The world came to Chicago in 1893, to showcase cultures and homelands at the Columbian Exposition. When the World’s Fair closed, however, many chose to leave behind their artifacts and handcrafted items.
The genesis of the Field Museum 130 years ago may seem today like a mishmash of items — animals in skeleton and taxidermied forms; precious gemstones, minerals and jewels; insects and invertebrate collections; fossils and meteorites from dig sites near and far and a smattering of other rarely seen curiosities — but it soon became a leading institution dedicated to scientific exploration and educational experiences for visitors about the people, creatures, habits and habitats that have shaped our planet.
Here’s a look back at highlights in the museum’s continuing evolution.
‘We need people power:’ How visitors to the Field Museum are helping with scientific research
May 31, 1890: Chicago’s World’s Fair — ‘perfect ethnolographical exhibition of the past and present peoples of America’
Frederic Ward Putnam, one of America’s first anthropologists and professor and curator of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, suggested Chicago look to Paris for a key element to incorporate into its 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition — “the study of man.”
“The reproduction of the habitations of man, showing the development of architecture from the primitive shelters of savages to the elaborate dwellings of barbaric times, and finally to the early classical architecture, was a grand conception and count but impress upon the mind the trials and struggles through which the civilization of today has been attained,” Putname wrote in the Tribune.
The fair’s organizers agreed and put Putnam on their payroll. Just a few days after commissioners for the World’s Columbian Exposition settled on Jackson Park as the site for the event, Putnam recommended the fair dedicate $300,000 (or roughly about $10 million in today’s dollars) for archaeological expeditions — from Greenland to Patagonia — to collect artifacts which would then be housed in a large, permanent ethnological museum on the grounds.
But the Tribune’s Editorial Board scoffed at the potential cost — calling it “prehistoric crankery” — for the cash-strapped undertaking.
“If the archaeological enthusiasts think that the public has a wild, yearning desire to see skeletons from the glacial gravels or detritus from the cave floors and shell heaps, let them spend their own money,” they wrote. “The directors have no money to waste on the man of the ice sheet or stone monstrosities from serpent mounds. … All that is necessary can be supplied by the Smithsonian Institution, and if Mexico, Greenland, or Peru pride themselves on this prehistoric stuff they can easily be induced to send it.
Putnam, given $100,000, hired two young assistants who would go on to become legends in anthropological history, German-trained Franz Boas and George Dorsey, Putnam’s prize graduate student at Harvard who in 1894 earned the first anthropology doctorate degree granted in the U.S.
The three men selected 100 men — graduate students, soldiers, sailors, diplomats and missionaries — to fan out through 50 countries to seek out and bring home outstanding artifacts for display in the 157,000 square foot Anthropology Building.
Each of the collectors was given detailed instructions on how to properly excavate and scientifically record a prehistoric ruin. If the expedition was visiting living tribal cultures, collectors were told what sorts of items to acquire:
“Particular attention should be paid to the fact that the most important things to be collected are those of genuine native manufacture, and especially those objects connected with the olden times. Objects traded to the natives by whites are of no importance, and are not desired.”
It was an unprecedented undertaking for its time, not exacting or professional by today’s standards, but more scientifically rigorous than other expeditions of that period.
May 1, 1893: Ethnic village opens with the exhibition — but without Putnam’s guidance
Beyond boxes of artifacts, many of the expeditions returned with groups of people they had studied, along with whole houses and portions of their villages to be displayed at the fair — a practice that would horrify today’s anthropologists. Among the 3,000 indigenous peoples were Laplanders, Alaskan Eskimos, North and South American Indians, Melanesians, Maoris, Javanese, Sri Lankans, Africans, Arabs and Egyptians. Putnam planned to install “a dignified and decorous ethnological display” on an 80-acre strip of land called the Midway Plaisance.
Vintage Chicago Tribune: World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 and Century of Progress, 1933-1934
Fair directors, however, were looking for ways to recover the millions of dollars in Chicago money invested in the fair. They took control of the Midway away from Putnam and gave it to Sol Bloom, a young protege of showman P.T. Barnum.
Under Bloom, who sold concessions to entertainment vendors, the “native” villages were tucked among beer halls and restaurants featuring food and music from around the world, a huge circus of performing wild animals, Buffalo Bill Cody’s internationally famous “Wild West Show,” and notorious entertainers, including belly-dancing “hoochie-coochie” girls. The area became an instant hit with visitors and the salvation of investors — but did not at all represent Putnam’s “dignified” plan.
Oct. 27, 1893: A home for the rare — and the odds and ends — gets a major influx of cash
Discussions began in late August 1893, on what to do with all the artifacts that had been assembled in Chicago for the exposition after it closed. A committee of trustees for the project began to solicit financial requests to establish a permanent museum that would memorialize the exposition. Originally dubbed the Columbian Museum of Chicago, the collection was set to occupy the exposition’s Palace of Fine Arts.
Marshall Field, founder of his namesake department store, heeded the call by giving the largest donation — $1 million (or more than $30 million in today’s dollars). The Tribune reported Field’s generosity was made “with as little ceremony as he would pay an admission fee to Jackson Park.” It was lumberman Edward E. Ayer who persuaded Field to make the generous contribution — and proposed the museum be named after Field.
Soon, wealthy Chicagoans rushed to support the project. George Pullman promised $100,000. Ayer, who would become the museum’s first director, donated his extensive collection of Native American artifacts and purchased the museum’s original collection of Egyptian artifacts.
Yet, the common man who attended the exposition also looked to donate his items to the museum out of frugality, “It gets their names in the papers and saves the expense of packing and carting away,” the Tribune reported.
Among the museum’s earliest acquisitions were the following items from the exposition: Ward’s Natural Science Establishment collection of fossil invertebrates, the entire Tiffany & Co. gem display, a collection of pre-Columbian gold ornaments and musical instruments from Samoa and Java.
June 2, 1894: Field Museum opens
Six thousand people gathered to view the museum’s collections after a simple ceremony featured “a prayer, two speeches, a single word spoken to a man holding a lanyard, a colored streamer rose to masthead, throwing a fluttering shadow downward, and the Field Columbian Museum was given to the people,” the Tribune reported.
Visitors who entered the building’s rotunda could walk along the evolution of the earth before man’s appearance — baked vegetation covered with lichen, then a cross section of a California redwood tree that was nearly 6 feet in diameter, followed by animal including a mastodon, mammoth and a whale.
May 2, 1921: Antiquities get a new home
The museum quickly outgrew its Jackson Park home, which also needed major repairs. (It reopened as the Museum of Science and Industry on July 1, 1933, as part of the Century of Progress exposition.) Construction began in July 1915, on the museum’s current site at Roosevelt Road near Northerly Island and was expected to take two to three years. Costs were estimated at $5 million (or roughly $156 million in today’s dollars).
One year prior to its opening, the museum’s exhibits were carefully removed from their first home and transported about 6 miles north to their new home.
More than 8,000 visitors braved a “biting wind and drizzly rain” to enter what the Tribune called “the greatest natural history museum in the west, and one of the finest examples of Ionic architecture in this country.” For the first time they could view the the exhibits — including prehistoric animals, skeletons, Egyptian relics and mummies and Native American handcrafted works — in spacious accommodations.
Then, just as now, the museum was open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas.
1924: Lions of Tsavo land in Chicago
In 1898, two “devil” lions inexplicably began attacking laborers constructing the Uganda Railway near the Kenyan city of Tsavo. Before the beasts’ nine-month reign of terror was over, an estimated 135 men (though that total was later challenged) were slaughtered and the progress of the monumental project was halted.
Field Museum scientists use X-rays to examine infamous man-eating lions to settle skull mystery
Col. J.H. Patterson, an engineer, had to subdue the animals before construction could continue, and the British empire could expand its colonial reach. He wrote a book titled “The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures,” about the experience, which was later adapted into the 1996 film “The Ghost and the Darkness.”
Nearly three decades later, in 1924, Patterson would journey to Chicago to lecture on the incident.
The museum’s chairman of the board, Stanley Field, asked his friend if he knew what had become of the lions. Patterson told him they were serving as rugs in his home.
Field offered to purchase the bullet-riddled skins — and the cats’ skulls — for $5,000. The deal struck, taxidermist Julius Friesser was given the task of getting them in shape for display.
Other talented men who have worked with the institution’s animal displays include “Father of Modern Taxidermy” Carl Akeley, Carl Cotton and Sinclair Clark.
1951: Bushman — ‘the most famous animal to ever call Chicago home’
Bushman, a gorilla born in Cameroon then brought to Chicago by American missionaries, was the highlight of a visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo. In the 1930s and 1940s he so firmly embedded himself into the hearts and minds of our citizenry that by 1950, Time magazine could accurately write that he was “the best known and most popular civic feature in Chicago.” During his lifetime, Bushman was seen by an estimated 100 million people.
After his death on New Year’s Day 1951, the massive 6-foot-2, 550-pound gorilla was brought to the Field Museum where its expert taxidermists carefully preserved and encased in glass the beloved animal who greets visitors at the museum’s East Entrance.
Another monumental animal who lived in Chicago is tucked away in a back corner on the museum’s main level. Su-Lin was the first live panda brought to the United States from China.
April 15, 1977: King Tut’s tomb treasures attract thousands
The Field Museum was one of six institutions in the United States chosen to host 55 objects that once belonged to the young King Tutankhamun. The exhibit idea was formed during the administration of President Richard Nixon, who wanted the American people to associate Egypt with something more than oil and water, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Unlike his possessions, King Tut didn’t make the trip to Chicago — his mummy remained in the Valley of the Kings outside Luxor, Egypt. Chicago was the second stop of “The Treasures of Tutankhamun” tour, which remained incredibly popular during its four months at the Field Museum. Long lines of eager visitors regularly snaked outside the museum and down its front entrance steps. Once inside, each paid the $1.50 admission then waited for TV monitors announcing when they could enter the Tut exhibit.
More than 1.3 million people — at a rate of more than 1,000 per hour — viewed the King Tut exhibit.
May 17, 2000: Here’s looking at Sue
After years of hype and hullabaloo, dinosaur fans finally got to see the biggest, most complete and the most expensive at the time ($8.36 million) Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever found — on permanent display in Chicago.
The dinosaur’s skeleton was discovered in 1990 near Faith, S.D., by Black Hills Institute of Geology worker Sue Hendrickson — earning it the nickname “Sue.” Federal authorities seized the fossil in 1992, claiming it was illegally removed from a Sioux ranch held in trust by the government. The government chose to sell the fossil at auction — the first T.rex to be sold in this way — in New York on Oct. 4, 1997.
The Field Museum, with McDonald’s and Walt Disney corporations helping bankroll the purchase, bought the specimen during the dramatic, high-stakes auction hosted by Sotheby’s. The money went to the rancher. The Black Hills Institute, left with nothing, claimed trademark and licensing rights to the Sue name. When the institute and the Field Museum could not come to an agreement on the use of the name, the museum dropped the Sue name in January 1998, announcing a contest for elementary-school children to find a new name (who chose the name “Dakota”). A few weeks later, however, the institute agreed to drop all claims on the name Sue.
Sue is no longer the priciest T. rex ever, but is it still the best specimen? Let’s go to the tape
Many paleontologists feared that if the 65-million-year-old fossil were purchased by a private buyer, then it would not be made available for scientific study. But they celebrated the specimen’s arrival at the museum, where it has undergone a variety of CAT scans and other technological tests that continue today.
Originally Sue occupied a prime position in Stanley Field Hall, the institution’s grand entrance. Since December 2018, Sue has lived in a second-floor gallery on the path through the “Evolving Planet” exhibit.
May 2022: ‘Native Truths’ exhibit shifts the narrative where it belongs — straight to Indigenous people
From the 1950s until 2019, the Field Museum’s Native North America Hall was a haphazard collection of everyday Indigenous American items. Vague, terse descriptions rendered the artifacts as faceless as the mannequins on display. Field anthropologists had hastily collected the items in the late 19th century, assuming, chillingly, that the cultures of their origin wouldn’t last.
“Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories,” was a long-awaited corrective. A four-year project, the permanent exhibit replaced the former Native North America displays bringing the history of Native American life in dialogue with its kaleidoscopic present.
The exhibit’s writer-curators — representing about 100 of the 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S. — contextualize items from the Field’s holdings through first-person descriptions, mostly relayed via touch screen. Fifty of the 400-plus items on display were commissioned by contemporary Native artists specifically for the exhibit, where they’re juxtaposed with historical artworks and artifacts.
May 2024: Archaeopteryx arrives
The museum’s most important fossil acquisition since Sue the T. rex has feathers, hollow bones, a long tail and 50 teeth — and is the earliest known avian dinosaur, a link between dinosaurs and modern birds.
The fossil is accompanied by a hologram-like projection showing how the Archaeopteryx would have looked in life. It’s one of two Archaeopteryx specimens in the United States — and only a dozen others have been found.
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