The Museum in Old Main, 1874-c. 1950

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"Museum Notes," North-Western College Chronicle, April 1890

 

The college’s museum was founded in 1874 and flourished on campus for more than forty years. This article is representative of many published in the Chronicle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about the museum’s latest acquisitions.

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The 1910 Spectrum yearbook featured a photo of a beaver from the museum’s collections.

 

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The Bird Room of the Museum, The Spectrum yearbook, 1911, page 21

This photo of the Bird Room published in the 1911 Spectrum yearbook is one of the only images we have of the museum that was once on the fourth floor of Old Main.

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"Alumna Sends Museum Pieces from Cameroon," The North Central College Chronicle, March 5, 1935, page 1

Missionaries educated at North Central College were frequent donors to the museum. The mixing of biological specimens with cultural artifacts was typical of museums at the time. It has only been recently that museums such as the Field Museum and the Smithsonian have recognized the importance of contextualizing these objects and working with the cultures from which they came to present them accurately.

The museum’s curator and chief collector, Professor L. M. Umbach, died in 1918. During a brief time of revitalization under a new biology professor, the museum’s herbarium was sold in 1927 to raise funds to fit up a new display space in Goldspohn Hall. While the museum would receive occasional donations, it remained in Old Main for nearly two more decades and was open less and less often.

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 "Engineers to Use Remodeled Top Floor of Old Main in Place of Old Museum Now in Goldspohn Hall," The North Central College Chronicle, September 19, 1945, page 1

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Nancy Thompson, "Girl Sleuth Finds Lost Museum in Gloomy Gray of Goldspohn," The North Central College Chronicle, March 9, 1949, page 8

This is the last mention of the museum in North Central College publications.

The Museum in Old Main, 1874-c. 1950