The Museum in Old Main, 1874-c. 1950
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.
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.
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.
This is the last mention of the museum in North Central College publications.