The Delaware County and Haverford historical societies were among 17 institutions in five states recently to finally get back items that had been stolen decades ago, though that is not the only county connection to what might be the longest running string of museum thefts known.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Art Crime Team and law enforcement partners, including the Upper Merion Township Police Department and Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office, announced the return of 50 stolen historical artifacts during a repatriation ceremony, many of them weapons taken from museums stretching from Mississippi to Massachusetts.
Among the items returned to the county historical society were three handguns and a rifle from the early 1900s and World War I, said interim Director Paul Hewes, along with a sword belonging to the Buckley family that dates from the Civil War.
“They were stolen from DCHS in the 1970s when we were housed at Widener University,” Hewes said in an email. “There was also a bugle, a bullet pouch, a belt, and a knife with sheath, all from the Civil War.”
Haverford Historical Society Librarian Irene Coffey said that institution had been burglarized on April 14, 1979. She said it was hard to pin down exactly what was taken because the records from nearly 44 years listed things like “antler-handle knives” without any quantities.
Coffey estimated a couple of dozen items were stolen, many of which are still missing, but was happy to have gotten back a pewter plate and cup, two beautiful horn or antler cups and a combination candlestick/rush light that may be 200 to 300 years old.
“It’s very exciting, it really is,” she said. “The one horn is almost translucent — you can see the light coming through — and the rush light is a fascinating story for people to appreciate what people had to go through to get light in their homes.”
Coffey explained that the rush light used grasses cut from marshy areas dipped in beeswax or animal fat instead of expensive candles. The community had come together after the burglary to fund some replacement items, she said, but a new rush light was not among them.
Crimes come to light
All of the recovered items were from a long-cold investigation into connected museum thefts dating to at least 1968 that finally concluded in December with the sentencing of Michael K. Corbett, a Delaware man who had been indicted a year earlier in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for possession of stolen property.
Corbett, 73, pleaded guilty to the single charge in August and was sentenced Dec. 27 by U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney to serve one day in prison with three years of supervised release. Corbett was also ordered to pay a $65,000 fine and $100 special assessment.
A sentencing memorandum says the FBI served a search warrant on Corbett’s home in May 2017 and recovered numerous missing items, primarily firearms.
Corbett, who suffers from a number of health issues, admitted that he knew the items in his possession had been stolen from other states, and turned them over to police.
Corbett also assisted in recovering 14 additional items but was unable to locate two others he thought he could lay hands on: a powder horn stolen from the Wayne County Historical Society Museum in Honesdale in 1971 and an English holster pistol stolen from the Valley Forge Historical Society Museum in 1979 that had been in the possession of Corbett’s brother.
The indictment notes that several of the stolen pieces were stored for a period in 1995 inside a basement vault of a Wallingford home.
These include the candlestick and rush light, as well as several Kentucky rifles, an 1830 musket with bayonet stolen from the Old Stone Fort Museum in Schoharie, New York, and a Mississippi rifle from 1847 valued at approximately $30,000 that was stolen from the Beauvoir Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi.
USA Today reporter Matthew Korfhage detailed the arduous investigation in a piece published Monday, which was rekindled with a tip Upper Merion detectives received in 2009 that ended up being bogus but nonetheless put them on the right track.
Defense attorney Barry Gross said in that story that Corbett was a great fan of history and a collector who had acquired most of his cache of historic weapons from flea markets and estate sales. Corbett made a living dealing in antiques for most of his life but never intended to sell the historic weapons in his trove, Gross said, only to “have them.”
The government presented no evidence that Corbett was the actual thief in any of these cases, but Assistant U.S. Attorney K.T. Newton did note in the USA Today article that a number of items stolen from the same museum at the same time were found in Corbett’s home and that he had previously been charged with burglary from the Middlesex County Historical Society in Connecticut.
“The DCHS staff is grateful to the District Attorney’s office of Montgomery County and the FBI for their efforts in locating and returning these items to us,” said Hewes. “We hope to have an opportunity to display these items for the public to see, and we thank the people of Delaware County entrusting us to be good stewards for their history and culture.”
Coffey said the Haverford Township Historical Society likewise plans to display the recovered items when it is next open to the public during its annual Heritage Festival on June 4 at Nitre Hall, 1682 Karakung Drive.
