"Cohasset: In Port" (first floor) features the maritime history of Cohasset, from the earliest Indigenous people to the 19th-century community that supported shipbuilding and the fishing industry to today's recreational boaters.

Currently under construction, the second floor, "Cohasset: At Sea," explores both the challenges of life at sea for deep sea captains and crew and the women who sometimes accompanied them; chronicles the many shipwrecks off the Cohasset rocks; and showcases the Society's ship models and navigational instruments.

The Maritime Museum remains one of the earliest commercial maritime structures in the state. Samuel Bates, a deep sea captain and businessman, built the chandlery to outfit his own schooners as well as other local vessels.

In 1905, Clarence Walker Barron, a summer resident and the owner of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, and Barron’s Magazine, saved the chandlery (originally located on Border Street) from certain demolition by the town (an early effort to clean up the harbor) and used it as a boathouse and as an art studio.

Later, his granddaughter Jessie Bancroft Cox gave the two-story frame structure to the Society. In 1957, it was moved to its present location on Elm Street, to the east of the Society’s Captain John Wilson House, home of another seafarer.