“Someone just sent us information that they would like to send us a dozen birds and a bear,” Staber said. More often, individual donations that come before the five-member collections committee are unsolicited. She wanted to acquire it, she said, because “every little girl named Phoebe came in asking to see one.” “For example, the phoebe,” Staber said, pointing to a small stuffed bird. Occasionally, Staber said, the museum will put out the call for a particular object. Most of the exhibits are donated rather than purchased, which adds a certain element of randomness to the acquisition process. Staber said that the most recent acquisition was a deer tick. Today, the museum still does business with Wards, which has lived on as a supply store for science gear ranging from molecule models to rock hammers to seismographs, although in a much more limited fashion. Most of the museum’s exhibits were in place by 1950, Staber said. In its early days, the museum bought many of its exhibits a handful of stuffed monkeys and other exotic animals in the taxidermy collection were purchased by Hinckley in the early 1900s from Wards Natural Science Establishment, a taxidermy warehouse in Rochester, N.Y., that helped to supply ravenous collectors with everything from anteaters to zebras. Many items around the museum house placards bearing relevant quotes from Hinckley he has also left behind extensive personal letters and writings. The spirit of Hinckley himself looms large in the building, which has one room dedicated to the history of the Good Will-Hinckley campus. The museum has grown since the 1860s, when the school’s founder, then a boy, was given a chunk of stalactite, a small fossil and a bit of sulphur by a local grist mill owner.įrom that modest beginning, the collection has grown to include 40,000 archaeology pieces alone, but not even the curator knows how many total pieces are in the collection, which fills every available inch within the framing of the building’s yellow pine beams and window arches. Other places that are purely natural history or purely history, they can’t do it in the same way.”
“I don’t think you can separate human history from natural history,” he said. “We’re from a time of object-based collections, from a time when people were looking at science objects and trying to sort them.”įew items would look completely out of place among the museum’s exhibits, which include everything from impressionist paintings by American painter Charles Daniel Hubbard to a grouping of about 20 marine sponges that an accompanying card says was donated from “Cuba boys.”Īdams said that there is a value to the broad approach common to the early 20th century. “Newer museums will tend to choose a focus,” Staber said. The differences between the Bates museum and other museums, so striking that curator Deborah Staber said it regularly draws field trips from curious museum classes, are largely because of an approach to science that has gone by the wayside. If it was quaint, or old, or attached to something because it was an oddity or whatever it was, then it got collected.” “There was some history, some natural history, some ethnographic pieces, a little bit of everything. “In the early days, they tended to be like L.C. Bates Museum, known in industry circles as cabinet of curiosity institutions, are becoming more rare, said Jay Adams, president of the board of directors of Maine Archives and Museums, an organization dedicated to the state’s collecting institutions.
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