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Milwaukee Public Museum
The Milwaukee Public Museum
opened in 1884 and is one of the finest natural and human history
museums in the country. It contains three floors of displays and the
first IMAX theater in the state. The museum was 1 of 6 main American
museums that were started in the latter part of the 19th century,
and though it was chartered in 1882, it had its beginnings in 1852
with the German-English Academy. The academy's principal, Peter
Engelman inspired his students to take field trips, which resulted
in numerous specimens being collected, like geological, organic and
archaeological in scoop, which ended up in the academy. Sometime
later, alumni and other people began donating different kinds of
specimens of ethnological and historical importance to the
collection. Interest in the marvelous collection had grown to such
excellent extents, by 1857, that Peter decided to organize a natural
history society to take care of and increase the collection. After a
while, the collection began to be considered "the Museum", and it
grew to be to big for the academy's size to contain it. August
Stirn, city alderman and part of the society, managed to get
legislation from the state to have the city accept the collection
and start the procedures to start a free public museum. Carl
Doerflinger was the first director and the collection was moved into
rented spaces in 1884. Carl placed much emphasis on using the
exhibits for research and study, besides public education, until he
resigned in 1888; but not before urging the city to buy land to
build a permanent structure to house the museum and the public
library; which was done and finished in 1898. Carl Akeley, biologist
and taxidermist, considered to be the father of modern taxidermy,
completed the first habitat diorama in the world, which showed a
muskrat colony. In 1902, Henry L. Ward, the fourth director in that
year, started a history museum to go along with the natural sciences
museum. A new building was finished in 1962, and the collection
moved there in 1966. The museum houses both permanent and rotating
exhibits, with the first being the Streets of Old Milwaukee that
opened in 1965 and has become one of the most favorite, getting many
millions of visitors since opening. Today, the museum has 17
permanent exhibits that include; Africa, Arctic, Asia, Pacific
Islands, Rain Forest, A Sense of Wonder, Bugs Alive!, Living Oceans,
South & Middle America, European Village, the Puelicher Butterfly,
Exploring Life on Earth, Pre-Columbian Americas, North American
Indians, the Third Planet, Streets of Old Milwaukee and Temples,
Tells & Tombs. The museum hosts special traveling exhibitions that
can be seen only for limited times; with the most famous and popular
in recent years, Saint Peter and the Vatican: Legacy of the Popes, a
fantastic exhibition that only made three stops in this country and
the last one was at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Collections and
research include; a 14,500 year old woolly mammoth skeleton that was
given the museum with the bones being so brittle and fragile that is
used for research only and the skeleton on display is a fiberglass
copy; the anthropology department that houses about 120,000 relics,
vertebrate zoology, the conservation department, the botany
department that has a greenhouse on the museum's roof and a
herbarium collection of more than 5000 specimens, the geology
department with a huge number of minerals and fossils, a photograph
collection that contains 6000 images of the Sumner W. Matteson
Collection along with 8000 of the Brandon DeCou collection and
photographs of Wisconsin native Americans that were taken by the
staff, the registration department that inventories the collections,
the reference library with more than 100,000 volumes of natural
history information and the historical and cultural artifacts that
include the Dietz typewriter and Nunnemacher arms collection.
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