Twice as nice: Museum vying for repeat atop nation’s best list
USA Today’s 10Best Awards program annually highlights destinations nationwide and worldwide.
The best in the country — again.
At least that’s what the Acton Museum hopes will be the case when USA Today announces the top vote getter for the nation’s “Best Small-Town Museum.”
Acton’s was among 20 nominated small-town museums from which voters selected the top 10 last year. It has been nominated again. Acton finished first in 2025 and hopes to earn that spot this year.
USA Today’s 10Best Awards program annually highlights destinations nationwide and worldwide. The top 10 are scheduled to be revealed February 18.
“We are immensely proud,” says Claire Nelson, president of the museum’s board of governors. “This year has been an incredible celebration for all of us who steward Acton’s remarkable past, and as the nation commemorates its 250th, we are thrilled to continue to lead, gather, and educate by sharing our story with the world.”
The nomination came as the museum, which began as a private collection in the 1850s, continues to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution.
Acton’s was the only small-town museum in New England that made the USA Today list of 20 last year. This year’s group includes one other, the Lifesaving Museum in Hull.
Acton Museum stewards one of the largest and most significant collections of objects related to the battle at the North Bridge on April 19, 1775. Among them are an original lantern used as a signal in the belfry of the Old North Church in Boston during Paul Revere’s famed midnight ride, battlefield artifacts, paintings, historic clothing, furniture, ceramics, and a dramatic hour-by-hour account of the events of April 18 and 19, 1775.
‘Liberty, community, identity’
As part of its semiquincentennial commemorations, the museum is offering an expanded slate of exhibits, forums, and public programs. Special exhibits include last year’s Whose Revolution, and the current Transformed by Revolution, which explores what it was like to live in wartime Acton, when the town hosted Harvard College and became a hub of military supplies for the army in Boston. That exhibit runs through February 22.
A third exhibit is titled Revolutionary Legacies and will open in March. Through relics, souvenirs, documents, and contemporary works of art and poetry, it will illustrate how the legacy of April 19, 1775, has been remembered and reinterpreted over the last 250 years. The spotlight will be on “the evolving meanings of liberty, community, and identity,” according to the museum.
Upcoming forums include: An Evening with Historian Jill Lepore, who will speak on the U.S. Constitution on March 26; The American Revolution and the Fate of the World on April 13 with historian Rick Bell; and Revolutionary Legacies: Between the Lines, with Native American poet Bonney Hartley on April 23.
“We are deeply grateful to be a part of this extraordinary community that honors our shared past with such passion,” says Nelson.
You can cast a vote for Best Small-Town Museum at 10best.usatoday.com/awards/best-small-town-museum.
