Boulter's Museum - 21/22 Market Place, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. NR30 1LY - Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com

Daniel BOULTER and Rachel SPARSHALL had three sons in Worstead Norfolk in the 1730's. They were a Quaker family.
Some of Rachel's background is known, but Daniel is a mystery, he was a butcher. Possibly he became a Quaker to marry Rachel as there are no other BOULTERS on the Norfolk Quaker Register Films. The three sons went to Great Yarmouth, John a shopkeeper, Daniel the founder of the Boulter Museum at G.Y., and Joseph a baker and confectioner.
From the Eastern Daily Press:-
[Daniel] was a sharp businessman and avid collector whose accumulation of oddments brought the world to Great Yarmouth and created Norfolk’s first museum.
From the Norfolk Museum's website:-
Boulter's Display
.....a bit of background.....Daniel Boulter opened his museum in Great Yarmouth on August 8th 1778. The site of the shop and museum was situated at number 19, Market Place. This is on the west side of the Market Place at the north-east corner of Row 35, and is now marked by a blue plaque fixed by the local Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Beat Service Society in 1987. Daniel Boulter was born in the Norfolk village of Worstead in 1740 and by the age of 15, was apprenticed to his cousin Joseph Sparshall, a Yarmouth grocer and tallow chandler. During 1764, he married and purchased a shop in Yarmouth selling hardware and toys. He later expanded this to include silver, toys, books and prints. During 1777, he moved to a larger shop at 19, Market Place which after much improvement, opened as a museum on August 8th 1778. The collection consisted of over 5,000 items of ‘natural and artificial curiosities’. Daniel Defoe writing in his Norfolk Tour’ in 1795 stated ‘there is nothing more worthy of notice than Boulter’s museum in the Yarmouth Market Place. The collection included mammals, birds, fishes, shells, insects, anatomical preparations, plants, Roman and other antiquities, stained glass, weapons and armour, coins, oil paintings, prints and books. There were many items newly discovered from the ‘South Seas’ by Captain James Cook which Boulter purchased from the crew of his ship in London. Among the strangest items in the museum were the dried hand of a women supposed to have been a criminal and a two-headed Cat. The mania for collecting did not reach its peak until the Victorian era, but Boulter’s vast collection reveals there was already, at the end of the 18th century, a vogue for amassing antiques and fossils, especially sea shells and birds.

There is a new exhibition at the Time and Tide Museum based around the earliest known museum in Great Yarmouth, the Musuem Boulterianum which opened in 1778 in the Market Place by Daniel Boulter. For further reading see Eastern Daily Press

Boulter died in 1802 aged 62 and the collection was dispersed two years later – possibly to the old sailors home on Great Yarmouth seafront, [which was] later the town’s maritime museum where a banana and a pineapple were considered off-beat and peculiar.

Blue Plaque managing agency: Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Beat Service Society Individual Recognized: Daniel Boulter Physical Address: 21/22 Market Place Great Yarmouth, Norfolk UK NR30 1LY Web Address: Not listed

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