True Tales from Canton’s Past: Collecting History

A WWI era tank rumbles through Canton Center as part of a victory loan parade. (From the Daniel C. Keleher Collection at the Canton Public Library)

On the subject of collecting, I have had plenty of experience and much of it began at a fairly young age. I must have been in the fourth grade, perhaps as young as 9 when I picked up my first piece of Canton memorabilia. It came from a classmate: a small round box with a simple hinge and a Spanish gentleman on the cover. Danny, my pal, lived near Joseph Warren Revere’s house on Plymouth Street, and the dingy artifact was traded for less than $5. The accompanying provenance was simply Danny’s word that he had found the box while digging around behind his house. For me, this was a treasure, and in the folklore of my family it became known as Paul Revere’s Snuffbox. It isn’t.

The box is still with me, all these years later in my “collection.” The very idea that I have a collection brings a smile to my face as I write this story. Some of my favorite things to collect have always had a connection to Canton. The postcard collecting was an outgrowth of my travels with my wife, Patricia, when we would go into antique stores and rummage through the bins of paper and ephemera, looking for anything that came from or was heading to Canton or Ponkapoag. We still find ourselves flipping through postcards when we travel. The source of this interest came when, as a boy, I had seen countless local postcards when they were exhibited at the Canton Historical Society.

Dan Keleher was an avid collector of postcards — when you thought of Canton postcards, you always thought of his collection. Keleher had been the police chief in Canton from 1965-1971, and he always had plenty of stories to share as a lifelong resident of the town. As a member of the Canton Historical Commission and Historical Society, he would bring an envelope to meetings and show off his latest acquisitions. Before there was eBay, the hunt for postcards was pretty much limited to weekend drives to paper shows and hand-sorting through cardboard boxes full of thousands of cards in order to find the one hidden gem.

It was not just the postcards that were intriguing; it was the stories that Keleher told when the cards were handed around. Never one to let facts get in the way of a good story, Keleher’s tales would become larger than life with the embellishment of time. As for his collection, Keleher lived in a tidy house on Norfolk Street, and at the back of the house was a small room where he had placed file cabinets and a desk. It was here that Keleher worked to make the bridge from his collection of postcards and photographs to stories.

There was seemingly little order to the visual chaos of folders and binders that Keleher built up over time. In fact, the order was all his; like all collectors he had a system that worked for him. We both shared a love for the railroad, and in fact the trains streaked through his lot line behind the house with amazing frequency and a rumble that rattled the windows. He had plenty of images of the Viaduct, of Canton Junction, and of the factories that benefited from the traffic. In his retirement, he was asked by Beth Erickson to write a column for this paper, which would capture his stories and share them with a wider audience. The column was a hit, and Keleher took the writing seriously. Typewriter clacking, pen scratching, and always hunting down another story, it was a welcomed addition to the news of the day. Suddenly, Keleher opened a door to old timers who had forgotten about the Fireworks Factory Explosion, Briggs’ Billiards Room, or the Human Fly. To new residents, the stories were fresh material for why Canton is so great both culturally and historically.

Keleher wrote his “Historical Perspectives” column for ten years, a treasure trove of stories that endure, connecting us with the past. After he died at age 93 in 2006, his family lovingly sifted through the paper and artifacts. The collection itself is now part of the Bolster Local History Room at the Canton Public Library. Keleher’s children generously found a way to donate the material so that it can be preserved for future enjoyment and research. More than 1,800 individual items, in 34 boxes, have been catalogued and referenced as part of an electronic Wiki developed by the library. Today, the Daniel C. Keleher Collection continues to be organized as a fine resource for local history.

Another avid collector of Canton’s history was Peter Sarra. Sarra lived in a large house on Sherman Street, and over the years, as he gathered the resources to buy items for his collection, he amassed a house full of memorabilia. I visited Sarra often, and like all collectors, he loved to share the items and the stories to anyone willing to spend an afternoon.

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