The Peck Collection consists of 149, 5X7-inch photographic glass plate negatives taken of Boston’s waterfront and the Massachusetts’s seacoast in the early 1900’s. The images are part of a larger body of work by amateur photographer and naturalist, John Murdoch. Murdoch graduated from Roxbury Latin and Harvard and worked as a librarian with the Smithsonian and Boston Public Library. His images are part of MIT’s Hart Nautical Collections, part of the MIT Museum’s five permanent collections. It is a world-class collection of ship and yacht plans, books, models, marine art, photographs, and shipbuilding records primarily on the history of New England ship building from the mid-19th century. There are 250,000 objects in the museum including 100,000 shipbuilding plans some of the finest sailing yachts ever built.
