In the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia was already home to the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Museum established by Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), and a thriving medical community. But the academy founders, members of the city’s growing professional class, felt excluded and poorly represented by the city’s established elite institutions. For its first home, the young academy rented rooms above a milliner at 94 N. Second Street that included meeting space, a reading room, and a room to keep their growing specimen collection. The first major collection acquired by the academy, a large collection of minerals purchased from prominent local geologist and congressman Adam Seybert (1773–1825) in the summer of 1812, provided the basis for the first series of lectures for the members.

While the academy’s founders considered the creation and diffusion of knowledge about the natural world important for its own sake, they also enthusiastically embraced the idea that the study of natural science built character in urban young men and was a patriotic duty that would place the sciences in the young United States on an equal level with those in the Old World. Even though membership was restricted to only those people nominated by two current members, the academy continued to grow. By 1817 it became clear that if it were to take part in the international exchange of scientific theories and discoveries as well as specimens, the academy would need to publish a journal. Scottish-born geologist and academy member William Maclure (1763–1840), a generous donor of money as well as specimens and a large number of volumes for the library, championed the idea most strongly. He was so dedicated to public science education and cooperation that he bought the academy a printing press and housed it in his own home where the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences was published for the first few years. The Journal, and later the Proceedings, became important natural science journals.

A History of Expeditions

In 1812, a mere month after its founding, the academy sponsored its first “expedition” to visit the zinc mines in nearby Perkiomen, Pennsylvania. As it grew in size and prestige it organized, sponsored, and staffed more expeditions, often in collaboration with the federal government and other institutions. Army topographer Major Stephen Harriman Long (1784–1864) led one such expedition in 1819 to the Upper Mississippi Valley, which included academy members Thomas Say and Titian Peale (1799–1885), to study and collect the area’s flora and fauna.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the academy’s amateur naturalists gave way to a more professional membership, reflecting a larger trend in American science. The academy continued to collect specimens from around the world through trade, purchase, donation, and sponsorship of expeditions of exploration. In 1834, it cosponsored an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia River with the American Philosophical Society. In 1838 academy members Charles Pickering (1805–78) and Titian Peale, along with several corresponding members, joined the four-year Wilkes Expedition, which explored and surveyed the Pacific Ocean and adjacent land.

The academy’s collection grew quickly throughout the nineteenth century, forcing it to move five times to progressively larger buildings. In 1840 the institution moved to a new, fireproof building at Broad and Sansom Streets where it became one of the most modern, best-equipped natural history museums in the United States. It boasted, among other holdings, the world’s largest ornithological collection. The academy made its final move in 1876, constructing a new building at the corner of Race and Nineteenth Streets, a remote location that later became the heart of Philadelphia’s cultural district. The academy’s location was further enhanced by the creation of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway as the showpiece of the City Beautiful movement in 1917.

A Bent Toward Paleontology

Paleontological work preoccupied the academy during the late nineteenth century, thanks to men such as Joseph Leidy (1823–91) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97).  Leidy trained as a medical doctor, taught anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and later Swarthmore College, and was a curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences from 1846 until his death. He described some of the first dinosaur fossils in America and led the field of vertebrate paleontology for most of the nineteenth century. Leidy did some collecting locally, but relied largely on field naturalists such as Cope and Ferdinand Hayden (1829–87) to send fossils from the American West.

Following early successes by men such as Leidy and Hayden, the field of paleontology exploded, and the academy was at its center, not always for the better. The most brilliant and controversial of these later scientists was Edward Drinker Cope. A student of Leidy’s, Cope was talented and ambitious, and after the Civil War he embarked on a number of expeditions of the American West that sent huge numbers of paleontological specimens back to the academy. Unfortunately, Cope maneuvered himself into a petty, and sometimes violent, feud over access to fossil excavation sites, interpretations of specimens, and prestige with fellow paleontologist O.C. Marsh (1831–99) of Yale University, a feud dubbed by many historians as the “Bone Wars.” This feud had important consequences for the academy and Joseph Leidy. Outlandish stories of the feud published in the popular press sullied the academy’s reputation, and Leidy, disgusted by Cope’s behavior and tired of being caught in the middle of the feud, eventually abandoned paleontology in the West and turned his attention to other projects and helping local organizations, including serving as the president of the faculty and head of the museum at the Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia.

Twentieth Century and Beyond

By the turn of the century, study of natural science began to shift away from museums to university biology labs. However, the academy continued to sponsor expeditions to the Arctic, Asia, Africa, and Central America and conduct original research in several fields. Years before ecology, pollution, and conservation became topics of public debate, in 1947 the academy embarked on a research agenda to study aquatic ecosystems through its Department of Limnology, and in 1948 it established an Environmental Research Division. Throughout the twentieth century, the academy conducted important research in ecology and biodiversity on its own and in partnership with other area institutions.

In 2011 the academy became the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University when it formed an official affiliation with Drexel University. This partnership created a bridge between university-based biological research and museum-based natural history collecting. The relationship combined the institutions’ educational missions and resources and enhanced their ability to collaborate on natural and environmental science research. The affiliation facilitated, among other projects, creation of a joint Department of Biodiversity, Earth, and Environmental Science (BEES) dedicated to research and education in the fields of environmental science, ecology and conservation, biodiversity and evolution, geoscience, and paleontology.

The mission and motto of this new department, “Field Experience, Early and Often,” echoed the interests and ambitions of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences. By remaining true to the vision of its founders, America’s oldest institution of natural history remained relevant into the twenty-first century.

Matthew A. White is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the University of Florida. His dissertation, “Patronage, Public Science, and Free Education: William Wagner and The Wagner Free Institute of Science 1855–1929,” was supported by grants from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Philadelphia). He is also a museum professional with over twenty-five years of experience in museums of science, technology, and history, and is the Director of Education at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Postal Museum. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The AAMP, originally called the Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, was part of a larger shift toward creating institutions for Black art and history collections. Although an independent 501(c) (3) nonprofit since its formal inception in 1975, the museum was unique because of the city’s role in its founding and its creation as part of the United States Bicentennial. As part of the 1976 celebrations, the museum responded to the civil rights movements of the 1960s, which raised awareness of inequality in the legal treatment of African Americans and in the treatment of Black history in narratives of the past. While telling a more diverse and accurate history of the United States and Philadelphia, a Black history exhibit at the Bicentennial also had the potential to promote pride and positive self-image in Philadelphia’s Black communities and cross-racial understanding in a racially divided city.

The need for a coordinated approach to the inclusion of Black history in the celebrations came to the attention of Bicentennial planners by 1974, although Philadelphia had chartered its Bicentennial planning commission (eventually known as Philadelphia ‘76 Inc.) seven years before, in 1967. In May 1974, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick (1910-95), a professor of history at Temple University, wrote to the planners to raise concerns about the lack of representation of Black history at the Bicentennial. In a long letter to William Rafsky (1919-2001), chairman of Philadelphia ‘76, he asked: “How did it happen that the plans for the bicentennial celebration at Philadelphia resulted in virtual exclusion of blacks from active participation and a distortion of the role of the black people in the building of ‘American civilization’?” Rafsky responded by sharing information about planned programs and existing collaborators. He also invited Reddick to meet with him and, ultimately, to be part of a steering committee for what came to be the AAMP.

Protests Reverse a Funding Cut

This did not facilitate the smooth development of the project. In December 1974, Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91) cut funding for the Black history museum. He restored it a few days later, however, after public protests and questions about why a Mummers Museum could be built in time for the Bicentennial, but a Black history museum could not be.

Even more visible was the prolonged debate in 1975 over where the city should locate the museum. Following a survey of various sites across Center City and North Philadelphia by architect Theodore Cam (1929-2001), a site at Sixth and Pine Streets emerged as the most desirable. The site’s advantages included proximity to the subway, the highway, and the historically significant Mother Bethel AME Church and the Seventh Ward, which in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been the heart of Philadelphia’s Black community. By the 1970s, however, the neighborhood had been redeveloped as predominantly white, upscale Society Hill. The Society Hill Civic Association, which was mostly white, protested that the size and scale of the proposed museum building would bring too much traffic and would be detrimental to the character of the neighborhood. The association members specified that they were objecting not to the concept of a Black history museum but to the lack of input from the existing community, but the events nonetheless highlighted racial exclusions in the city. Ultimately, the protests in Society Hill delayed the project long enough to force organizers to select a new site for the museum so it could open in 1976. The site at Seventh and Arch Streets was only a block from the Independence Mall tourist area, but it was awkwardly located behind modern office buildings. In addition, its hasty design was not ideal for exhibits or the care of collections.

From the start, the museum struggled to establish an identity. Among its problems was its inability to establish sustainable sources of revenue. The city funded construction, but the museum was meant to fund itself as an independent nonprofit with only partial governmental support. Without an endowment or a preexisting donor base, this proved difficult. Also, lacking funding and effective leadership, the museum could not develop as an institution on the level of its peer museums. It was meant to complement—and even critique—not only the Bicentennial but also legacy institutions like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Atwater Kent Museum. However, collection-building was difficult because of the lack of funds, competition for support from other institutions, and the seeming sparsity of surviving artifacts related to Black history. At the same time, its origins as a history museum often overshadowed its participation in the art world as seen, for example, in the works it commissioned for its opening from Romare Bearden (1911-88) and John Rhoden (1916-2001).

In its first decade, the museum went through seven directors and struggled to maintain a professional staff and an adequate environment for borrowed art and artifacts. It did collaborate with Charles Blockson (1933-2023) to display items from his collection in the 1981 exhibit “Of Color, Humanitas and Statehood,” but Blockson had reservations about the museum’s ability to properly care for the collection and ultimately donated it to Temple University in 1984.

Highlighting Promise vs. Reality

Still, the museum’s presence and its programs were meaningful for Black Philadelphians. In a rich challenge to mainstream histories, its narrative moved from life in Africa to enslavement and abolition in the United States and then followed the Black experience through the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and post-World War II fights for civil rights. It highlighted the disconnect between the equality and freedom promised in the Declaration of Independence and the reality of Black life in America and in Philadelphia over two hundred years.

The museum seemed to hit its stride after Rowena Stewart (1932-2015) took the job of executive director. During her seven-year tenure from 1985 to 1992, she focused on telling the story of Black Philadelphia with exhibits like “The Sounds of This City: Afro-American Music in Philadelphia” and “Let This Be Your Home,” which explored the Great Migration through the personal stories of Philadelphians. In 1986, she acquired the art and archives of Anna Russell Jones (1902-95), a twentieth-century Philadelphia artist and designer, and Jack T. Franklin (1922-2009), a prominent photojournalist who worked locally and nationally from the 1940s through the 1980s. She also initiated ambitious programs in oral history and community collecting. Her efforts aimed to simultaneously engage the community and build a collection, twin problems that plagued the museum from the start.

Stewart and her immediate predecessor also made progress with fundraising, but it did not last beyond their tenures. At its lowest points, the museum survived because of financial support from the city, but the money it received was never enough to address the budget shortfalls that impeded the maintenance of a professional staff, an adequate facility, and a strong collection. For the twenty years following Stewart’s leadership, the museum continued to see a rotating cast of administrators and financial crises. At some times this was due to internal mismanagement. At other times, it was due to broader cuts to funding for arts and culture or chronic under-support for Black institutions. Amid these troubles, the museum changed its name in 1997, becoming the African American Museum in Philadelphia, a name that administrators hoped would better capture the museum’s identity and the place it aimed to occupy in the city.

Building Partnerships

A new period of stability emerged when Romona Riscoe Benson (b. 1959) served as the museum’s director from 2005 through 2012. Benson built corporate and other partnerships, and she oversaw production of “Audacious Freedom,” a multimedia installation offering a sweeping history of Philadelphia’s Black community in America’s first hundred years. Benson’s successors as director, including Patricia Wilson Aden (b. 1959) from 2012 to 2020, maintained the stability of the institution and expanded its imprint in the Philadelphia arts scene with exhibits of Black artists and collaborations with community institutions, such as a much-heralded joint exhibit with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that opened in 2023. In 2022, the city announced that the museum would finally have a new home. Plans called for moving the museum to the former Family Court Building next to the Free Library of Philadelphia on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. However, no funding was guaranteed.

Despite its struggles, the AAMP strived to realize its potential for telling the stories of Black Philadelphians that too often had been neglected in histories of the city. The museum’s founding as a city institution helped it survive, and its official status as the designated African American museum in Philadelphia made it a logical place for that storytelling. However, in part because it originated from the city’s white administration rather than the city’s Black community and in part because it lacked the centuries-old collections of other local institutions, the museum had an uncertain place in Philadelphia’s landscape of historical memory that often overshadowed its underappreciated engagement with Philadelphia’s Black art and artists.

Mabel Rosenheck is the Director of Education and Exhibition Planning at LancasterHistory in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the author of many articles on Philadelphia’s historical and cultural organizations. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Founded in 1743, the APS was an extension of Franklin’s intellectual club the Junto and an answer to London’s Royal Society. Marking a departure from British science, the founding document of the APS asserted that because the American colonies had matured, intellectuals could employ insights from their North American experience to promote human knowledge. Franklin and Bartram designated Philadelphia as the most logical headquarters because of its location, its easy access by sea, and the vibrant bookish culture fostered by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the lending library Franklin founded in 1731. Philadelphia also had the benefit of Bartram’s unparalleled botanical knowledge, as he collected and identified species of plants found only in North America.

Franklin and Bartram organized the APS to promote advancement in all fields of science. They proposed that there should be no fewer than seven members: a physician, botanist, mathematician, chemist, mechanic, geographer, and natural philosopher, in addition to a president, treasurer, and secretary. Members would meet once a month to conduct experiments in brewing, navigation, and agriculture among other subjects. Yearly membership dues (a Spanish piece of eight) funded the cost of experiments and the publication of the society’s findings, both for distribution among society members and abroad.

The APS quickly became much more collaborative than independent as it became an important international link in the exchange of scientific information. Members such as Bartram maintained ties with their British counterparts and sent specimens overseas, even during the Revolutionary War. From its earliest days, the APS made scientific inquiry a matter of international diplomacy as it elected members from around the world. The first international member of the society, elected in 1768, was the French naturalist and cosmologist Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-88), followed a year later by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-78). As its first female member, inducted in 1789, the APS chose the president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Princess Yekaterina Dashkova (1743-1810).

Building a Reputation

In 1769, a merger with another scholarly society in Philadelphia, the American Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge, gave the APS new vigor and initiated a series of scientific activities that solidified its mission. A crucial first step in establishing the APS as a reputable scientific authority occurred in the same year when David Rittenhouse (1732-96) observed by telescope the transit of Venus. His findings, with other observations around the globe, helped to determine the distance of Earth from the sun. Rittenhouse’s results were published in the APS’s Transactions of 1771 and distributed by Franklin across Europe, putting Rittenhouse’s findings on par with those of the Royal Society in London. In 1770, gifts from Thomas Penn (1702-75), members, and from scientific societies in Dublin and London established the APS Library.

In 1783, the APS sought to further secure its future by voting to build a headquarters, a task completed in 1789. Through a combination of members’ donations and a loan from Franklin, Philosophical Hall was constructed on Fifth Street adjacent to the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) under the direction of Samuel Vaughan (1720-1802), a friend of Franklin. Vaughan’s sense of style was also responsible at the time for gardens around Philadelphia, including that of the State House, and he designed the garden of another member of the APS: George Washington (1732-99) at Mount Vernon. With its new building, the APS also became a resource for public access to the sciences. Member Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) housed his Philadelphia Museum at the APS from 1794 to 1811, and the University of Pennsylvania also used its space for five years beginning in 1789.

During and following the 1790s, when Philadelphia served as capital of the United States, the APS played a significant role in scientific activities and innovations of the early nation. As U.S. president, APS member Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) sent Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) to Philadelphia to study with other APS members, including Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), to prepare for their cross-country expedition in 1804. The APS helped to sponsor the mission, and in return the explorers contributed a huge bank of new scientific knowledge on botany, zoology, geography, and ethnology from their travels. Just as their founder Franklin was a leading statesman as well as a scientist, and especially after the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition, APS members tied their research to the service of the state and the expansion of American power. For instance, Commander Matthew Fountaine Maury (1806-73), the “Pathfinder of the Seas,” played a key role in charting the geography of the sea to support an expanding American Navy. In 1862, however, Maury was expelled from the APS for joining the Confederate Navy.

The impact of the APS extended as its members of the APS consulted on the founding of other American scientific and cultural institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences, the Franklin Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. Ophthalmologist Isaac Hays (1796-1879), a leading member of the APS who advanced a theory of natural selection before Darwin published it in The Origin of Species (1859), was among the founders of the American Medical Association in 1847. APS membership in the nineteenth century included such prominent scientists as Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), Charles Darwin (1809-82), the Swiss-born Louis Agassiz (1807-73) and his wife American-born Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz (1822-1907), Louis Pasteur (1822-95), and Thomas Edison (1847-1931). The scope of the APS also expanded to an additional field of scholarship in 1884 when, inspired by the creation of the American Historical Association, the society began to elect leading historians into its ranks and created a Committee on Historical Manuscripts to promote access to its own rich history.

Isaac Minis Mays, Secretary and Librarian

The work of producing manuscript catalogues and calendars of historical documents, as well as editing the Proceedings and Transactions of the APS was taken up by Hays’s son, Isaac Minis Hays (1848-1925), who served as secretary and librarian from 1897 to 1922. An energetic leader, Hays ushered the society into the twentieth century. He improved the quality of the APS library, expanded access to the library for researchers and the public, accomplished a fifteen-year project to bind and catalog the papers of Benjamin Franklin, and created the Franklin Medal to recognize excellence in both science and public service.

The APS continued its transition to a multidisciplinary scholarly organization under the leadership of biologist Edwin Grant Conklin (1863-1952), who served in a variety of APS offices leading to two terms as president in 1942-45 and 1948-52. In addition to members such as Margaret Mead (1901-78) and Albert Einstein (1879-1955), in the twentieth century the society expanded its membership from the humanities: poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909-97), poet Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and historian Natalie Zemon Davis (b. 1928). By the early twentieth century, in a departure from the society’s early history of collaboration with the United States military and government, members included scholars whose research questioned institutional power over the individual and reflected on access to justice. They included a philosopher of ethics and human rights, Martha Nussbaum (b. 1947), queer theorists Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009) and Judith Butler (b. 1956), and post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942).

These APS members and many others extended and elevated Philadelphia’s vibrancy, which initially made the city fit to host the society, to a truly international stage. In the second half of the twentieth century, the society also increased its physical presence in its home city. In 1959, across Fifth Street from Philosophical Hall, the APS opened Library Hall, a reproduction of an eighteenth-century structure that originally housed the Library Company of Philadelphia. In 1984 and 2000, the APS campus expanded to include two adjacent former bank buildings on Chestnut Street. Through its rich library and manuscript collection, research grants, and such prestigious prizes as the Magellanic Premium in navigation and astronomy, established in 1786, and the Barzun Prize in history the American Philosophical Society continued its mission of promoting useful knowledge. As affirmed by a mission statement adopted in 2008, the society’s activities sought to “reflect the founder’s spirit of inquiry, provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas, and convey the conviction of its members that intellectual inquiry and critical thought are inherently in the public interest.”

Brooke Sylvia Palmieri is a Philadelphia native living in London, working toward a Ph.D. at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at University College London. Her dissertation details the reading, writing, and publication habits of Quakers at the end of the seventeenth century and how they circulated their ideas from London to the British colonies in the West Indies and North America. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The Athenæum of Philadelphia, a non-profit, member-supported library, was founded in 1814 “to disseminate useful knowledge.”  Threatened for its very existence with the advent of the city’s free library in 1894, the organization subsequently recovered and ultimately thrived as it reinvented itself as a special- collections library with related public exhibitions, lectures, and publications.

Unlike modern tax-supported public libraries, athenæums were private organizations established as associations of dues-paying subscribers or as stock companies—in which the purchase of a share made one an owner.  Early member-supported libraries such as The Library Company of Philadelphia (1731), The Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island (1747), The Charleston Library Society (1748), and The New York Society Library (1754), began appearing in America’s major coastal towns in the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, when neoclassicism was the popular style, member-supported libraries were often named for Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of arts and literature.  This name became synonymous with the term library in towns like Zanesville, Ohio; Keokuk, Iowa; and La Jolla, California, as Americans moved west in the later nineteenth century.

The Athenæum of Philadelphia’s founders were leading citizens of what was then the largest city in the United States, including Chief Justice William Tilghman (1756-1827), Jacob (1788-1856) and Benjamin Gratz, George and Roberts (1786-1836) Vaux, Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), Horace Binney (1780-1875), George Cadwalader (1806-79), and Mathew Carey (1760-1839).   They declared “their first and immediate object” to be “the collection, in some central place, of American and foreign periodical publications of political, literature and science, maps, dictionaries, and other books of reference to which access might be had at all hours of the day.”  Many of the founders were also members of The Library Company and The American Philosophical Society, but neither of these institutions remained open for extended hours, nor did they specialize in periodicals and books of reference.

Early Years

For nearly three decades, the Athenæum occupied the first floor of Philosophical Hall, next to Independence Hall, across Fifth Street from The Library Company of Philadelphia.  These were years when the Athenæum grew rapidly in prestige, membership, and the variety of books and periodicals available to its stockholders. By 1825, Jonathan P. Sheldon of New York declared that every visitor to Philadelphia should go to the Athenæum for “New York has no institution of the kind to compare with it. A comparison of the Libraries of the two cities and especially the situation of each as to pecuniary matters, would place New York far behind her rival in matters of correct taste and liberality.”  The members regularly brought visitors to the rooms, dutifully entering their names in a “Strangers’ Book” kept at the librarian’s desk. These ledgers record visits by John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan and, on October 1, 1825, “General LaFayette,” introduced by “all the members.” The occasion of the Marquis de LaFayette’s visit prompted the members to elect him their first honorary member.

In 1829 William Lehman, a wealthy and bookish druggist, bequeathed $10,000 to the library for “the acquisition of a suitable building.”  However, it would not be until 1845 that a building lot on Sixth Street opposite Washington Square was finally acquired and an architectural competition announced.  Ultimately designs were received from such major Philadelphia architects as William Strickland (1788-1854), Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87), and John Haviland (1796-1865), but the design adopted and constructed came from a recent Scottish emigrant, John Notman (1810-65), who with his Athenæum design introduced to American the first example of a brownstone Italianate Renaissance palazzo made popular in London by Charles Barry at the Travellers’ Club (1829). The three-story building provided two floors of rental space. Lawyers occupied the ground floor while architects and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania settled on the third floor.  Eventually the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects became a tenant.  The AIA would presage the future by calling for the establishment of an architectural library at the Athenæum.

Today the Athenæum occupies all three stories of the original building as well as another level inserted under the building in the 1970s for additional high-security, temperature- and humidity-controlled collection storage.

For the Athenæum and the other member-supported libraries in the city, the opening of the Free Library of Philadelphia in 1894 was a cataclysmic event.  Operating under the motto Liber Libere Omnibus—Free Books for All—the Free Library effectively undercut Philadelphia’s membership libraries such as the Mercantile Library, which claimed more than 6,000 members and an annual circulation of 140,000 volumes at the time.  The Mercantile Library eventually failed and was absorbed by the Free Library.  At the Athenæum, membership steadily declined, even with the approval for book circulation in 1855, and its modest endowment proved inadequate to properly maintain the building, which also affected rental income.  By the 1920s the board of directors was hiring retired clergymen as caretaker librarians and the future appeared bleak.  Encouraged by the post-World War II urban renewal of Society Hill and the establishment of Independence National Historical Park, the directors hired a succession of younger librarians in the hope of revitalizing a traditional book circulation service, but efforts to increase endowment and raise funds for restoration of the building were generally unsuccessful.

Renaissance

The downward spiral was arrested in the 1960s and 1970s when George Vaux (1908-1996), an energetic direct descendant of an Athenæum founder, was elected president of the board of directors. He replaced inactive board members with scholars and administrators who brought to the table extensive experience with not-for-profit institutions.  Simultaneously he attracted community leaders and generous donors.  The directors then hired their first executive director who was charged with redefining the Athenæum as a special-collections library with related public exhibitions, lectures, and publications, while simultaneously strengthening the traditional membership structure and services.   Substantial sums were raised from individual donors and local and national foundations to hire a professional staff and to restore and expand the National Historic Landmark Athenæum building to provide proper facilities to care for and exhibit the collections.

The new leadership first focused on the extensive collection of rare books and periodicals surviving from the period when the Athenæum had been founded, flourished, and erected its building.  The promising extension of the collection scope to include Victorian material culture prompted an invitation to the newly founded Victorian Society in America to establish its headquarters in the Athenæum building.  Thus the library was overnight introduced to a national audience that attracted the interest of scholars and collectors such as Samuel J. Dornsife (1916-1999), whose lifetime collection of rare design books and trade catalogues devoted to Victorian-era architecture, decorative arts, and interior design, ultimately came to the library where it has provided a rich core of documentary sources for the authentic restorations of Victorian buildings as well as licensed commercial lines of authentic reproduction lighting fixtures, wallpapers, textiles, and paint colors.  Subsequent collecting greatly expanded those holdings.

The Athenæum’s rare book collection originated with a substantial early nineteenth-century gift from Samuel Breck of Sweetbrier (1771-1862), and the time-honored practice of libraries collecting collectors’ collections continued right through to the twenty-first century.  Among the most distinctive donations have been theater historian Irvin R. Glazer’s (1922-96) collection of books on America theater buildings; Robert L. Raley’s architecture and garden design books; former director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Evan Turner’s collection of early books and manuscripts on the history of books and printing dating from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries assembled by his father, Professor Albert Morton Turner; and Eli P. Zebooker’s collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps and prints of Philadelphia.

Emphasis on Architecture

The primary focus of the library’s research collections gradually became American architecture prior to 1930.  Recognizing that no institution in Philadelphia actively collected architectural records or specifically sought to support research on architects and builders, the Athenæum undertook that role in the early 1970s, accumulating over time 220,000 architectural drawings, 300,000 photographs, and supporting documentation representing the work of 26,500 architects and engineers.  Of special interest has been the collection of books known to have been owned or consulted by architects who practiced in the greater Philadelphia region. For that reason the library acquired whenever possible the intact office libraries of early architectural firms as well as their client records and drawings.  One example of such an omnibus acquisition is the office records, library, and drawings of Theophilus P. Chandler (1844-1920), founder of the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture.  The Athenæum also became the official repository of the records of the Philadelphia Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

The Athenæum’s architectural drawing collection has focused primarily on Philadelphia architects and builders ranging from master builders such as William Palmer (1771-1815) and Owen Biddle (1774-1806) to the earliest professional architects: Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), John Haviland (1792-1851), William Strickland (1788-1854), and Robert Mills (1781-1855).  The crown jewel of the nineteenth-century holdings is the complete archive of Thomas Ustick Walter (1804-87).

The twentieth-century architectural holdings are substantial and include sixty thousand drawings representing the career of Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945), the office archives of the country-house architects Walter Mellor (1880-1940) and Arthur I. Meigs (1882-1956), the complete archive of the Art Deco theater architect Louis Magaziner (1878-1955), and the office records of the Henry D. Dagit & Sons dynasty, and many others.

Decorative Painters and Craftsmen

The drawings of decorative painters and craftsmen such as stained-glass makers and decorative ironsmiths are more ephemeral than those of architects.  Holdings at the Athenæum include a comprehensive collection of the celebrated stained-glass master, Nicola D’Ascenzo (1871-1953); the archives of the decorative painter George Herzog (1851-1920), who was responsible for Philadelphia City Hall, the Union League Club, and the Masonic Hall; and the New York City artists H.D. & J. Moeller—among others.

In 1999 the Athenæum conceived and the William Penn Foundation funded a cooperative agreement with the University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives, the Philadelphia Historical Commission, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, to establish the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project (later renamed the American Architects and Buildings collection) to offer free of charge online access to more than 26,500 biographical essays of architects, engineers, and contractors and information on 270,000 projects and buildings, supported by 135,000 digitized images.

Although begun in 1814 as a reading room for noncirculating books and periodicals, the Athenæum grew over its two centuries of activity to include a thriving lending collection offering both print and e-books, major resources in the history of architecture and the design arts, a mid-nineteenth-century museum collection, and two websites providing research support with both maps and architectural drawings.  Although steeped in new technology, the Athenæum still realizes the noble desire of its founders:  “to disseminate useful knowledge.”

Roger W. Moss is Executive Director Emeritus, the Athenæum of Philadelphia, which he directed  from 1968 to 2008.  Simultaneously he was an adjunct professor in the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is the author of more than a dozen books on architecture and design, including the trilogy Historic Houses of Philadelphia (1998), Historic Sacred Places of Philadelphia (2005), and Historic Landmarks of Philadelphia (2008) published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Barnes’s successful career in the pharmaceutical industry laid the groundwork for his foundation. He built a fortune manufacturing Argyrol, a widely used antiseptic that he developed with German chemist Hermann Hille (1871-1962). While running a factory in West Philadelphia to produce the drug, Barnes introduced the study of philosophy into his employees’ daily schedule. With advice from painter William Glackens (1870-1938), who knew Barnes from their days attending Central High School, Barnes began collecting art to use in his lessons. He launched his foundation with the goal of expanding these experiments in art education.

Barnes actively shaped every aspect of his fledgling organization. In the most tangible sense, he donated his art collection and a recently purchased plot of land in Merion to the foundation. The foundation’s charter and bylaws outlined the terms of these gifts and enumerated detailed guidelines that governed the foundation’s operations. He commissioned noted Beaux-Arts architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876-1945) to design the institution’s facilities. The foundation’s building, programs, and art collection additionally reflected Barnes’s ongoing interest in African American culture, which grew out of his fascination with music and religious ceremonies he encountered as a child. At times Barnes pursued partnerships with other schools and exhibition spaces in the region, but the foundation remained independent during his lifetime.

Education at the Barnes Foundation began as a pedagogical experiment in the systematic study of art. Barnes believed that learning to look carefully and methodically would grant students access to a deeper, more enriching experience of art. His theory of art education combined concepts of intelligence from psychologist William James (1842-1910), studies of aesthetics from George Santayana (1863-1952), and a philosophy of education and social reform pioneered by John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey’s work was so influential that he was named honorary director of education at the foundation in 1923. Students read texts by these and other thinkers while they learned to visually dissect artworks with particular regard for what Barnes called “plastic form” – line, color, light, and space. In contrast to conventional practices, this technique downplayed other aspects of an artwork such as the artist’s intention, the story told by an image, and the historical circumstances surrounding an object’s creation.

To hone their visual analysis skills, students studied the eclectic objects that hung in the foundation’s galleries. These eventually included masterworks by European modernists such as Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Henri Matisse (1869-1954), over a hundred African sculptures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the largest known array of paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). It also featured works by American artists Barnes knew personally, such as Glackens, Charles Demuth (1883-1935), and Horace Pippin (1888-1946). To illustrate various lessons, Barnes installed these items in “wall ensembles”: complex, often symmetrical arrangements of artworks, metalwork (like hinges and dental tools), and in some cases, furniture. The composition of the wall ensembles invited viewers to look for visual connections across objects rather than study each piece individually. Diverging from contemporary exhibition trends, Barnes did not group objects by artist, culture, or historical period. Instead he mixed and matched, disconnecting the items on display from any context other than his galleries. Throughout his lifetime, Barnes reconfigured the wall ensembles to draw out new connections across objects.

Many of the education and exhibition practices at the Barnes Foundation reflected Barnes’s desire to change Philadelphia’s cultural landscape by providing a new model for experiencing art. He asserted that his institution offered a necessary alternative to the region’s art establishment, which he repeatedly criticized for its conservative tastes, elitism, and frivolity. His work, too, was the subject of frequent critique. For example, paintings from his collection met with mockery when exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1923.

Even so, the impressive collection eventually attracted extensive positive attention from scholars, art collectors, and other individuals not affiliated with the foundation. Members of the public who wanted to visit the collection were required to write to the foundation and request an appointment. Although Barnes welcomed many outsiders into his galleries, he notoriously denied access to several prominent individuals including author James A. Michener (1907-97), collector Walter P. Chrysler (1909-88), and art historian Meyer Schapiro (1904-96). Illustrative of Barnes’s strong personality and sharp tongue, some who were refused admission to the collection received rejection letters signed by Barnes’s francophone dog. Critics accused Barnes of leveraging his galleries as a tool for spurning people he did not like or whose elite social status he resented. Barnes maintained that for the sake of the school he only permitted visitors who were interested in the serious study of art.

When Barnes died unexpectedly in a car accident on July 24, 1951, the guidelines he developed for the foundation’s long-term operations took effect. As outlined in the foundation’s bylaws, these instructions ranged from a proscription against moving the paintings after he and his wife died to a plan for transferring leadership. Initially, his wife Laura (1875-1966), director of the foundation’s arboretum since 1928, became president. Education programs continued under the direction of Violette de Mazia (1896-1988), Barnes’s longtime assistant who had played a vital role in developing much of the curriculum. After Laura Barnes died, trustee Nelle E. Mullen (1883-1967) assumed the leadership position. Following her death, stewardship of the foundation began to shift from the original trustees to Lincoln University, a historically Black university in nearby Chester County, which became responsible for appointing new trustees to the foundation’s board as positions opened.

With the exception of occasional lawsuits and financial challenges, the foundation operated quietly for four decades after Barnes’s death. It reemerged in the public eye in 1990, when newly appointed director Richard Glanton (b. 1946) initiated a series of changes aimed at improving the foundation’s fiscal viability and public image. Although the bylaws provided specifications for how the foundation should function when Barnes could no longer lead the organization, they provided limited options for raising the revenue required to maintain the foundation’s activities. By 1990 the galleries required substantial renovations and the foundation did not have sufficient funds to cover the cost of the project. To raise money for the endeavor, the foundation obtained permission from the Montgomery County Orphans’ Court to send selected works from the collection on an international tour while the galleries closed for renovations. Judge Louis Stefan (1925-94) determined that a one-time deviation from the prohibition against moving the paintings would be permissible in order to ensure the foundation’s future success. Between 1993 and 1995 an exhibition of European masterworks from the collection traveled to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich, earning unprecedented attention for the collection and, in several cases, for the institutions that hosted the tour, as well.

When the collection returned from the tour and the galleries reopened in Merion in November 1995, the foundation faced new challenges. More visitors than ever flocked to see the now-famous art. Although a local ordinance limited the number of weekly visitors the foundation could host, the newfound attention created problems in the neighborhood. It brought an abundance of tourists onto a residential street, and the traffic upset neighbors. The foundation tried to ameliorate the situation by building a parking lot to accommodate the cars and tour buses, but neighbors protested this action, as well. Conflict over the increased traffic resulted in an expensive lawsuit that left the foundation unable to pay its legal bills and maintain operations under its financial model. Recognizing the hostile local context and financial challenges that it faced, foundation leaders explored the possibility of moving the galleries from Merion to Center City Philadelphia, where, they argued, the institution could better accommodate visitors and fundraise more effectively. At the same time, the foundation also sought court permission to expand its board from five members to fifteen members in order to broaden its adviser base and enhance its ability to raise funds and fulfill its mission.

Major Philadelphia philanthropists and political leaders backed these endeavors. Critics, including arts writers and Barnes alumni, vehemently protested against relocating the collection. They argued that it belonged in Merion because Cret’s galleries, the arboretum setting, and the historical context in which it had been displayed for decades were vital to the full experience of the collection. Others challenged the proposed board expansion, arguing that such an act would shift control of the foundation into the hands of powerful individuals and organizations that Barnes had vied with during his lifetime. The foundation’s lawyers argued that moving the collection and expanding the board was the only way that it could maintain operations. Although Judge Stanley R. Ott granted permission for these changes in 2004, the foundation was enmeshed in legal battles and waves of conflicting public opinion for nearly another decade as a group of neighbors and former students led repeated challenges to the judge’s ruling both within and beyond the courts. During that period the Barnes Foundation became an important case study for scholars and practitioners in a range of fields including philanthropy, nonprofit management, museum studies, and trust and estate law.

Despite the efforts of those who opposed the move, the Barnes Foundation expanded onto a new campus on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, which opened to the public in 2012. At that time the Merion campus became dedicated primarily to horticultural programs. The 4.5-acre Philadelphia campus is located in a tourist district near the Franklin Institute, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Academy of Natural Sciences, and the central branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. With a building by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and landscape design by Olin, it speaks the language of public institution, not domestic enclave. In addition to its permanent collection galleries, which resemble the historic Merion setting and preserved Barnes’s wall ensembles, the Parkway facilities include special exhibition galleries and visitor services beyond what was feasible in Merion. The foundation expanded its education programs to offer lessons for school groups in partnership with the School District of Philadelphia, and it provides both traditional and new courses for adult learners. The move cemented the foundation’s shift from primarily serving its regular students to directing its efforts toward a broad cross-section of the public. In turn, city leaders touted the Barnes on the Parkway as an important contribution to Philadelphia’s rich constellation of cultural offerings that elevate the city’s status in the eyes of national and international audiences.

Laura Holzman is Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. (Author information current at time of publication.)

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the majority of public libraries were subscription libraries, which required membership fees to gain library privileges. This led to only wealthier members of society having access to books. Carnegie, who had little formal education and could not afford the fee for a subscription library, gained access to books for self-study and developed a love for literature because a local philanthropist in Pittsburgh opened his library to young working men. Carnegie agreed with the prominent belief of the time period: that reading good books would lead to good behavior and that public libraries would contribute to progress and social order. This belief, his own learning through reading, and his conviction that no man should have excess wealth, led him to create a program through which communities could request funds for libraries. Eventually 1,689 of these libraries, referred to as Carnegie Libraries, were founded throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries.

The program began in 1886, when Carnegie donated funds for a library building and community center to Allegheny, near Pittsburgh. Towns and cities applying for a library grant were required to demonstrate the need for a library, provide a building site, and promise to provide ongoing support for books, upkeep, and staff with taxes equal to no less than 10 percent of the library grant. While some criticized Carnegie for not providing endowments or books to the libraries, this ensured that the community supported the library and fostered a sense of ownership and responsibility.

In 1903, the librarian of the Free Library of Philadelphia applied to Carnegie for funding to create thirty branch libraries with an estimated cost of $20,000 to $30,000 for each branch. The Free Library had opened in 1894, and by 1898 the library system had 160 employees, fourteen branches, and 250,000 volumes. However, none of the system’s libraries had a purpose-built library building, and many operated in poor conditions without enough space.

Carnegie agreed to provide $50,000 for each of the Free Library’s branches, more than requested, based on his experience funding branch libraries in Pittsburgh and New York City. In 1904, the City Council accepted Carnegie’s offer, but only twenty-five libraries were built, due to rising costs of building construction over the decades it took to erect the branches. Each branch was designed to be suitable to each neighborhood in outward appearance, and under the direction of Carnegie’s secretary James Bertram (1872-1934) the branch libraries in Philadelphia had a significant impact on the layout of other Carnegie library buildings. Many were T-shaped with an open plan, contained flexible spaces for public lectures or events, and had open stacks that allowed patrons to browse books, which was uncommon in the early twentieth century.

Although the Midwest received the largest portion of libraries funded by Carnegie, the program funded fifty-nine library buildings in Pennsylvania and thirty-six in New Jersey (Delaware is one of two states that received no funding). In Philadelphia and the surrounding region, many agreed with Carnegie’s belief that libraries would allow for self-improvement, but others complained about the struggle to find an appropriate building sites or the ongoing costs related to the libraries. Others complained about lack of specific genres, such as a nine-year-old girl from New Jersey who wanted more fairy tales.

Many of the libraries funded by Carnegie in the Philadelphia region continued to operate in the twenty-first century, including fifteen of the original Free Library of Philadelphia branch locations. Some — notably the Camden Free Public Library built in 1905 — deteriorated to ruin, while others found new uses. In Philadelphia, the Germantown branch became a senior citizens center, and the Manayunk building became a nursing home.

Carnegie Libraries greatly impacted the Philadelphia region by providing the much-needed funding for library buildings, which allowed for the creation of new library systems as well as the expansion of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Cassie Brand is Curator of Rare Books at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on the history of the book as a physical and cultural object, collecting history, and library history. (Author information current at time of publication.)

The creation of a Civil War museum in Philadelphia originated with the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), a fraternal association for veteran officers of the Civil War founded in 1865 at the Union League in Philadelphia. The group formed in the wake of the assassination of Lincoln amid fear of a continuation of the Civil War, but when that fear subsided, commemoration became central to the association’s mission. The chartering of the War Library and Museum in 1888 reflected new efforts at remembrance that occurred in part because veterans were aging, but also because in the wake of Reconstruction, the Civil War seemed resolved and so it began to fade from current events into history.

Members of MOLLUS, including John Page Nicholson (1842-1922), who had taken control and revived the organization a decade earlier, chartered the War Library and Museum to collect, preserve, and maintain books and artifacts—“implements, relics, and muniments of war”—pertaining to the “War of the Rebellion.” The library and museum reflected a larger interest in documenting the memories of aging US Army and Navy veterans so as to capture history before it was lost. The urge to collect artifacts from veterans and to write and publish their recollections was also part of a contest over who would get to write the history of the Civil War.

Donations From Veterans

Collections grew throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, primarily from the donations of veterans and MOLLUS members, but the early history of the War Library and Museum revolved mostly around finding a home for itself. The State of Pennsylvania offered $50,000 for construction of a building if MOLLUS could raise $100,000 more. Throughout the 1890s, the group wrote appeals, pursued various locations, and drew up designs for a grand structure that would house offices, banquet halls, and the library and museum. The veterans envisioned a repository of history and material objects, but also a space where they could socialize and reminisce.

At different times, MOLLUS pursued homes in council chambers at Independence Hall, in properties near City Hall, and in a building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, but none of these proved feasible. In 1907, the organization rented rooms in the Flanders Building at Fifteenth and Walnut Streets, and in 1922 it made a permanent home in a townhouse at 1805 Pine Street. The selection of a more modest home was a disappointment, but it enabled building funds to sustain the institution as an endowment for much of the twentieth century.

At the Flanders Building, for the first time, exhibits showcased the collections publicly. The displays included the Tiffany sword and scabbard that General Ulysses S. Grant received after the battle at Vicksburg, a uniform worn by General George Meade (1815-72) at Gettysburg, and casts of Lincoln’s face and hands made by sculptor Leonard Wells Volk (1828-95) just before the war broke out. Visitors could also see the cane Lincoln carried into Ford’s Theater, a tree trunk hit by a cannon ball at Gettysburg, a recruitment drum played outside enlistment headquarters in Philadelphia in 1861, and the paisley smoking jacket worn by Jefferson Davis when he was captured by Union soldiers in 1865.

Ephemeral items and other personal relics donated by Union veterans contrasted strikingly with other Civil War commemorations in Philadelphia at the time, including the equestrian statues of Meade and General John Reynolds (1820-63) and the Smith Memorial Arch in Fairmount Park. While Nicholson and MOLLUS wanted the library and museum to be similarly monumental, the museum’s collection was a mixture of official military history documented by the uniforms and firearms of commanding officers and a more subtle memory of the Civil War driven by everyday artifacts donated by individuals (albeit mostly officers) that revealed alternative, more personal histories. General Lewis Merrill (1834-96), a member of the museum’s Board of Governors, explained that an institution like theirs “will be a more lasting monument than any one that is built of stone or metal, and will be more influential in telling the truth of history and doing justice to its defender.”

From Private to Public

Debates arose in the 1920s over whether the collection needed to be better interpreted now that veterans (who could recall their own experiences) were dying and MOLLUS membership was passing to descendants, but a catalog to guide visits never emerged. In the members-only museum, the artifacts were largely left to speak for themselves and the library and archives, while available for use, were only partially cataloged or cared for.

MOLLUS remained involved with the museum until the 1970s, when the organization and the museum separated so that each could dedicate more resources to its narrower mission. In 1976, coinciding with the Bicentennial, the museum opened to the public on a day-to-day basis, and in the 1980s special exhibits began to interpret more diverse histories—including those of women or African Americans or even the rebel states—in  addition to the other long-standing displays of the collections.

By the early 2000s, a dwindling endowment and declining visitation threatened the sustainability of the museum. Legal proceedings against former curator Russell Pritchard Jr. (b. 1940) and his son for fraud and theft from a variety of Civil War institutions, including the Civil War Museum of Philadelphia, provided further evidence of the museum’s longtime mismanagement. One proposed solution to address the state of the museum would have loaned part of the collection to a planned Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia. The backlash in Philadelphia against that idea resulted in a proposal to create a Center for Civil War Studies based at the Union League that would have included partners like the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, and the Philadelphia Historical and Museum Commission. The desire, beyond creating an exceptional network of research collections, was to make Philadelphia a destination not just for Revolutionary War tourism, but also for tourism around nineteenth-century history and the Civil War. Plans for such a consortium never came to fruition, nor did another plan for the museum to occupy Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. Continuing the disappointments, in 2002 the State of Pennsylvania pledged $15 million toward a new facility but retracted the funds in 2009 during the recession.

A Dual Emphasis Emerges

While the quest for a new home signaled a desire for a more professional, authoritative institution, appreciation also remained for the small, quirky museum on Pine Street that displayed, among other things, the preserved head of Old Baldy, General Meade’s horse. However, rather than develop either of these identities, in 2003 the institution reemerged as the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum with a new dual emphasis that reflected trends toward more inclusive histories of the Civil War era. With a limited collection of African American materials, the museum turned to living history with actors portraying historical figures including Harriet Tubman (c. 1822-1913) and Absalom Jones (1746-1818). New outreach resulted in a 2006 program called “Faith and Freedom,” co-produced with Black churches. One program featured an actor portraying Jones giving his “Thanksgiving Sermon” at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas.

In 2004, a grant from the William Penn Foundation enabled the first complete inventory of the collection, which revealed objects previously unknown to the museum or the nation. In addition to the already celebrated items from well-known figures, the inventory uncovered items like a pocket watch belonging to Brevet Capt. John O. Foering (1843-1933) that was dented by a bullet; a jar of peaches from an orchard on the battlefield of Winchester, Virginia; the tombstone of John Butcher (1845-99), a veteran of the United States Colored Troops; and an 1872 first edition of The Underground Railroad by William Still (1821-1902).

However, none of these developments could save the museum, which closed in 2008. An effort to work with the National Park Service to renovate the Second Bank in Old City to yield a usable space also failed, and ultimately in 2016 the artifact collections transferred to the Gettysburg Foundation—the private, nonprofit partner of Gettysburg National Military Park—with the promise that the National Constitution Center would still display some of the artifacts in Philadelphia. The museum retained the two-dimensional materials, including paintings, lithographs, and books that went on loan to the Union League and remained available to researchers there. Other artifacts—including the head of Old Baldy, which had been on loan from the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in Frankford—returned to the GAR Museum, which sustained Civil War memory in Philadelphia, although on a smaller scale.

In 2019, the National Constitution Center opened the exhibit “Civil War and Reconstruction: The Battle for Freedom and Equality,” which used Civil War Museum artifacts in an expansive history that explored the context, causes, and consequences of the Civil War. Extending to histories of injustice and violence, the exhibit encompassed causes like slavery and racism and consequences like the Reconstruction amendments to the U.S. Constitution and their simultaneous importance and impotence in the face of Jim Crow segregation. At the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum, meanwhile, artifacts from the Philadelphia museum illustrated the story of the Civil War from the perspectives of both the United States and the states that seceded. While the objects added authenticity in service of each institution’s interpretive goals, the new installations also demonstrated the contrast between the polished Civil War tourism of the twenty-first century and the earlier museum’s role as a nineteenth-century reliquary and evocative home for family legacies.

Ultimately, the Civil War Museum faced several hurdles that it could not overcome. By the late twentieth century, Philadelphia museums—especially small, lesser-known museums—were suffering financially. The Civil War Museum’s location was also challenging because Philadelphia never successfully cultivated a Civil War identity or Civil War tourism despite deep connections to that history. However, if, as a fundraising appeal from 1891 argued, the museum was meant to commemorate those “who gave their lives to the war which restored the Union and maintained the Constitution,” then the collections found a fitting final resting place at the National Constitution Center in an exhibit about the simultaneous successes and failures of that document and a more critical memory of the Civil War for a new generation.

Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, lecturer, and historian in Philadelphia. She works in the museum of the Wagner Free Institute of Science and teaches at Temple University in addition to freelance writing and research. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from Northwestern University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Edinburgh graduates Dr. John Morgan (1735–89) and Dr. William Shippen Jr. (1736–1808), together with Benjamin Rush (1735–1813), envisioned a society in Philadelphia like the Royal Colleges of Physicians of Edinburgh and of London, to regulate the medical profession and foster medical research and education. They sought to create a society that would give cohesion and prestige to the medical profession and serve the needs of the elite physician-professors of Philadelphia. Morgan, Shippen, Rush, and twenty-one other prominent Philadelphia physicians established the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 1787 and elected their mentor, John Redman (1722–1808), its first president.

Fellows elected colleagues based on their contributions to American medicine and society. Notable fellows included famed surgeon Samuel D. Gross (1805–84) and the prominent American neurologist and writer Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914). The fellowship addressed challenges facing all Philadelphia physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly infectious diseases such as yellow fever, cholera, typhoid fever, and tuberculosis. During the yellow fever outbreak of 1793, the college participated in debates concerning the origin, spread, and treatment of the disease and recommended both quarantine and sanitary measures. It facilitated development of city health laws and creation of the Philadelphia Board of Health in 1794 to enforce these laws.

In its early years, the college rented rooms from the American Philosophical Society, which provided the space and means for fellows to review medical literature and learn from their colleagues. To this end, it developed an extensive library, a museum of medical specimens, lecture series, and meetings for the exchange of medical knowledge. Thanks to a large endowment by college fellow Thomas Dent Mütter (1811–59), the college built its first permanent home in 1863 at the corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets. The activities of the college stalled during the Civil War, as one-third of its members volunteered for the war effort. After the war, membership and donations to the college increased. In addition to books and specimens, the college became well known for its collection of fine art and furniture. It soon outgrew this space and relocated to a larger, more opulent residence at Twenty-Second and Ludlow Streets in 1909.

The College Library

Fellows donated books from their personal collections to establish the library in 1788. The library grew with more such contributions as well as volumes written by members and purchases. In the later nineteenth century, the college appointed a professional librarian, and by 1900 it received over five hundred medical journals either by subscription or in exchange for the college’s publication, Transaction and Studies. By the 1970s, the library made available over three thousand current biomedical journal titles in dozens of languages. In this period, it served as a regional medical library and supported the needs of the area’s many medical schools and teaching hospitals. Its accumulation of books, journals, and manuscripts over more than two centuries produced one of the world’s most complete and treasured medical-historical libraries. It holds over four hundred incunables (books published before 1501), the great anatomical atlases beginning with Vesalius, as well as the texts, manuals, and periodicals used by practitioners for over four hundred years. 

The Mütter Museum

Medical museums were also an essential component of nineteenth-century medical education, and in its early years, the college developed an essential component of nineteenth-century medical education—a medical museum. After Thomas Dent Mütter resigned from his post at Jefferson Medical College in 1856, he donated his collection of anatomical and pathological specimens to the College of Physicians. Mütter’s endowment of $30,000 required the construction of a fireproof building to house his collection, which led to the building of its first permanent home in 1863 at the corner of Thirteenth and Locust Streets. The endowment also supported the hiring of museum staff and acquisition of specimens and artifacts well into the twentieth century.

After the Civil War, the Mütter Museum grew exponentially with the specimens acquired during the war. The museum also displayed specimens from the work of physicians—from the plaster cast of conjoined twins Chang and Eng to the wax model of the horny protuberance from the forehead of a French woman. These anatomically curious collections generated an international frenzy, which soon made the Mütter Museum a top destination for physicians and students around the world.

For much of the twentieth century, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia worked quietly in the realms of public health and the history of medicine. On its 150th birthday in 1937, the college celebrated by establishing the medicinal plant garden that co-founder Benjamin Rush had envisioned. In 1976, the college established the Francis Clark Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, “to promote the historical resources of the college’s library and museum.” The college became part of the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, founded in 2007, and was established as a Historical Landmark in 2009, considered “an outstanding property in the medical and cultural history of the United States.” The Historical Medical Library of the College developed a Digital Library to share and make more accessible literature important in the history of medicine.

For the better part of two centuries, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has served medical professionals and the public. As an authority on the history of medicine and public health issues, the college became a vital participant in the medical community of Philadelphia and a respected institution both nationally and internationally.

Amanda Bevers Bristol is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Science Studies Departments at University of California, San Diego, where in 2012 she received her master’s. She is completing her dissertation entitled “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: The Army Medical Museum and the Development of American Medical Science, 1862–1913,” which has been supported by grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Central to the mission of the Commercial Museum was the notion that commerce was the unifying principle of mankind: past, present, and future. The 1890s marked a period of global transformation, during which the industrial economy of the United States continued to expand. In response to the manufacturing boom, American manufacturers began to seek foreign markets to sell their products. They also exhibited their wares at the world’s fairs that characterized the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of those fairs, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, had a role in the creation of Philadelphia’s Commercial Museum. Among the many American traders and manufacturers enticed and inspired by the Chicago fair was a former botanist and University of Pennsylvania professor, William P. Wilson (1844-1927). After visiting the Columbian Exposition, Wilson officially founded the Commercial Museum the same year, housing the collections in a variety of temporary locations until the building was officially completed in 1897. Borrowing the neoclassical style of the Columbian Exposition, the Commercial Museum communicated legitimacy through the architectural style of empire, rationality, and intelligence. The Commercial Museum acquired many items from the Columbian Exposition and eventually became the official repository for artifacts from many of the world’s fairs of the era.

The Commercial Museum aimed to educate everyone about the merits of international trade. Schoolchildren from across the region came to learn about the pivotal role of commerce throughout history and to explore strange artifacts from faraway lands. Merchants came from around the globe to educate themselves about foreign markets and production methods by examining raw and manufactured goods held in the collections. The Commercial Museum also administered a Bureau of Information, which compiled and published international trade and market reports to aid American entrepreneurs as they expanded their enterprises at home and abroad. Inspired by the idea of a commercial museum, American and foreign business leaders in California, France, Berlin, China, and more developed similar museums and hosted world’s fair-style expositions in order to develop transnational trade relations.  The museum reigned as the foremost authority on information regarding manufacturing and international commerce in the United States for a quarter century.

The Commercial Museum’s prominence as a beacon of commercial knowledge and exhibits began to wane by the 1920s. A variety of social, political, and economic factors rendered it increasingly irrelevant, the most significant of which was the rise of the International Trade Commission. Developed by the United States Department of Commerce in 1916, the International Trade Commission was closely modeled after the Commercial Museum’s Bureau of Information. Until then the museum acted as the unchallenged provider of international trade intelligence, market reports, and commercial knowledge. The Trade Commission, among other newly formed transnational trade institutions, began to assume this role by publishing international trade and market reports.

By the 1950s the museum had become obsolete. After decades of decreased public interest and visitation, in 1952 the City of Philadelphia restored and attempted to revitalize the Commercial Museum and neighboring Convention Hall. The museum was rebranded as a part of the Philadelphia Civic Center, but its staff was drastically reduced. Thereafter known as the Civic Center Museum, it continued to provide educational programming and display exhibits until 1994, when it closed indefinitely.

In 2001 the City of Philadelphia, through the Orphans’ Court, dispersed the majority of the Commercial Museum’s holdings to universities, museums, and archives around the city. Among these, Temple University’s Anthropology Lab, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Independence Seaport Museum, and the Philadelphia History Museum gained significant collections. The Civic Center and museum building complex were razed in 2005 and became the site for the University of Pennsylvania’s Ruth and Raymond Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine. The Pennsylvania Convention Center, located at Eleventh and Arch Streets, became Philadelphia’s center for commerce and trade, acting as a venue for international trade shows and other events.

Grace Schultz earned an M.A. in History with a concentration in public history from Temple University and is an Archives Technician at the National Archives at Philadelphia. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Eighteenth-century Philadelphians often expressed scientific interest in insects in relation to agricultural or economic matters. In 1768, Samuel Pullein (fl. 1734–68?) published The Culture of Silk to encourage American silk production. The treatise explained how to rear silkworms, the larvae of the domesticated silk moth (Bombyx mori). Pullein’s instructions proved to be very popular, and in 1769 Dr. Cadwalader Evans (1716–73) wrote to Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) for advice on introducing silk production to Philadelphia. Franklin suggested the creation of a public filature, an establishment for reeling silk from cocoons. By 1770, Evans and other prominent Philadelphians had organized a silk society. The following year their filature reeled 155 pounds of silk for export. Although the scheme ultimately failed, Philadelphians’ fascination with insects was just beginning.

Philadelphia’s early contributions to the study of entomology were largely due to the pioneering work of Thomas Say (1787–1834), a descriptive taxonomist. In 1812, Say joined the Academy of Natural Sciences, which became an important venue for his entomological collaborations, including American Entomology. In the absence of a comprehensive field guide to insects, Say sought to provide descriptions and color illustrations of all known species in North America. Fellow academy members Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846) and Titian Ramsay Peale (1799–1885) executed many of the drawings. Apart from a preliminary set of plates and descriptions issued in 1817, the three-volume work was printed in Philadelphia between 1824 and 1828. Before his untimely death by typhoid, Say discovered and formally described more than 1,500 insect species.

A New Way of Displaying Insects

Titian Peale, the youngest son of Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827), was primarily interested in Lepidoptera, the taxonomic order that encompasses butterflies and moths. He curated an impressive collection of roughly four thousand specimens, for which he designed what entomologists call a “book box.” In the 1820s, Peale began hermetically sealing his butterflies in glass boxes lined with tin foil. Entomologists usually preserved insect specimens by pinning them to an opaque surface lined with cork; Peale’s boxes allowed them to study specimens from both above and below by pinning specimens to small cork discs glued to the glass bottom of the box. Peale displayed these boxes at the Philadelphia Museum. In 1899, the Academy of Natural Sciences acquired Peale’s collection. It is one of the oldest collections of insects in the United States.

Concurrently, women produced popular works that diffused entomological knowledge beyond the walls of scientific societies and museums. Philadelphia Quaker and abolitionist Mary Townsend (c. 1814–51) wrote Life in the Insect World in 1844. Townsend emphasized the practical uses or lives of insects, portraying them as diligent workers, careful artisans, and clever tradesmen. In doing so, Townsend argued for cosmic design—even small, seemingly unappealing creatures had purpose and were evidence of God’s goodness. Didactic works that used science to cultivate religious sensibility were considered to be appropriate fare for young women.

In 1859, Philadelphia became home to what would become the country’s oldest continuously active entomological society, the Entomological Society of Philadelphia. Prominent founding members included John Lawrence LeConte (1812–97), a specialist in Coleoptera (beetles), and Ezra Townsend Cresson Sr. (1838–1926), a specialist in Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants). Lucy Say (1801–86), the wife of Thomas Say, became a member in 1863. The society produced various publications, including its scholarly proceedings. It also distributed, at first gratuitously and later by subscription, a circular called The Practical Entomologist. This serial aimed to acquaint farmers and agriculturalists with useful entomological knowledge. Content ranged from advice on how to deal with problematic species to the basics of taxonomy. In 1867, the society changed its name to the American Entomological Society (AES).

Illustrating Specimens

By the late nineteenth century, Philadelphia was home to a number of women illustrators. Local artist Mary Peart, along with Lavinia Bowen (b. c. 1820) and Patience Leslie, primarily illustrated Butterflies of North America by William Henry Edwards (1822–1909), issued in parts between 1868 and 1897. Rather than drawing from dead specimens, Peart raised and observed butterflies in her Philadelphia residence to more accurately draw and color the larval and pupal stages of her subjects. Ultimately, Edwards believed that Peart contributed more to the work than he did. In raising so many insects, she learned and passed on a great deal of information about the life cycles and habits of moths and butterflies.

Love of entomology passed from one generation to the next. Two of Ezra Townsend Cresson Sr.’s sons followed in his footsteps and became entomologists, working for periods of time at both the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Entomological Society. George Bringhurst Cresson (1859–1919), like his father, specialized in Hymenoptera, working as a conservator at the Entomological Section of the Academy of Natural Sciences in the 1880s. Ezra Townsend Cresson Jr. (1876–1948) specialized in Diptera, the order that encompasses true flies. Cresson Jr. became a curator in at the Academy of Natural Sciences. He contributed to entomological publications up through the 1940s, co-editing the Academy’s bimonthly serial, Entomological News, with Phillip Powell Calvert (1871–1961). Under their stewardship, the publication became increasingly interested in the study of species’ evolution to expand classical taxonomy of insects.

Meanwhile, rising concern over invasive insect species prompted entomologists to team up with local Philadelphians and the United States government. In 1916, Japanese beetles (Popillia japonica) appeared in Burlington County, New Jersey. Without natural predators, the beetles spread quickly, ravaging crops and ornamental plants. From roughly a dozen insects, their numbers escalated to one thousand quarts of insects captured largely by local children, during the summer of 1920. By 1923, and despite the efforts of entomologists, the infested area spanned seven hundred square miles with no sign of abatement. The situation prompted the U.S. Department of Agriculture to form the Division of Japanese Beetle Control in 1928; in 1933, in an early biocontrol effort, researchers produced the first commercial microbial pesticide, Milky Spore, first detected in New Jersey. By the 1940s, various branch offices littered the state; the Philadelphia office was responsible for quarantining beetles in the eastern third of Pennsylvania. Japanese beetles remained an invasive pest into the twenty-first century.

Interaction with the public was not limited to invasive species. Although the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Entomological Society continued to foster entomological research well into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, by the end of this period, the two institutions increased efforts to educate young children. In 1986, the AES established the Calvert Award for young entomologists in honor of former AES president Dr. Phillip Powell Calvert. AES additionally offered an Insect Field Day for school-age children in conjunction with the Academy of Natural Science’s two-day Annual Bug Fest. Visitors to the Academy of Natural Sciences’ museum could enjoy the live butterfly exhibition in addition to its impressive collection of preserved specimens. Other entomological exhibits geared toward children also emerged. In 1992, the Insectarium, a museum of live insects, opened in North Philadelphia.

Though the goals of entomological study were varied, throughout its history, Philadelphians maintained a steady interest in insects. By the twenty-first century, outreach efforts worked to preserve this fascination among future generations.

Jessica Linker is a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and the recipient of fellowships from a number of Philadelphia-area institutions, including the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. Her work focuses on American women and scientific practice between 1720 and 1860. (Author information current at time of publication.)