PHOTO/COURTESY
Bob Collings' collection of antique cars has led four decades later to today's American Heritage Museum.
August 2, 2019
Focus on Hospitality & Tourism
American Heritage Museum brings dozens of new rare war collectibles to Hudson
PHOTO/GRANT WELKER
The collection at the American Heritage Museum includes a landing craft, in blue at right, used in Normandy on D-Day.
By GRANT WELKER
Only one place in America has a Soviet tank used during World War II, or a British cruiser tank, or an amphibious landing craft used in the Pacific.
Only one place in North America has a Scud missile and launcher used during the Gulf War, and only one place in the world has an American tank used in the War on Terror.
That’s in Hudson.
The American Heritage Museum, which opened in May, brings a collection of dozens of rare war machines and other artifacts to a town where few might expect to see some of the only publicly available armored vehicles anywhere.
“Technically, there’s really no museum like this in North America,” said Hunter Chaney, the marketing director for the Collings Foundation, the nonprofit that obtained the collection.
If that sounds like hyperbole, it may not be.
There’s the The International Museum of World War II in Natick, but that collection is comprised more of personal items like diaries, books or posters. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans includes a fighter jet but is more focused on storytelling.
That gives the American Heritage Museum an ability to stand out among attractions fighting for the public's spare time and leisure dollars. It also makes the collection crucial for helping to tell the story of war, said Erika Briesacher, a history professor at Worcester State University, who has a degree in museum studies.
The 66,000-square-foot American Heritage Museum doesn’t call itself a military museum but is unmistakably one.
It starts with the Revolutionary War era, a period it explores more through re-enactment videos created by the museum itself and shown in one of the museum’s three theaters. World War I is shown in a video to visitors who stand in a mock trench; the war’s story told by a nurse who is clear about the horrors of war.
“There’s no glory in this. No lasting triumph,” says the fictional nurse through describes the Americans’ need to defend allies but also its soldiers’ brutal injuries and deaths.
The MetroWest Visitors Bureau is starting to incorporate the new museum in its marketing materials, hoping to attract people to Hudson, such as those who might be visiting Boston from outside the region to learn about history, said Jill Schindler, visitor bureau interim executive director.
“It’s a totally impressive institution in this region,” Schindler said.
Long road to a massive collection
Bob and Caroline Collings, the namesakes for the Collings Foundation, began collecting four decades ago what would lead to the American Heritage Museum.
It began with rare automobiles and showcasing living history events, then antique aircraft they had restored to working condition.
A few other aircraft followed, and for the past 30 years, the foundation has put on an annual air show, the Wings of Freedom Tour. At one of those shows the Collings met Jacques Littlefield, whose collection of more than 300 military tanks is said to be the world’s largest private collection of its kind.
The two collections of the Collings and Littlefields attracted those involved in the collections to one another.
“This kind of partnership seemed very natural,” Chaney said.
After Littlefield died in 2009, his family chose to donate the collection to the Collings Foundation. After selling off duplicates and spending a year figuring out how to move such heavy machinery cross-country, the collection arrived.
Another long process – more than two years to win permitting in Stow, where the museum itself sits – was joined by a painstaking effort of restoring much of the machinery and deciding how to make the museum not just a collection of tanks but a place to tell the story of war through those who fought and the machinery they used to fight it.
“It was a lot of effort from a lot of people with a lot of different skill sets,” Bob Collings said.
Creating a new MetroWest attraction
An M1A1 Abrams tank weighing more than 60 tons American forces used in Iraq is the only one on public display in the world, the museum said. In this case, the museum’s efforts to expand beyond the machinery itself included bringing troops who fought in the tank, including the widow of one soldier killed by an improvised explosive device while riding in it, to see it on display.
“When we first got the collection, we had to figure out how to make this special,” Chaney said.
Of the museum's 84 major artifacts – mostly World War II era – 15 are said to be the only ones on display in North America.
Such a collection, especially not at a military base, is very rare, especially with how expensive such artifacts typically would be to buy, Briesacher said.
"In terms of visualizing history, it's one thing to talk about these things in abstract," she said. The collection, she said, "gives an enormity, because they can see it."
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