899 and Anderson's death in 1937 they owned 32 automobiles, 24 carriages and six horse-drawn sleighs.
After Anderson died, Isabel auctioned most of the fleet, but 14 cars remained untouched, and those are the heart of today's museum. The line-up spans the wild early decades of motoring: an 1899 Winton Phaeton, a 1903 Gardner-Serpollet steam car, a 1908 Bailey Electric, a 1924 Renault Torpedo and a 1926 Lincoln Limousine, among others. Crucially, none of them have been restored. They wear their original paint, upholstery and patina, which makes them genuine time capsules — several are the last surviving examples of their kind anywhere in the world.
The couple first opened the collection to visitors in 1927, and after Isabel's death in 1948 it was formally established as a museum. It still collects, with newer acquisitions rotated through the displays, so repeat visits rarely look identical.
What the museum lacks in size it makes up for in atmosphere. The carriage house, built in 1889, has an ornate interior that suits the vintage machinery far better than any modern showroom could. The setting helps too: Larz Anderson Park sits in a residential neighbourhood just northwest of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, so it pairs easily with a walk in the arboretum or an afternoon in Boston.
For travellers, this is a niche stop, but a rewarding one. If you care about vintage cars, early industrial design or Gilded Age wealth on wheels, it's an easy half-day outing that most visitors to Boston never hear about. Motorheads planning a New England trip should slot it alongside the Museum of Fine Arts or a Harvard stroll — you'll come away with a much better sense of how experimental motoring was before World War I, when steam, electric and petrol cars were all still competing for the future.