Thursday, April 12, 2012

Bert H. Baily Museum, Coe College, Iowa (1885-2004)

From the Archives…

Did you know Coe had a museum?  When Coe College was incorporated in 1881 is was common for college’s to have their own museums.  In fact it was a point of prestige for a college to have a museum, which is why the Coe College Museum was begun in 1885, three years after Coe instituted a library and five years before it had a student newspaper.  Part of the museum was still used by students as late as 2004 when art classes used the preserved birds as drawing subjects.

Today the space has been turned into much-needed classrooms, but pieces of the museum’s history still occasionally show up in the archives.  With the cleaning out of Peterson hall, in advance of its renovation this summer, a box of museum correspondence and notes was discovered by Harlo Hadow (Heins-Johnson Professor of Biology) and brought to the archives.  The identification cards on the right are part of this recent accession to the museum’s recorded history.

~Sara, Archives Assistant

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