Forbes House Museum

The Forbes House Museum is a historic house museum atop Milton Hill, with views of the Boston skyline, the Neponset River marshes and Boston Harbor. It chronicles an entrepreneurial American family and draws on the Forbes legacy of entrepreneurship, social action and philanthropy to encourage conversation about civic engagement and cultural awareness. Its exhibitions have included “Opium: The Business of Addiction,” which opened in 2022.

Architect Isaiah Rogers designed the Greek Revival mansion in 1833 for widow Margaret Perkins Forbes and her four daughters. It was an engineering marvel for its time, with central heating and indoor plumbing, and partly a memorial to Thomas Tunno, the oldest Forbes brother, who drowned in a typhoon off China. The younger brothers, Robert Bennet and John Murray, supported the family through the China Trade and other businesses and promoted abolition and the Emancipation Proclamation.

What to Know

• The museum was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.
• Nearly seven acres of gardens, mature trees and lawns are open to visitors from dawn to dusk.
• House tours are offered by advance reservation on select days.
• The site stands on the traditional land of the Neponset band of the Indigenous Massachusett people.