When the Western Museum Society set out to collect objects and raise funds for their museum in 1818 they were very successful. They were able to raise $4,500 by 1820 when they opened the museum and their collecting efforts had been richly rewarded. They were able to forge a relationship with the new college and found a room for their museum in their building. Their efforts to setup the museum were noted and commended in journals around the country and their correspondence spanned the globe.
However, in two years the museum was struggling. Patronage from the general public was poor, money had run out, and the society was breaking up. Daniel Drake, the museums most vocal supporter, had had a falling out with the administration of the college resulting in his departure for Transylvania University. Robert Best, curator of the museum and the man who kept the doors open followed Drake to Lexington to pursue new opportunities as a professor of chemistry at Transylvania University while getting a medical degree.
This left the museum with an uncertain future. In an attempt to ensure the museum would be able to continue in operation, the directors of the Western Museum Society decided to give the museum and its contents to a recently arrived naturalist, Joseph Dorfeuille. Dorfeuille had traveled up river from New Orleans with his own collections and arrived in 1822. It's unclear how he became involved with the Western Museum, but he seems to have fairly quickly joined Best in maintaining the museum and combined his collections that he had brought with him up river with those of the museum. Dorfeuille was the best candidate to continue the dream the Western Museum Society had in 1818. Still, it would be an uphill battle.
The museum had to move to a new location around this same time, likely as a result of a break-down in relations between Drake and some of the other college directors. There was also the issue that attendance was far too low to sustain the museum and that a move might be the final straw. It had survived the first two years by the good will of the members but now the society was effectively disolved and the museum would need the good will of Cincinnatians and its visitors to keep the doors open. The admission price would remain the same as it had been since it opened, 25 cents per adult and half price for children. Former members of the Western Museum Society and their families were given free attendance as part of the deal in transferring the museum to Dorfeuille.
But 25 cents was expensive for what was regarded as an amusements and it wasn't an easy sell. Dorfeuille maintained a pretty active schedule, lecturing in the museum, writing pieces for local papers, buying new artifacts, and writing to many different people around the world. This was much the same as what the Western Museum Society had done although Dorfeuille was better at advertising it. Unfortunately the situation failed to change and Dorfeuille had to provide a lure to get them in the door where if all went well, they would take an interest in collections.
This shift away from the pure pursuit of the ideals set forth by the Western Museum Society in 1818 has generally been regarded as the beginning of the end for the museum. I would argue the contrary. Dorfeuille was still a man of science and would continue to maintain and grow the collection and give lectures and correspond on scientific topics. Dorfeuille recognized that to keep the doors open he had to get widespread support and interest in the community, that the interests of the scientific minded were simply not enough.
Certainly, his ideas were sensational and he frequently brought in items that were of questionable taste (like the hand of a murderer, preserved in spirits). These items had no scientific value but they brought people in in droves. There is a question of how much decisions like this compromised the permanent collections of the museum. Some items, like the famed Fiji Mermaid were pseudo-science, things created to fool the general population, that are generally associated with side-show acts. Passing items like this off as genuine raise questions about Dorfeuille's qualifications as a man of science and are difficult to reconcile.
Dorfeuille left little in the way of personal writings or correspondence but what does survive doesn't indicate that he actually believed these things were real. He realized that these things had value. They could be relied upon to bring people through the door and that was what he needed. The Infernal Regions exhibit would do this exceptionally and I think it's worth pointing out that after the success of this exhibit, Dorfeuille did not bring in many more of these unusual items. He no longer needed them.
As such, I'm not inclined to come down too hard on Dorfeuille. He was far from perfect, but I would contend that the museums long path to failure began after Dorfeuille. Dorfeuille sold the museum to Dr. William Wood who did little with it. It was open but rarely advertised and as far as can be determined no real changes were made. However, Wood was an amatuer scientist and was likely content with the museum as it stood. When Wood sold the museum to Frederick Franks, however, the decline can become more discernible. Franks was an artists and had run a museum of his own until it had burned down in 1841. Franks did not appear to have much interest in the core collections of the Western Museum and their decline can be more readily traced from this period forward.
More in Part II.
Saturday, April 8, 2017
Friday, July 22, 2016
A Brief Introduction
Cincinnati holds a special place in the history of museums in the United States. While there were several other cities with museums by the time the Western Museum Society was founded in 1818, the others were in well established cities. Cincinnati was 30 years old and on what was then the western frontier of the United States.
The Western Museum was run by the Western Museum Society, a group made up of local men who had a shared interest in the world around them and collection. In 1818 they made several public appeals and through the end of 1818 and 1819 they raised money, collected specimens, and donated their own collections to building the museum, which opened in June of 1820. Depending on how one chooses to look at it, the Western Museum/Western Museum Society is the first museum west of the Alleghenies, although another Cincinnati institution, Letton's Museum, opened its doors earlier in 1819.
The museum was located in the Cincinnati College building, another endeavor of some of the same men involved in the founding of the museum. By sharing spaces they believed that the students of the college could gain the added benefit of the museums collections in their studies. The public was admitted (something not all early American museums engaged in) for the price of 25 cents for adults and half price admission for children. The museums collections, while focused on so called natural curiosities (mineral, fossil, botanical, and like specimens) it would encompass Native American relics (referred to as American Antiquities), art, architecture, chemistry, and any other subject deemed suitable for public consumption. It was an ambitious undertaking.
Dr. Daniel Drake delivered a speech at the opening of the museum in which he discussed how unusual it was for the museum, located as it was in a new community at the fringe of a fledgling nation, to cover such extensive topics. “For an obvious reason, it is a new country in which such a multifarious assemblage is most proper. Ancient communities, only, exhibit a perfect separation of trades and occupations, and a divorcement of the extraneous branches of science from the learned professions, to which in young societies we find them closely united. Old communities therefore are the only ones which can successfully establish cabinets and museums for particular classes of objects...”
The museum, despite such lofty ambitions was not a success, for several reasons (which I will delve into in future posts), and in 1823 the directors of the society decided to give the museum and its collections to the current curator, Joseph Dorfeuille. Dorfeuille has been something of a contentious character in the history of the museum and has been through the 20th century written off as a charlatan, a P. T. Barnum before there was Barnum.
Under Dorefeuille's leadership, however, the museum was able to bring in enough money to support itself, particularly after the introduction of the Infernal Regions exhibit sometime in 1828. The exhibit was immensely popular, gaining world wide fame for its automaton wax figures and lively depictions of hell. Dourfeuille would maintain and expand the museums collections through his tenure and would also help to build the museums library. By the mid-1830s Dorfeuille began looking to sell the museum and at one point offered the collection and library to the Western Academy of Natural Science, an organization founded by many of the same people who had founded the Western Museum Society 20 years before. They were unable to accept and Dorfeuille eventually sold the museum to Dr. William Wood, a member of the Academy. Dorfeuille left for New York City with a large part of the Infernal Regions exhibit which was lost in a fire in 1840. Dorfeuille died shortly thereafter of cholera.
Wood maintained the Western Museum more or less as it was and the years between 1838 and 1846 were quiet ones. He appears to have rebuilt or replaced the Infernal Regions with an exhibit of the same name which would remain a fixture of the museum and Cincinnati for the next 20 years. Wood sold the museum in 1847 to Frederick Franks, another museum owner in Cincinnati who had lost most of his museum and collection in a fire in 1841. Franks ran the museum, again with no significant changes, until 1859.
The last 7 years of the museum's operation saw it at its lowest. The collections, once one of the best in the country, had been neglected and were described as being in a poor state by visitors. The Infernal Regions was the only real draw at this late stage and the exhibit had been changed into a kind of live theater performance rather than a wax works exhibit. A former Cincinnati silversmith named Abraham Palmer bought the museum from Franks and operated it until 1862 when he appears to have retired. Palmer sold the museum to Mary English, who as far as I can tell is the first female owner and operator of an American museum of any description.
English saw the museum through most of the Civil War, using the museum as a kind of gambling hall under the cover of the museum. During the war the museum was briefly closed by order of the Army because of the effect the losses local troops were having at the card games there were deemed detrimental to moral. English was able to get the order rescinded after a short period but the museum remained something of a notorious place with fairly regular notices in the papers of people reporting having their pockets picked or being robbed at the museum.
English did rearrange the collection in the museum and sent some up to Indianapolis during the war, opening the Indiana State Museum (different from the institution of the same name which opened only a few years later and remains to this day), donating the profits from the museum there to soldiers. What connection her museum has with the Indiana State Museum of today is not clear but there is a possibility that the collection sent up from Cincinnati formed some part of the original collection of that organization. There is no record of it having returned to Cincinnati.
After the end of the war English operated the museum until 1867 when it closed its doors for good. In 1868 an auction was held and the contents of the museum building were sold at auction. Five years later, the remnants of the Western Academy and other local citizens banded together to open the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. While it is possible that some of the remaining collection from the Western Museum sold in 1868 was used to help establish the new museum there is no record of this being the case.
In future posts I will delve into different parts of the Western Museum's history and the people connected to it.
The Western Museum was run by the Western Museum Society, a group made up of local men who had a shared interest in the world around them and collection. In 1818 they made several public appeals and through the end of 1818 and 1819 they raised money, collected specimens, and donated their own collections to building the museum, which opened in June of 1820. Depending on how one chooses to look at it, the Western Museum/Western Museum Society is the first museum west of the Alleghenies, although another Cincinnati institution, Letton's Museum, opened its doors earlier in 1819.
The museum was located in the Cincinnati College building, another endeavor of some of the same men involved in the founding of the museum. By sharing spaces they believed that the students of the college could gain the added benefit of the museums collections in their studies. The public was admitted (something not all early American museums engaged in) for the price of 25 cents for adults and half price admission for children. The museums collections, while focused on so called natural curiosities (mineral, fossil, botanical, and like specimens) it would encompass Native American relics (referred to as American Antiquities), art, architecture, chemistry, and any other subject deemed suitable for public consumption. It was an ambitious undertaking.
Dr. Daniel Drake delivered a speech at the opening of the museum in which he discussed how unusual it was for the museum, located as it was in a new community at the fringe of a fledgling nation, to cover such extensive topics. “For an obvious reason, it is a new country in which such a multifarious assemblage is most proper. Ancient communities, only, exhibit a perfect separation of trades and occupations, and a divorcement of the extraneous branches of science from the learned professions, to which in young societies we find them closely united. Old communities therefore are the only ones which can successfully establish cabinets and museums for particular classes of objects...”
The museum, despite such lofty ambitions was not a success, for several reasons (which I will delve into in future posts), and in 1823 the directors of the society decided to give the museum and its collections to the current curator, Joseph Dorfeuille. Dorfeuille has been something of a contentious character in the history of the museum and has been through the 20th century written off as a charlatan, a P. T. Barnum before there was Barnum.
Under Dorefeuille's leadership, however, the museum was able to bring in enough money to support itself, particularly after the introduction of the Infernal Regions exhibit sometime in 1828. The exhibit was immensely popular, gaining world wide fame for its automaton wax figures and lively depictions of hell. Dourfeuille would maintain and expand the museums collections through his tenure and would also help to build the museums library. By the mid-1830s Dorfeuille began looking to sell the museum and at one point offered the collection and library to the Western Academy of Natural Science, an organization founded by many of the same people who had founded the Western Museum Society 20 years before. They were unable to accept and Dorfeuille eventually sold the museum to Dr. William Wood, a member of the Academy. Dorfeuille left for New York City with a large part of the Infernal Regions exhibit which was lost in a fire in 1840. Dorfeuille died shortly thereafter of cholera.
Wood maintained the Western Museum more or less as it was and the years between 1838 and 1846 were quiet ones. He appears to have rebuilt or replaced the Infernal Regions with an exhibit of the same name which would remain a fixture of the museum and Cincinnati for the next 20 years. Wood sold the museum in 1847 to Frederick Franks, another museum owner in Cincinnati who had lost most of his museum and collection in a fire in 1841. Franks ran the museum, again with no significant changes, until 1859.
The last 7 years of the museum's operation saw it at its lowest. The collections, once one of the best in the country, had been neglected and were described as being in a poor state by visitors. The Infernal Regions was the only real draw at this late stage and the exhibit had been changed into a kind of live theater performance rather than a wax works exhibit. A former Cincinnati silversmith named Abraham Palmer bought the museum from Franks and operated it until 1862 when he appears to have retired. Palmer sold the museum to Mary English, who as far as I can tell is the first female owner and operator of an American museum of any description.
English saw the museum through most of the Civil War, using the museum as a kind of gambling hall under the cover of the museum. During the war the museum was briefly closed by order of the Army because of the effect the losses local troops were having at the card games there were deemed detrimental to moral. English was able to get the order rescinded after a short period but the museum remained something of a notorious place with fairly regular notices in the papers of people reporting having their pockets picked or being robbed at the museum.
English did rearrange the collection in the museum and sent some up to Indianapolis during the war, opening the Indiana State Museum (different from the institution of the same name which opened only a few years later and remains to this day), donating the profits from the museum there to soldiers. What connection her museum has with the Indiana State Museum of today is not clear but there is a possibility that the collection sent up from Cincinnati formed some part of the original collection of that organization. There is no record of it having returned to Cincinnati.
After the end of the war English operated the museum until 1867 when it closed its doors for good. In 1868 an auction was held and the contents of the museum building were sold at auction. Five years later, the remnants of the Western Academy and other local citizens banded together to open the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History. While it is possible that some of the remaining collection from the Western Museum sold in 1868 was used to help establish the new museum there is no record of this being the case.
In future posts I will delve into different parts of the Western Museum's history and the people connected to it.
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