History of Bolton Museum

Bolton Museum is part of the history of Bolton. The Museums of the town, have been places to visit and a part of the leisure and education of Boltonians for over 120 years.  Many of the people involved in the Museum professionally, as donors, and in other ways, have lived in or originated from Bolton. Also, the buildings that house the collections – Mere Hall, Hall i’ th’ Wood, Le Mans Crescent, Smithills Hall – are part of the local landscape.  The key building missing from this list is the Chadwick Museum, once located in Queen’s Park, and the pride of Bolton’s civic amenities.

In 1852 following the adoption of the Libraries Act, Bolton’s first free public library was established in Victoria Square. The library quickly established a collection of natural science specimens and ethnographic objects, indeed the first item of the Library’s register is not a book but a ‘small collection of fossils’.

This library building still stands in Victoria Square; a stones throw from the present day Library and Museum on Le Mans Crescent.

The rise and fall of the Chadwick Museum

In 1876 Samuel Taylor Chadwick left a bequest of £5000 to the Bolton Corporation for the ‘building, furnishing and maintenance of a Museum of Natural History in the Bolton Park’. This was to be Bolton's first museum.

W. W. Midgley & Son – professional curators

As the Corporation’s first professional curator it was William Midgley's duty to arrange the Museum’s displays out of the Library’s collections.

The Crescent and the end of the Chadwick

By 1934 it had long been recognised that the Chadwick Museum building was too small for displaying the Museum’s growing collections.