Allan Appel Photo
Young dinosaur lover James with his dad Michael Conte.
Displaying complete animal dominance over his triceratops, 2‑year-old James Conte represented the fourth generation of his family to be dazzled by the various fierce ceretopsians and other holdings of our hometown treasure, the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
Allan Appel Photo
The Great Hall, with plant eating Comptosaurus in the foreground.
Tuesday afternoon James was hanging out in the Cretacious Garden in front of the museum.
He was part of a festive crowd chatting after a whirwind tour of the history of the museum organized by the International Festival of Arts & Ideas as part of the museum’s ongoing celebration of its sesquicentennial.
Many of the 30 or so attendees in the tour were somewhat older than James, like 84-year-old Art Zollin, and yet still full of vivid memories of having visited the museum with their elementary school classes in New Haven and from the surrounding communities
Zollin came down to New Haven from where he was vacationing in New Hampshire, both for his Hopkins School 65th reunion and also to participate in the Arts & Ideas events; yesterday, he said he had A&I-toured the Pardee Rose Garden and Greenhouse.
Yale Peabody Museum Archives
About 500 of the 700 attendees at the 1925 opening were scientists.
Zolin remembered the dinosaurs in the museum’s Great Hall from when he visited as a kid at the Mary Benton Elementary School — which stood where Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel now stands on Whalley and Harrison — as well as with the Sheridan School and Hopkins.
He said for this tour he was looking less for being wowed again by the museum’s great fossilized creatures but getting more of a behind-the-scenes experience of how the museum came to be.
He was not disappointed.
Elizabeth Driebeek and her sons Julian and Kyle, beneath Torosaurus latus in the Cretacious Garden, off Whitney Ave.
Instead of entering the building, Education Coordinator Jim Sirch led his fossil-dazzled flock of all ages up Sachem Street toward Hillhouse Avenue to check out some of the early sites and buildings associated with the museum’s institutional evolution before the current august structure was inaugurated on Dec. 29, 1925.
At the summit of Hillhouse, Sirch explained that the eponymous 19th-century businessman and Connecticut senator (James Hillhouse) gave Yale a large parcel of land but dictated that no dormitory be built on it. All kinds of activities ensued on the parcel, including Yale tennis courts, but the land eventually became the site of the 1925 building.
The original 1866 four-story building now gone.
Before that Yale’s collection of fossils, minerals, and ethnographic materials were held in a four-story building that had been erected for that purpose in 1866 on the university’s old campus.
It endured until 1917 until it was replaced by Saybrook College, with all the treasures placed in storage post-World War I until the grand building we now have was complete.
Sirch in front of site of the museum’s first school service program.
At No. 51 Hillhouse Avenue Sirch pointed out that the entire building had been dedicated to disseminating knowledge, not just collecting specimens. Not only is the Peabody, Sirch said, one of the earliest and most prestigious natural history museums associated with a university — the George Peabody who gave the money for Yale’s museum also gave money for a similar institution at Harvard — but our Peabody created the first substantial school service program.
He held up a box, which he recently uncovered at the museum’s archives, which was an early traveling exhibit explaining to school kids all about Oahu, one of the Hawaiian Islands, he said.
Next stop was the wide expanse of grass in front of the current MacMillan Center at about the midpoint of Hillhouse. This was the site of the home of Benjamin Silliman, Yale’s pioneering professor of chemistry and natural history.
Yale Peabody Museum Archives
The story Sirch told — part fact and part charming fable — as the group saw several more sites and then meandered back to the Peabody’s main building went like this: Silliman had a brilliant student whose name was O.C. Marsh.
Problem was that Marsh was more interested in geology and especially in all the remarkable bones that had begun appearing in the American West. He went nuts as a fossil hunter organizing expeditions, risking life and limb fighting off Indians for the sake of science, and sending back trainloads of bones to Yale.
And many of them, it was reported, were a million years old. Never mind that they turned out to be one hundred times older than that.
Bushnell (left) and Roach.
Even if the tour was more history than highlights of the museum’s treasures — including the great John James Audubon bird prints and the world-class collections in invertebrate paleontology — visitors like Guilford’s Lynn Bushnell and her cousin Judy Roach visiting from Maine were more than pleased.
Bushnell said she had not been back to the museum since she had visited as an eight-year-old girl.
“I stood in awe of the dinosaurs” then, she said.
Elizabeth Driebeek, beside Archelon, a prehistoric cousin of the sea turtle.
And the awe continues. Go ask James Conte.
The museum has continuing programs marking its sesquicentennial year. They include a display, beginning in August, of selections from the museum’s Polynesian collections in the Yale-owned storefront formerly occupied by Au Bon Pain and Emporium at the corner of Broadway and York. Sirch said that exhibition, free to the public, will be open for a year.
