America on Exhibit

Natural history was the first focus of museum life in America. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by the French philosophe Comte de Buffon’s denigration of New World flora and fauna as “smaller” and “weaker” than Old World specimens, instructed Lewis and Clark to collect animal and plant life on their western expedition. In the large foyer of Monticello, he displayed animal skins, skeletons, and plant specimens that proclaimed the New World’s vitality.

Charles Willson Peale, preeminent portrait painter of the Founding Fathers, was also the acknowledged founder of museums in America. Like Jefferson, Peale was fascinated by the New World environment. And like Jefferson as well, he shared the 18th century’s view of the New World as a virtual tabula rasa of civilization compared with Europe and wondered: What came before? What are the building blocks of this vast continent?

Peale began to collect and display specimens from western expeditions at his Philadelphia home. The collection burgeoned, and in 1802, his “museum” took over the top floors of Independence Hall. The Quadruped Room was populated by specimens of bigness (bison, elk, and grizzlies); the Long Room had over a thousand bird varieties, insects, minerals, fossils, and coins; the Marine Room had a huge hammerhead shark and various sea creatures. All were carefully catalogued and intended to impart an understanding of science to Everyman.

The atmosphere was meant to be both uplifting and entertaining: Peale charged admission for the public to listen to learned professors giving lectures, but he also installed such crowd-pleasers as “moving pictures,” semi-transparent and lighted moving panels depicting Western landscapes that delighted audiences. He was a showman and clearly understood the idea of box office appeal.

When Peale died in 1827, his sons took the museum over until 1842, when it was sold to P. T. Barnum. Barnum’s American Museum was a popular midcentury New York attraction that displayed (in his words) a conglomeration of “industrious fleas .  .  . jugglers, living tableaux, gypsies.” Barnum explained in his autobiography, “It was my monomania to make the Museum the town wonder. .  .  . [M]y ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated.”

But at the same time that Barnum was creating museums as entertainment, a more serious approach to displaying “lost worlds” was emerging in the scientific community, and the story of Yale’s Peabody Museum was an important catalyst to this movement. George Peabody was a philanthropist who believed in supporting education. He had already helped fund Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology when his nephew, the Yale professor of paleontology O.C. Marsh, convinced him in 1866 to donate $150,000 to establish a Yale Museum of Natural History.

Marsh was a colorful figure whose specimen collections would form the core of the Yale museum. His important collecting began in 1870, when he took a group of graduate students on a western expedition to Nebraska, where they uncovered an ancient boneyard. Over the next decade, fossil remains of early dinosaurs, horses, and camels would be shipped back to Yale by the railroad-car-load. Marsh’s discovery of what he called “birdlike Reptiles, and Reptilian birds” helped link birds to dinosaurs and bolstered the idea of evolutionary theory that Charles Darwin had promulgated in On the Origin of Species (1859). In fact, Darwin wrote in an 1880 letter that Marsh’s discoveries “afforded the best support to the theory of evolution” since his book had been published.

George Bird Grinnell, who had accompanied Marsh on that 1870 expedition, went on to play a major role in the growth of America’s conservation movement. In his own western travels as natural history editor of Forest and Stream magazine, Grinnell noted the disappearance of the buffalo as the frontier expanded westward. He became a leading advocate for national measures to protect the buffalo from slaughter, and for legislation that would bar uncontrolled mining across the Western landscape. He partnered with Theodore Roosevelt, then a New York state assemblyman, to found the Boone and Crockett Club—a group of wealthy East Coast hunters who sought to protect Western wildlife.

The Peabody Museum sponsored an 1877 expedition to Colorado and Wyoming that discovered “miraculous” dinosaur finds: Huge skeletal remains of Jurassic creatures were unearthed, including the “thunder lizard” Marsh named Brontosaurus. These incredible discoveries revolutionized field and collecting procedures, generated a startling growth in paleontology as a science, and stimulated great public interest.

The popularity of these dinosaur discoveries also precipitated an infamous Gilded Age scientific feud known as the Bone Wars, a cutthroat rivalry between the Peabody’s Marsh and the Philadelphia paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. As Richard Conniff explains, both men used their wealth and influence to finance competing expeditions to procure fossils. By 1892, the “Great Dinosaur Rush” launched by their feud had led to the discovery of over 140 new dinosaur species, 32 of which remain valid today.

In the 20th century, the Peabody Museum was in the forefront of creating displays that helped museumgoers understand how these skeletal creatures had lived. The museum’s barren Great Hall became the canvas for a muralist named Rudolph F. Zallinger, who created an “entire saga of time” spanning 300 million years of life on Earth. He created many other murals to contextualize the story and is perhaps best-known for the 1965 Time-Life book Early Man, which contained a foldout in which Zallinger depicted “The March of Progress” from early Pliopithecus to Homo sapiens.

The Peabody Museum’s fame was even utilized in the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), featuring Cary Grant as a mild-mannered paleontologist, Katharine Hepburn as a daffy heiress, and a leopard named Baby. The plot involves the search for an “intercostal clavicle” (a nonexistent bone in real life) and Cary Grant’s assembly of a Brontosaurus-like skeleton similar to one displayed at the Peabody Museum.

One of the leading figures in the Peabody’s postwar history was S. Dillon Ripley, an ornithologist who combined scholarship with a prodigous talent for raising money. He became director of the Peabody Museum in 1959 and stayed for five years before becoming secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1964. Public access and public education were key elements in the Ripley mantra, and as Conniff writes, “he wanted the Peabody to be a source of excitement and to be talked about.” Ripley’s time at the Peabody gave him a forum for developing “his grand worldview and his sense of mission for museums everywhere.”

At the Smithsonian, Ripley would add eight museums and seven research facilities and, along with J. Carter Brown at the National Gallery of Art, create a dynamic “new museum age” rooted in scholarship but enlivened with showmanship. Explaining his philosophy in a 1984 talk at the Peabody Museum, Ripley said that “something about the word ‘museum’ tends to make people feel very slightly dreary, but this is not a dreary museum and all museums, with my thinking, should be places of life and enjoyment and gaiety and fun because that is what education is all about.”

Amy Henderson is a historian emerita at the National Portrait Gallery.