Rare 19th-Century American Menu Collection Donated to AAS
WORCESTER, Mass. — September, 2026 —
https://www.americanantiquarian.org/
The American Antiquarian Society (AAS) has received a gift of more than 2,600 nineteenth-century American menus and related ephemera from Henry Voigt, a longtime collector and authority on American culinary history. Spanning the years 1841-1900, the collection includes menus, invitations, seating charts, and trade cards from restaurants, hotels, railroads, steamships, and private dining events across the United States and beyond. The donation significantly expands the AAS’s existing menu holdings and strengthens its capacity to preserve the culinary, social, and cultural history of the period.
The collection’s range is remarkable. Among its highlights are menus from New York City’s elegant Astor House, which maintained separate dining rooms for men and women; a birch-bark menu from the New Park Hotel in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan; and an elaborate French-language luncheon menu from ‘Iolani Palace, home of Hawaiian King Kalakaua, dated December 28, 1875. Additional treasures include the bill of fare from President Lincoln’s second inaugural ball in March 1865, six game dinner menus from Chicago’s Grand Pacific Hotel covering 1877-1885, and thirty-one railroad menus from President Benjamin Harrison’s 1891 cross-country tour. Two surviving copies of the lavishly produced menus from Taylor’s Saloon in New York, the foremost women’s dining establishment of the mid-nineteenth century, rank among the rarest items in the gift.
“The variety of menus in this collection not only highlights culinary trends during the nineteenth century, but also documents class and gender distinctions, political ambitions, technological developments, and patterns of travel and entertainment,” said Christine Morris, curator of graphic arts at AAS. Voigt, who lives in Wilmington, Delaware, began collecting menus in the late 1990s and has published research on his blog, The American Menu, for the past sixteen years. In 2023, he curated the exhibition A Century of Dining Out: The American Story in Menus, 1841-1941 at the Grolier Club in New York City. He is an elected member of both the Grolier Club and the AAS, and a recipient of the Ephemera Society of America’s Maurice Rickards Award.
The American Antiquarian Society is located at 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, and holds the world’s largest and most accessible collection of original printed, handwritten, and visual sources from before 1900 in what is now the United States. The library is open to anyone with projects or interests related to the collections, and admission is free. Hours are Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Tuesday from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. For more information, visit americanantiquarian.org.
