Pioneer Museum
W WEDGWOOD BOWEN, Professor of Zoology and Director of the College Museum, has discovered that the Dartmouth College Museum is the oldest museum in continuous existence in the United States. The claim is based in part on a letter written October 26, 1772, by a young Yale graduate, David McClure, who helped establish the young "college in the wilderness." Other letters and historical notes found by Professor Bowen in the Baker Library archives have helped corroborate the McClure letter.
The McClure letter is addressed to Dartmouth's founder and first president, the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, and reads in part: "I have collected a few curious elephant bones found about six-hundred miles down the Ohio, for the young Museum of Dartmouth, which I shall forward to Philadelphia the first conveyance."
In a later diary note, dated September 13, 1772, McClure told of sending a "mammouth's grinder," weighing four pounds, four ounces, to Dartmouth. It had been found at Big Bone Lick, a fossil bed on the Kentucky River that was later to become famous.
Professor Bowen states in his booklet, APioneer Museum in the Wilderness, recently published, that as far as is known, the first natural history museum in America was founded by the American Philosophical Society in April 1770. However, it was later closed and the collections transferred to the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia in 1849.
Many of the Dartmouth Museum's early acquisitions came from New England merchant sea captains who were carrying the American flag all over the world in the heyday of the American maritime trade. Among them were such exotic items for those days as a stuffed "pinquin" from the Cape of Good Hope, the "slippers of a nabob of the Ganges" and a stuffed zebra.
The Museum's place in campus life was illustrated by one College historian in describing a serious fire that broke out in Dartmouth Hall in 1798. He noted the varying degrees of concern for the building's contents: "Professor Smith was calling out to save the library, while Professor Woodward pleaded for the air pump and the President at the same instant shouted to save the zebra."
