After years in storage, a Concord coach has returned to public display in the rotunda of the New Hampshire Historical Society’s building on Park Street.

This stagecoach was built around 1855 by the Abbot-Downing Co. and used on a mail line in Massachusetts until the 1890s. It was bought by the Boston & Maine Railroad, which put it on display in the Concord train station until that building was torn down in the late 1950s.

Boston & Maine donated the coach to the Historical Society, which put it in their Park Street building after driving it through downtown Concord pulled by a team of horses. It stayed there until 1994, when it moved to the Society’s exhibition galleries at Eagle Square. In 2014, as the Historical Society consolidated its presence at Park Street, the coach was put into storage, where it stayed until it was moved Aug. 18.

Brian Erickson of Contoocook, past president of the Abbot-Downing Historical Society, oversaw the move with assistance from the Society’s staff.

The Concord coach was taken apart, loaded onto a flatbed trailer and transported to the Park Street building, where it was reassembled. The society said that it “just barely fit through the building’s front doors.”

“This was a once-in-a-career move,” said Jonathan Olly, the Society’s Director of Museum Collections, noting that few people today know how to take apart and rebuild a Concord coach. The entire effort, he said, was months in the making.

The Concord coach, constructed by the Abbot-Downing Company of Concord, was one of New Hampshire’s chief products in the 19th century with an innovative design that gave it a smoother ride than other stagecoaches. It became the symbol of luxury horse-drawn travel and coaches were shipped as far away as New Zealand, South America and Africa, and were sought after for trips to the American West before railroads came along.