Museum of Natural History

Also called the “Cabinet,” “Museum,” and “Biological Museum,” The Museum of Natural History was a collection of naturalia or natural history specimens including minerals, skeletons, taxidermized and live animals and insects, and anthropological artifacts displayed for study.

The Cabinet

The Natural History Museum in Seabury Hall circa 1895. Visible in the foreground are specimens from the 1879 Ward Collection: a plaster megatherium (giant ground sloth) with Rhomaleosaurus cramptoni mounted on the wall; in front of it is an icthyosaurus longipes encased in stone. At bottom left is a horse skeleton. Photo credit: Trinity College Archives

Trinity's first president, Thomas Church Brownell had been Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Union College (Schenectady, New York), a school which was “the pioneer in offering degrees in scientific studies,” particularly Natural Sciences. Brownell envisioned Natural Sciences as being an important part of Trinity's curriculum as well.

The original Natural History Museum was housed on the third floor of Seabury Hall in a room called the Cabinet from 1825 until 1878. It is unclear whether the term “cabinet” comes from the term “Cabinet of Curiosity”; the room was also was used for college dances, examinations, and prize speaking, though it was “small, and cluttered with museum cases.”

Professor Frederick Hall, the first chair of Chemistry and Mineralogy (1824-1828), “brought to the College his valuable collection of minerals and this provided the nucleus of the Washington College Mineral Cabinet.” During his time teaching, Hall communed and traded with other mineralogists around the world to receive specimens for Trinity's collections. A snippet from an 1833 Darby and Dwight's Gazetteer describes the museum as a “mineralogical cabinet,” demonstrating that geology was initially the primary focus.

At the same time, Trinity established a botanical garden on the College grounds, for which donations of seeds and plants were solicited.

When Dr. Hall resigned from Trinity in 1828, he took his extensive collections with him. His successor, John Smyth Rogers, M.D., revived the Cabinet during his time as Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy, but resigned in 1838 and again, took the collection with him, leaving the Mineral Cabinet “very destitute.”

The College at the time was experiencing financial difficulties and “the Trustees did not feel able to purchase replenishments,” so they asked the Associate Alumni to organize a way to restore the Cabinet. The Associate Alumni in turn passed a resolution in 1839 urging fellow alumni to send specimens of minerals and natural history to the College under care of Professor Abner Jackson, who had succeeded Rogers as Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy.

“The challenge met with immediate response,” with alumni immediately sending collections to the College. ¹⁾ By the end of 1869, however, the College found itself with an embarrassment of riches, with students writing to the Tablet to complain: “what adequate reason there can be for allowing minerals and curiosities to remain unpacked and unassigned fitting places upon the cabinet shelves is beyond our comprehension.” ²⁾

Seabury Hall

In 1878, the Cabinet's collections moved to the “lower floor” ³⁾ of Seabury Hall as it and Jarvis Hall were the only constructed buildings on the new Summit campus, though a “natural history museum” was listed as a desired feature in the campus plan designed by William Burges. The Board of Fellows encouraged its construction during the 1880s, among other buildings, though it would take several decades to come to fruition.

Henry Augustus Ward, the founder of Ward's Natural Science, exhibited his extensive Cabinet at the City Hotel in Hartford for several weeks in November 1879. The collections, spanning thousands of skeletons, fossils, plaster casts, and minerals, attracted great attention in Hartford and at Trinity. As a result, President Thomas Ruggles Pynchon and Professor of Geology H. Carrington Bolton decided that “an effort be made to procure the collection.” ⁴⁾ Trinity alumni and trustees, along with members of the Hartford community, raised money to purchase the specimens for Trinity, valued at $6,000, which came to be called the Ward Collection. On January 28, 1880, the new Ward Collection was opened “to students and the public” for the first time. Bolton appointed Mr. Louis C. Washburn, Class of 1881, as curator. Bolton also decided that moving forward, the collections would be open to the public on Wednesdays from 2 to 5 p.m.

Among the collection's highlights included the oft-photographed casts of Megatherium Cuviers (giant ground sloth), Glyptodon Clavipes (great armadillo), and the Colossochelys Atlas (giant prehistoric tortoise), plesiosaurus cramptoni (Rhomaleosaurus), and thousands of other prehistoric copies created by Ward of famous originals. The collection also included “modern” animals, such as a horse, elephant, llama, and other skeletons, fossils, and taxidermized creatures.

The Hartford Courant wrote in May 1880 that before the Ward Collection, “the college possessed no material for illustrating the sciences of natural history…save a number of shells and a few minerals.” It also falsely attributed the College's ichthyosaurus fossil to Ward. A rebuttal, written the following week by a Trinity alumnus, attested that Trinity did have valuable teaching collections as early as 1826. “The skeleton of the ichthyosaurus, a real fossil, spoken of in your notice as the most valuable relic of the new collection, came from the old cabinet having been 'purchased in Paris and presented by one of the college,' and Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins' pictures of the extinct animals were constantly before our eyes in one of the old lecture-rooms, affording us both entertainment and instruction.” ⁵⁾

Boardman Hall of Natural History

After nearly two decades and a fundraiser that was stalled by an economic depression, Boardman Hall of Natural History was completed in July 1900 and the Natural History department and collections were moved to the building.

In June 1901, students solicited alumni donations for the large new building, stating that “the material which came out of the old museum, though good in its way, is almost lost in our present large quarters.” ⁶⁾ The article encouraged alumni living around the country to take “expeditions” to secure material for the museum by way of visiting “the Indian tribes that still have some of the original Indian weapons and tools, the bows and arrows, spears, hatchets, clothes, war dress, cooking utensils and the implements for playing games which were once very numerous…Let us have some of them for Trinity before they are all gone.” ⁷⁾ The article goes on to list all of the indigenous nations from which artifacts were desired.

Professor Charles Lincoln Edwards, B.S., was head of the Natural History Department in 1901 when Karl Wilhelm Genthe, Ph.D., from Leipzig, arrived at Trinity as his understudy and the J.P. Morgan Professor of Natural History. Genthe “served as curator of the museum collection which occupied so large a portion of Boardman Hall.” Edwards floated the idea to attain a schooner for the department, “fit it up with all the modern appliances for sounding, dredging, etc.,” for use as “A Floating Laboratory for the Department of Natural History of Trinity College.” This idea, however, did not come to fruition.

The Natural History Museum in Boardman Hall circa 1905. Photo credit: Trinity College Archives

The Natural History museum originally spanned all three floors of the building: “the first floor is given to the Vertebrates, with sections for fish, amphibia, reptiles, birds and mammals. The second floor contains the invertebrates and a section for Anthropology, while the third floor is devoted to Geology and Botany.” ⁸⁾ The collections varied from live animals to skeletons and taxidermized mammals, birds, and aquatic life; insects, plants, fossils, models, anthropological artifacts from indigenous nations in America and around the world, embryos, and human remains. There were even “microscopes in cabinets focused so a viewer outside a museum case could see through the microscope.” The museum, while primarily a teaching collection where students would view and study the specimens hands-on in their life sciences courses, was also a local phenomenon, opened to the public several times a week beginning in 1901.

The addition of several new collections in 1947, which encompassed thousands of items, posed a problem for the small building and staff, who neither had the resources nor time to organize and label them, on top of the existing collections. In 1949, William R. Eblin, a teacher of general science at Kingswood [Kingswood-Oxford] School in West Hartford, began designing exhibits for the Sage and other bird collections. Eblin's interest was in arranging the birds in interesting ways as to include their natural environment, nests, and eggs, as well as re-identifying the birds according to “modern nomenclature,” as terms used in the collection's development were by then outdated. However, lack of time and money “foiled a noble goal.”

In 1950, a Committee on the Museum was formed to attempt to rehabilitate it. The Museum collections were moved to occupy only the first floor, as other departments continued to move into the now-outmoded building. In 1955, students wrote in a Trinity Tripod article that the Natural History Museum, though well-attended by Trinity students as well as school classes and scouting troops throughout the state, suffered from “disorganized, dirty and uncatalogued displays” which rendered the museum “unattractive” to visitors, especially new students. The same article asserted that a Guidebook for the Natural History Museum was in the works, created by Professor Randolph Chapman of the Geology Department.

By the mid-1960s, Boardman Hall accommodated departments including the Fine Arts, ROTC, and Connecticut Educational Television Channel 24. The museum collections were removed to the basement of Boardman Hall to make room for Channel 24, which took up the entire first floor. Students and faculty felt that without new accommodations built with the future in mind, Trinity's science programs would suffer, and so serious plans were put in place to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art Life Sciences Center. As a result, the museum collections were dismantled with the exception of “selected items of teaching value to be stored in a pre-designated room in the new building.”

Between 1966 and 1968, Boardman Hall was locked up, and the museum's extensive collections quietly disappeared, an enduring Trinity mystery. According to Life Sciences Professor Dr. J. Wendell Burger, “the balance of the biological material was legally transferred to the Children's Museum and more especially to the University of Connecticut. They were stunned by the volume of their inheritance.”

Today, a small number of human and animal skeletons remain in room 308 of the Life Sciences Building; many of them appear to be from the Ward collection, including the elephant, horse, and llama. They are used as teaching implements, in very much the same way that students would have studied them over the past 200 years.

Collections

1824: Professor Frederick Hall, the first chair of Chemistry and Mineralogy (1824-1828), brought a valuable collection with him to campus. These were the first collections in the Cabinet. During his time teaching, Hall communed and traded with other mineralogists around the world and received specimens for Trinity.
1825: Commodore Isaac Hull, father-in-law of Dr. Jarvis and then United States Minister to Chile, sent minerals from Peru and Chile, beautiful shells and corals from South America, implements of war, articles of dress and other curiosities from the islands of the Pacific, and “some very curious ancient vessels taken from the graves of the aboriginal Peruvians.” The Honorable J. R. Poinsett sent minerals from the mountains of Guanexuato in Mexico, and an anonymous donor presented a collection of minerals “from the interior of Germany.” ⁹⁾
1828: When Dr. Hall resigned from Trinity in 1828, he took his extensive collections with him.
1838: John Smyth Rogers, M.D., revived the Cabinet during his time as Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy, but resigned in 1838 and again, took the collection with him, leaving the Mineral Cabinet “very destitute.”
1839: The Trustees plead with alumni to send specimens for the Cabinet, as the College had no funds to purchase them. “The challenge met with immediate response, and the Reverend C. J. Ives of Matagorda, Texas, sent 'a box containing several curious specimens of the Natural History of Texas.' Others sent mineral collections, and the Trustees gratefully acknowledged the gifts.” ¹⁰⁾
1868: The College receives gifts of gold and silver ore from the Rev. A.B. Jennings, Class of 1861, and J.H. Goodspeed, Class of 1866.
1878: The museum collections move to Seabury Hall.
1879: Henry Augustus Ward's collections of natural history, on display in Hartford at the City Hotel, are secured for the College by “subscriptions of several of the trustees, gentlemen of the city, and some graduates of Trinity” as “College funds are not available at present.” These collections included “several thousand skeletons,” plaster casts of fossils, and minerals. Professor Ward attended Williams College and the Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, where he was an assistant of Louis Agassiz, and subsequently traveled and studied across the world, assembling his natural history collection. In 1860 he returned to Rochester, where he was born, and founded Ward's Natural Science in 1862, a company which collected and sold natural history specimens for pedagogical use, and which still exists today. He became a professor at the University of Rochester in 1865, and died in Buffalo, New York in 1906.
1880: Mr. W. Walter Webb donates a collection of extinct shark teeth, attained via the Ashley River near Charleston, South Carolina.
1901: Colonel William C. Skinner donates “a valuable [anthropology] collection of stone implements gathered from the Indian natives of the San Catalina Islands, Pacific Ocean” which included stone oil lamps, discoidal stones for hammers and clubs, mortar and pestles, and “an almost complete skeleton taken from one of the Indian burial grounds.” J.J. Seinsoth donates a number of stuffed animals, and Mrs. Henry Ferguson donates skins of Australian marsupials. Mrs. Charles Coffing Beach donates the valuable and extensive “James G. Batterson Collection of Minerals,” collected by Batterson, the president of the Travelers Insurance Company. The collection also contains “rare kinds of shells, such as the Nautilus and Argonauta, and a very large mass of sulphur crystals from Mount Ætna. Sponges, corals, fossils and specimens of Chinese carving in sand-stone complete the collection.” Professor Riggs presents “a collection of Indian war-clubs and a pipe of peace.” ¹¹⁾
1902: Mrs. C.H. Hoadley donates “a collection of beautiful hand colored plates of all forms of animal, insect and plant life made in 1850 by William Roderick Lawrence. The artist was 'the great grandson of John Lawrence, the treasurer of the colony and state of Connecticut.'” ¹²⁾
1903: Herbert D. Goodale gifts cases containing “The Life Histories of Insects,” which include over 2,000 specimens, to the Museum.
1904: A series of “rare and beautiful” insects is donated by Professor Henry Ferguson.
1912: Over $200 [about $6,000 today] worth of gold nugget, gold thread, and platinum ore is stolen from the Boardman Hall cases. This ore was part of the 1910 Caswell Collection of Rare Minerals, which had a $10,000 value [$300,000 today].
1913: The Museum contains the plaster cast of a mastodon skull (the original of which resides in the Ward Collection in Boston), the plaster cast of a deinotherium jawbone, and original mastodon tusk. These likely originated from the Ward Collection acquired in 1879.
1917: A collection of aedes aegypti, boll weevils, elm leaf beetles, and other “insects of medical and economic interest” as well as “ferns of New England” are donated by W.A. Lorenz of Hartford; an edible and poisonous mushroom chart is donated by Dr. W. A. Murrill of New York, and a mounted moose head is gifted from Leonard A. Ellis '98 of San Diego, California.
1921: Dr. Robert Mosely Yergason, Class of 1908, gifts the Biology Department “a collection of embryological and anatomical specimens to be used for demonstration purposes in premedical courses.” They are a series of 17 preserved human embryos and placentas, ranging from very early pregnancy to pre-to-mid gestation. C.E. Hadley, a graduate student and a teacher of biology at Hartford High School, gifts the museum “some specimens of aquatic insects.”
1947: The Natural History Museum gains several prominent collections, primarily of birds, on loan from the Wadsworth Atheneum; these collections originated in the now-defunct Hartford Scientific Society and included the Dr. William Wood Collection of Connecticut Native and Migratory Birds, the John H. Sage Collection of Birds, birdskins, and other ornithological material, Trowbridge Collection of Eggs, and the Neff Collection of bird nests.
1966-1968: The museum is dismantled. The Sage Collection of Birds is transferred to the University of Connecticut's State Museum of Natural History, and other materials, per Wendell Burger, may have been sent to the Children's Museum of Hartford (today, West Hartford) and Yale Peabody Museum. Trinity retains a small sample of its teaching skeletons which include horse, elephant, llama, .
1971: Boardman Hall is demolished.

Every age has its standard educational model. In the late nineteenth century, it was the Hall of Natural History. This consisted of a museum of biological, paleontological, and geological specimens integrated with or conjoined to teaching facilities. These Halls were of necessity commodious buildings since elephants, stuffed eagles, and war canoes take space. Today, older colleges curse the accumulation of decades and wonder fitfully what to do with stored remnants. But one should not lose sight of the fact that these museums represented, for their day, educational progress. They were the visual aids of their day and did make explicit to the viewer the richness and diversity of the earth and its life forms. The concept of evolution was then a revolutionary idea which finally gave coherence to life. It is not that a museum is an outmoded concept, but rather that to keep them fresh and dynamic is beyond the financial resources of most institutions. ¹³⁾

Ethics

The contents of the Natural History Museum present a number of ethical concerns which would not have been considered during the 19th century, including the use of human remains (skeletons, skulls, etc.) as teaching tools and the “acquisition” of cultural heritage materials removed from their community of origin.

At least two collections given to the Museum from Commodore Isaac Hull, mentioned earlier, and Colonel William C. Skinner, Class of 1876, included anthropological objects: clothing, weapons, stoneware, funerary objects, and human remains. These cultural heritage items were possibly removed without the permission or consent of the communities in an all-too-common looting practice that persists today. In both collections, the items taken originated from the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Islands. However, there are likely other items acquired for the museum besides these.

Today, the International Council of Museums has a written code of ethics for natural history museums, including instructions on how to care for, display, and store cultural heritage items and human remains, as well as steps required for ethically collecting objects.

Repatriation is appropriate where objects still confer a spiritual and/or cultural significance, or where they can be irrefutably demonstrated as being stolen. All material being considered for repatriation, even unprovenanced material, must be properly documented with respect to the repatriation process. Any repatriation that does take place must be undertaken with the full knowledge and agreement of all interested parties and comply with the legislative and institutional requirements of all parties involved. ¹⁴⁾