Winchell arrives in September to begin the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Part of the duties assigned by President William Watts Folwell is the creation of a museum, which came to be called the General Museum. In his annual report of 1875, Winchell mentions that ‘Prior to the commencement of the Geological and Natural History survey, there was a nucleus of a museum already in existence in the University. This comprised a variety of objects, many from the State of Minnesota, and others from foreign localities.’ That same nucleus was mentioned in Winchell’s first (1872) report as well. ‘Rooms have been provided in the university building for the storage of specimens and for laboratory work; and the nucleus of a geological museum has already been established.’ However, no description beyond this is given of the nucleus’ content apart from a donation of plaster casts of state trilobites by Prof. William Franklin Phelps, president of the normal school at Winona.

Winchell is one of the main founders of the Minnesota Academy of Sciences and gave the Academy's opening talk on June 25, 'The Glacial Phenomena of the Northwest' to an audience that the St. Paul Pioneer noted included a large proportion of ladies. Before Winchell's talk though, the audience inspected the Academy's 'Cabinet and curiosities,' so the Academy debuted with the beginnings of its museum. Although their activities were supposedly separate endeavors, from the beginning there were many ties between the nascent collections of the Academy and the General Museum. Within three years, two-thirds of the Academy's 3,000-item collection were geological in nature, a testimony to Winchell's influence on the Academy.

Also in 1873, Winchell makes his first collection of ‘archaeological materials’ from the state, taking three skulls and other skeletal remains from burial mounds at Big Stone Lake. Also in 1873, Winchell makes his first collection of ‘archaeological materials’ from the state, taking three skulls and other skeletal remains from burial mounds at Big Stone Lake. Although this activity was not detailed in his second annual report for 1873, Rebecca Toov discovered Winchell’s description of the mound’s 1873 desecration in an 1882 field notebook where Winchell compiled some of his unpublished field notes. 

A full transcription of Winchell's unpublished archaeology notes can be found here but the Big Stone Lake notes begin rather poetically. 

‘1873. Brown’s Valley. An Englishman, horse-thief, gambler, photographer, lecturer, and correspondent of one of the New York papers, opened one of the Indian mounds near the station at Big Stone Lake. He took out a number of skulls, and other bones. I gather a few more by slight examination, and, packing the whole in a box, take them with me to Minneapolis. The man who took them out was detected with Lieut. Allanson’s horse, and by giving his captor all his available property was released. I met him on the Coteau at Headquarters, near the State line on the Winona + St. Peter. RR. He abandoned his bones + skulls, and the depositer gives them to me.

Winchell then went on to describe four mounds on the Dacotah side of the lake and includes a drawing of the burial mound indicating the position of the bodies which included both adults and children.

In his second annual report for the year 1873, Winchell noted a University of Minnesota student accompanied him to Big Stone Lake and aided his exploration of the valley. Although Winchell identified the student as C. E. Chatfield, this was undoubtedly Edward Crane Chatfield. Chatfield and George Edwin Ricker comprised the University’s second graduating class and Chatfield earned the first Bachelor of Science awarded by the University of Minnesota. The following year, Helen Mar Ely, became the first female graduate, earning the University’s first Bachelor of Literature degree. Chatfield later became an Alderman for Minneapolis’ second ward. 

At least one of the three skulls taken by Winchell in 1873 remained in the department collections until the fall of 1997, along with partial skeletal remains from an estimated total of seven individuals. Those remains were stored in 103 Pillsbury Hall. While those remains were rematriated in 1997, by Minnesota law their presence in the department had been illegal for over two decades and ethically had been wrong from the start. 

During the summer of 1874, Captain William Ludlow recruited Winchell to lead the 1874 Black Hills Expedition’s science corps. Winchell’s co-leader was George Bird Grinnell and both had assistants. Winchell’s assistant was Aris Berkley Donaldson who had been the University of Minnesota professor of rhetoric and English literature for the previous five years. When the university regents terminated his position that April, Winchell offered to let Donaldson accompany the expedition as he knew of Donaldson’s interest in botany. While on the expedition, Donaldson supplemented his income by writing stories for the St. Paul Pioneer, which led to his second career as a journalist and owner of the Alexandria Post. 

Winchell’s collection of rocks and minerals from the Black Hills were all thought to have been disposed of in a landfill in the 1970s but Du Anne Heeren, acting on a tip from Mary Beck, the undergraduate curator for the department’s collection in 1974-75, found four of Winchell’s Black Hills samples when the department moved out of Pillsbury the summer of 2018. More recently, a search of the collections found roughly half of Winchell’s rock and mineral samples that had been mislabeled and mixed in with the department’s teaching collection. While it is likely that some of Winchell’s Black Hills fossils still exist, they would have been sent with the rest of the department’s fossil collections to the University of Cincinnati in 2018. Curation of those materials is still ongoing.   

Surprisingly, many of Donaldson’s botanical samples, despite being far more fragile than Winchell’s minerals, rocks, and fossils, fared better. Winchell had Donaldson send them to John Merle Coulter, then botanist for the United States Geological Survey and later Professor of Botany at Wabash College from 1879 to 1891. Coulter prepared a list of the specimens for Ludlow’s 1875 report on the Black Hills Expedition. The specimens remained at the Wabash Herbarium in Crawfordsville, Indiana until 1987 when the herbarium’s collection was transferred to the New York Botanical Garden where they remain. 

Sadly, the skins of various mammals that Winchell collected during the expedition did not fare as well as Donaldson’s plants did. The mammals were mounted by Professor Henry Augustus Ward of Rochester, New York and remained an integral part of the early museum collections. The first nine items in the General Museum Zoology Registrar (Vol. 2) were a male elk, female grizzly bear, three antelopes (two male, one female), a male black-tailed deer, male and female white-tailed deer, and a badger. In addition, Winchell also brought back grizzly bear young and a weasel. The antelopes are featured in one of the few photographs we have of the General Museum but their fate, as well as those of the other Black Hill mounts, is unknown. None of them currently exist in the Bell Museum holdings. 

Winchell’s fourth annual report for the year 1875 included the first catalogue of the museum’s holdings. This was also the year when the General Museum opened to the public as rooms dedicated to the museum were completed as part of an expansion of Old Main. Winchell also reported progress in securing cabinets for the collection’s display. 

Winchell also purchased 354 plaster casts from Professor Ward’s science. Nearly a score of donors contributed $730 towards the $1,500 cost. According to department lore, Winchell made up some of the shortfall by trading fossils and skins to Ward in lieu of cash. Of the 354 casts, three remain on display in Tate Hall’s third floor atrium corridor. One was discarded by the University in the early 1990s but salvaged from the trash to now adorn my office wall. Another was found irretrievably damaged in the attic of Pillsbury Hall during the department’s move to Tate Halls and was discarded at that time. 

Two additional sets of the General Museum’s Ward casts were transferred to the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). 

On March 24, 1949, some of the Ward casts accompanied the Hollandale mammoth, originally donated by P.D. McMillan of Freeborn County, to the SMM. In exchange, the SMM gave the Department of Geology a large blackboard surfaced classroom globe on a floating pedestal mount. Besides the mammoth, the SMM received two meteorite samples and four Ward casts: the head of a dodo bird, an elephant bird egg, a fossil kiwi, and a fossil dragonfly. The imbalance of this trade was only heightened by the voluntary return of the blackboard surfaced globe to the SMM half a century later.

Later, as the Geology Museum closed, several large casts were sent to the SMM on Feb. 13, 1958. A glyptodon cast, originally from the General Museum, is still on display in the SMM’s paleontology hall. Casts of Dinotherium, mastodon, titanothere, and Capitosaurus skulls accompanied the Glyptodon to the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM accession number 2242). In addition, a suite of archaeological materials, including Hopi and Mimbres Valley materials collected by Albert Ernest Jenks of the University’s Anthropology department, which had been in the Geology Museum, were part of that transfer. 

A large Megatherium cast, whose protracted construction was featured in several late 19^th century The Ariel articles, was also sent to the Science Museum of Minnesota at that time but was given to Concordia College in St. Paul on Feb. 23, 1962. However, by 2024, no Concordia University staff I have contacted have any knowledge of the Megatherium’s fate.

In addition, at least one of the Ward casts, a plesiosaur paddle, made its way to the Bell Museum where it is currently on display in the museum’s Touch and See Room.

At the age of 20, George Frederick Kunz, who would go on to become one of the world’s most famous gem and mineral specialists, sold his first large collection of minerals to the General Museum for $400. The collection contained over 4,000 specimens and had an aggregate weight of two tons. Kunz credited this sale with the start of his highly successful career. Winchell arranged for this sale and others at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia which he attended to promote Minnesota's Geological and Natural History Survey and solicit materials for the General Museum.

In his fifth annual report for 1876, Winchell reported that: 

‘The most important addition to the mineralogical collections made during the year was in the purchase of the entire cabinet collection of Mr. Geo. F. Kunz, of Hoboken, N. J. This has not been received yet at the University, and is not enumerated in the following catalogue. In general it embraces a complete set of zinc and iron ores, and species, so far as they can be got in the locality of Franklin and Ogdensburg, N. J.’

At least 998 of Kunz’s mineral samples remain in the department’s collections, along with 77 rock samples. More may be present but do not have Kunz’s name listed in our digital records. The vast majority of the named Kunz samples were donated in 1876, but some samples are also listed as 1877, 1879, and 1880. 

In his Sixth Annual Report for the Year 1877, Winchell included a section titled ‘Primitive Man at Little Falls’ in which he describes finding pieces of chipped white chert he believed were evidence of humans were living in Minnesota prior to the glacial period. In his description, Winchell apparently concurred with the then-prevalent belief there was a previous Mound-Builders culture, distinct from and older than the ‘present Indian races.’ This was one of Winchell’s earliest forays into a topic that would consume much of his attention in the first decade of the 2oth century after his involvement in the Survey ended. 

The importance Winchell placed on these fragments of worked quartz is reflected in their entry as items 3 through 7 in his Catalogue of Archaeological Specimens in the General Museum - even ahead of the skeletal remains Winchell had collected from burial mounds near Big Stone Lake four years earlier. 

Some of the Little Falls worked cherts were transferred to the Department of Anthropology in 1939 and at a later unknown date as parts of accessions 212 (1939) and 328 (date is uncertain but probably prior to 1950). It is unknown whether any still remain in a University of Minnesota collection, but the chert fragments were surface finds rather than associated with burials.

Later that year, while exploring the geology of southwestern Minnesota, Winchell visited Pipestone Quarry on Sunday, October 21. His visit happened to coincide with that of a Yankton party who had come to the quarry earlier to collect pipestone. In a letter written to his mother two days later from Luverne, Winchell mentioned he had ‘procured about a ton of the pipestone, + must see to shipping it.’ Winchell’s estimate was high, but he did acquire a meter-square piece of pipestone that weighed a few hundred pounds, along with other smaller pieces. 

The large pipestone slab has a partial sawcut, which suggests it was already quarried and was beginning to be cut up when Winchell acquired it. It is not certain whether Winchell was given the sample or bought it as Winchell’s account books record few details. Winchell had an expense record for the day as ‘Pipestone $2.50’ but there is no additional information to determine whether the $2.50 was to purchase pipestone or offset Winchell’s lodging costs in the nearby city of Pipestone. Winchell often camped out on his travels so the question is open-ended. However, Winchell also noted expenses of 35 cents for a box and nails to crate the pipestone for shipping and indirectly records his difficulty in getting the sample out of the quarry as Winchell had to pay an additional nickel to get his harness repaired. In other survey accounts, three dollars covered three days’ work portaging goods, so if Winchell did pay $2.50 for the pipestone, it might have been a fair exchange for unworked rock. However, it is just as likely that he received the rock for free. 

In his description of the quarry for his sixth annual report for 1877, Winchell described the active pipestone quarries as being less than two meters deep, but he noted ‘the difficulties encountered in removing about five feet of very firm, pinkish quartzyte in heavy beds’ that the Yankton quarriers faced. Since the pipestone layer dips eight degrees to the east, after a century and a half of quarrying, modern quarriers now have to excavate over five meters of overlying quartzite to reach the pipestone layer using the same techniques as their predecessors.

Winchell's letter to his mother and his account book ledger for the trip can be viewed here.

The pipestone slab, bearing the sample number 2520, is still in the ESCI collections. For decades it was on display on the ground floor of Pillsbury Hall, bearing a small placard identifying it as catlinite, which was also the rock name that Winchell used in the museum registrar. Pipestone was often named catlinite at the time, in honor of the artist and explorer George Caitlin, who was one of the first Euro-Americans known to have visited the quarry in 1836. In the mid 1990’s a newly arrived faculty member removed the label as they took exception to a European name being used for a rock with significance to the Yankton, Dakota, and other Indigenous communities. 

The unlabeled pipestone remained on display until the summer of 2017 when the Earth and Environmental Sciences department moved into Tate Hall. Since then, it has remained off display until a suitable home is found for it. 

Christopher Webber Hall joins the department as its second geology faculty. He accompanies Winchell that fall to the North Shore and Arrowhead region of Minnesota. Hall and Winchell would revisit the area the following fall, but one of Hall’s assistants in 1879 would be a 21-year-old Thomas Sadler Roberts who, after a medical career, would return to the University of Minnesota in 1915 to work with the zoological legacy of the General Museum that eventually became the Bell Museum.

During this survey, Winchell acquired a birchbark canoe from the Ojibwe that spent many years stored in the General Museum atop display cabinets. Winchell includes a photograph of the canoe in his 1911 publication, 'The Aborigines of Minnesota'.

The Estherville meteorite fell in Emmet County, Iowa at 5 p.m. on May 10, 1879. The largest piece of the meteorite fell on the Sever Lee farm, two miles north of Estherville and weighed 437 pounds. Charles Birge, a Keokuk attorney took advantage of Lee’s temporary default on his farm payment to a railroad company to seize that piece and sell it to the British Museum. Another large piece, originally weighing 170 pounds, was found on the A. A. Pingrey farm. Unaware of its value, Pingrey gave the meteorite to a neighbor, John Horner, who hid it in a cave on the land of Ab. Ridley. This was the stone, and the setting where the University of Minnesota purchased a piece of the Estherville meteorite by midnight lantern light. 

When Professor Gustavus Hinrichs of the State University of Iowa visited Estherville and proclaimed the meteorite had considerable value, Pingrey attempted to reclaim his piece from Horner. As a result, Horner employed the services of Frank Davey, an attorney, and the editor of the Estherville Vindicator to defend his claim. 

Governor John Sargant Pillsbury of Minnesota sent Dr. Edwin J. Thompson, the University of Minnesota professor of mathematics and astronomy, who taught the university’s first astronomy course, to purchase as much of the meteorite as possible for the General Museum. He provided Thompson with significant cash and, in a remarkable sign of faith, a signed blank check. Thompson also gained the aid of George Chamberlain, a newspaper editor from nearby Jackson, Minnesota, who was a good friend of Davey. The three met with Horner at Ridley’s cave in the middle of the night to strike a deal. As it turned out, Pillsbury’s blank check was not needed, as the cash he provided was sufficient. Thompson and Chamberlain then smuggled the meteorite into Minnesota before dawn.

Although the sale’s legality was later questioned, this part of the Estherville meteorite was the only large piece to remain in the United States. A third piece, weighing 92½ pounds, was found by the Pietz brothers in February of 1880 and was purchased by Birge. During the summer and autumn of 1879, after prairie fires had cleared the ground, over 5,000 small pieces, ranging from pea- to egg-sized samples were found.

Winchell used pieces of the Estherville meteorite to trade for other meteorite samples. Consequently, it became the foundation for a collection that included samples from fifty-eight meteorites by Winchell’s 19^th Annual Report for the year 1890. Most of Winchell’s trades were with Charles Upham Shepard of Yale, who had compiled the largest collection of meteorites at the time. Along with trades with John Lawrence Smith, whose meteorite collection nearly rivaled Shepard’s, Winchell also obtained samples from Prof E. J. Thompson; Dr. Heinrich Hensoldt, a microscope maker; Albert E. Foote, an Iowa professor; and even Henry Augustus Ward. In addition, Christopher Webber Hall presented one small piece of the Estherville meteorite. 

In 1966, most of our meteorite collection was loaned to the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. However, much of the Estherville meteorite remains in our collection and a large piece of it is currently on display in Tate Hall. A smaller piece has been on loan to the public library in Estherville, Iowa since 1939.

Another notable 1879 find was the left ramus of the lower jaw of Giant Beaver Castoroides with incisor and four perfectly preserved molars, which was found on the corner of Washington Avenue and 15th Avenue North, Minneapolis. The specimen was found by workers excavating for a cistern. It was discovered in drift eight feet below the surface and roughly twenty feet above the river level. Winchell described the partial jaw. 

Loaned to the Science Museum of Minnesota in July of 1947 (SMM accession number 1074).

Also in 1879, the mount and skull of Cardigan, Libby Custer’s dog was donated to the museum by Reverend Edwin Sidney Williams. 

Although Cardigan’s mount was destroyed in early 1917, his skull was still in the Bell Museum collections until the 1960s although it has since been lost. 

The Nov. 24, 1881, issue of The Ariel described the donation of an oak beam believed to be one of four gallows beams from the scaffold used to murder 38 Dakota men at Mankato on Dec. 26, 1862. Although that identification is now thought to be incorrect, this supposed ‘gallows beam’ was kept on display in the General Museum (later Geology Museum) until 1927.

In 1927, the University donated the then-decaying beam to the Blue Earth County Historical Society where it remains in storage.

From the last week in September to the end of the year, much of Winchell’s activity for the 1884 year was tied to preparing the state’s display at the 1884 World's Cotton and Industrial Exposition at New Orleans. Winchell visited the Pipestone Quarry to purchase carved items for the display and traveled to the Vermilion Lake area to gather samples of iron ore. After the display was set up in January of 1885, Winchell’s son, Horace Vaugh Winchell stayed in New Orleans as the Survey’s exhibit custodian. Articles in the Ariel noted that Old Main’s hallways had been stripped of maps and materials and boasted of the University’s imprint on the state’s displays. In total, the University sent six railroad cars of materials to the Exposition, with Winchell and the General Museum furnishing half of the material. Other Minnesota organizations contributed materials for the state display, including a large obelisk of building stones from a Mankato Stone quarry. 

In his 13th Annual Report for the year 1884, Winchell listed many of the exposition materials.

As with the earlier Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Winchell returned with more materials than he had left with. But this time, instead of minerals, Winchell purchased hundreds of items intended to increase the General Museum’s archaeological holdings. The provenance of most of those items was not recorded beyond their geographic location, but at least two items, both stone discs, were dug from a mound in Charleston, Missouri and were found with skeletal remains. It is unclear how many of the other items may have also been taken from Indigenous burials. All of these materials were purchased from ‘Powers’ but I have no knowledge of who, or what, Powers was. Winchell usually used initials or first names when referring to individuals who sold or donated samples to the museum, which suggests Powers might be a business or institute. At present though, the identity of ‘Powers’ is uncertain. 

A list of the materials Winchell purchased from Powers can be found here.

Sixteen of the 226 items purchased from Powers at the Exposition were transferred to the Department of Anthropology as part of their accession 212. One of those items, a stone implement from Chickamauga Creek, near the Civil War battleground, is still in their collection. There is no record of what happened to the two stone discs (item 146) taken from the Charleston burial mound. They are no longer in the Earth and Environmental Sciences’ collection nor is there is any record of their transfer to the Anthropology department or another institution.

Of the 126 ‘manufactured articles of catlinite’ purchased for the exposition that were mentioned in Winchell’s 13^th Annual Report, eleven pipestone carvings were retained as part of the General Museum's archaeological collection. None of these pipestone pieces are still held by the department nor do we have any record of their transfer. However, at the time, they were craft items created for sale rather than burial goods, so their disappearance is not as concerning.

In the General Museum registrar, John Sargent Pillsbury is credited with the presentation of a white buffalo mount. That mount had previously been owned by James Jerome Hill of Saint Paul who had exhibited it at the 1884 Cotton Centennial World’s Fair in New Orleans. The buffalo was killed in Dakota Territory on Lakota ancestral lands. 

The General Museum white buffalo was one of sixty-nine mounts discarded in early 1917 by Thomas Sandler Roberts, then curator of the Zoology Museum. Those sixty-nine mounts, which included Cardigan, Libby Custer’s dog, were infested with pests and posed a risk to the Zoology Museum’s other mounts, including Robert’s beloved collection of bird skins. 

The University of Minnesota’s annual Calendar for 1885-86 noted that the General Museum comprised two rooms in Old Main. In the south room (room 52), besides the geological and mineralogical samples, ‘An archaeological collection of several hundred specimens, chiefly from the region of the Mound Builders in Ohio, has also been deposited by Dr. H. E. Twichell. It is expected that this collection will ultimately become the property of the University.’ In his fourteenth Annual Report for 1885, Winchell corroborated the Calendar, writing: ‘Besides the foregoing, the collections of Dr. H. E. Twitchell have been deposited in the museum, to remain at least four years. These will finally be presented to the museum by Dr. Twitchell according to his present design. They comprise several hundred specimens, characteristic of the mound-builders of Indiana and Ohio.’

Dr. Herbert Eugene Twitchell was born in Chatfield, Minnesota on March 27, 1855, as the village’s first ‘white child’. He apprenticed as a physician under his father at the age of 16. His father, Refine Weekes Twitchell served as the U.S. Government surgeon for the Dakota in that area and was an assistant surgeon in the 9th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry regiment during the 1862 US-Dakota War. Refine was also a trustee and founder of the Chatfield Academy, which was Herbert first schooling. Herbert later attended the Winona Normal School and taught for two years before deciding to pursue a medical career. He graduated from the Louisville Medical College in Kentucky before moving to Darrtown, Ohio and eventually to Hamilton. Twitchell was a surgeon in the Ohio National Guard Regiment during the Spanish American War. Twitchell maintained an interest in archaeology throughout his lifetime and in 1916, was elected a lifetime member of the Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society. 

Beyond the Calendar and Annual Report references, I have not discovered any additional information about these materials, their content, origin, or fate. Hence, it is uncertain whether Twitchell’s materials remained with the General Museum beyond the initial four-year span nor is there any record of what the collection consisted of. With several hundred items, this would have been a significant part of the General Museum’s archaeological holdings.

Henry Francis Nachtrieb, a former student of Winchell, was appointed State Zoologist to oversee the Survey’s zoological investigations in November of 1888. As a student, Nachtrieb donated a northern leopard frog to the General Museum collection in 1878, a crayfish in 1879, and a Corydalis plant in 1880. Nachtrieb earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Minnesota in 1883, one of a class of 158 students. For the next two years, he attended John Hopkins University before returning to the University of Minnesota as an instructor. On April 4 of 1888, the Board of Regents had established the position of State Zoologist and ruled that the professor of Animal Biology would hold it. However, at the time Nachtrieb was only an Assistant Professor so his formal assignment had to wait until he achieved full professorship that autumn. Nachtrieb’s first undertaking as official State Zoologist was a survey of the fish, mussels, and mollusks present in Minnesota’s rivers. Concurrent to his role as State Zoologist, Nachtrieb also served as the curator of the Zoological Museum, when the geological and biological collections of the General Museum were subdivided into two separate museums. Consequently, Nachtrieb was the first curator of the separate Zoological Museum, which eventually evolved into the present Bell Museum. Nachtrieb was the chair of the Department of Animal Biology in 1887 until his retirement in 1925.

In 1889, the General Museum moved from Old Main to a newly constructed Pillsbury Hall along with its associated departments, Geology, Mineralogy, Animal Biology, Botany, Mining and Metallurgy, as well as Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey. The Morrill Act of 1862 had earlier provided Minnesota with 30,000 acres of land seized from Indigenous nations to support a public university. However, that act’s goal was specifically the establishment of agricultural colleges. Early on, the university constructed an Agriculture Building where 216 Pillsbury Drive now sits. In 1885 though, the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station was established on St. Paul land acquired three years earlier and the University of Minnesota became a two-campus institution. Within four years, accusations arose that the university was diverting Morrill funds from the agricultural school to benefit the whole institution, and some politicians moved to separate the agricultural campus from the university. In 1887, the state legislature authorized $100,000 for the construction of a new ‘Science Hall.’ Before the building was completed, a fire destroyed half of the structure, and the legislature hesitated to provide an additional $150,000 to restore and finish the building. 

John Sargant Pillsbury called a joint meeting of the legislature and the university’s Board of Regents on April 16, 1889, where he announced he would fund the building’s construction costs - provided the agricultural college and the university’s applied sciences programs remained a single institution. Hence Pillsbury Hall not only became home for Winchell’s survey and General Museum but is also the reason the Saint Paul Campus remains part of the University of Minnesota. 

1899 also saw the development of the university's first aquatic laboratory under the direction of Henry Francis Nachtrieb. While undertaking graduate studies at John Hopkins, Nachtrieb forwarded seven samples of marine sea fans, acorn worms, and lancelets to the General Museum collected as part of his work with the John Hopkins Biological Laboratory. As an East Coast institution, the biology program at John Hopkins had strong interests in marine biology which only a few years later, in 1888, culminated in the establishment of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, as a forerunner to the present Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This early marine experience may have played a role in Nachtrieb’s involvement in the development of the ‘Megalops’ in 1899. The ‘Megalops’ was a houseboat laboratory that would travel the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers to study their aquatic life. Besides living quarters and a fully stock biological laboratory, the ‘Megalops’ even had a darkroom for developing photographs. Although Nachtrieb conceived of the idea, Ulysses S. Cox, professor of biology at the Mankato State Normal School, played a pivotal role in its construction and also served as the laboratory’s ‘captain’ when ‘Megalops’ was afloat. 

Per Winchell’s request, the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota is divided into three subunits. Winchell would continue to lead its geological investigations, while Nachtrieb oversaw its zoological work and Conway McMillan, the University’s first botany professor, would head up its botanical studies. For at least the next four years, this subdivision did not alter the General Museum’s designation in official correspondence, but this was the initial inception of the subdivision of the General Museum that would eventually lead to separate Geological and Zoology Museums.

On April 8, 1890, Horace Vaughn Winchell, Newton’s oldest child and Survey member, addressed the Minnesota Academy of Sciences to request the Academy’s support for a two-year collecting trip to the Philippines led by two of his friends from Michigan, Dean Conant Worcester and Frank Swift Bourns. Two months later, a new Academy member, Louis Francois Menage, agreed to fund the expedition provided the Academy covered the costs of mounting the collected specimens, a financial burden that would consume much of the attention of the Academy’s long-time secretary, Christopher Hall. The Menage Expedition continued until 1893 when a financial panic exposed a financial swindle run by Menage, forcing him to flee to Guatemala for six years to avoid imprisonment. The Menage collection was even more directly tied to colonialism than the General Museum’s and its eventual dispersal was every bit as confusing.

Horace also played a role in the acquisition of two meteorites that fell in 1890. At 5.15 p.m. of May 2, 1890, a meteorite fell near Forest City, Iowa. 

The meteorite exploded about eleven miles northwest of Forest City covering a large area near Thompson with debris. Hundreds of small pieces littered the ground with five larger pieces ranging from four to eighty-one pounds. Peter Hugelen [Hoagland] collected the largest piece. Horace V. Winchell, then assistant State Geologist, tried to buy it from Hugelen when another buyer arrived. After a spirited bidding war, Winchell succeeded in purchasing Hugelen’s meteorite for one hundred and five dollars. He then drove the meteorite to Forestville and left it at the express office to be shipped to the University. However, his bidding competitor learned that the meteorite had not fallen on Hugelen’s land and secured a court order allowing the sheriff to seize the meteorite. 

The case was eventually appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court. Before its decision though, the University of Minnesota acquired the meteorite through a lower court’s order. Minnesota Judge, Charles Burke Elliott, who taught at the University of Minnesota went to Forest City and with the Sheriff’s help seized the meteorite. Elliot not only taught at the University but in 1888 had earned the University of Minnesota's first Ph.D. However, at Forest City, it was not his legal expertise that prevailed so much as his physical fitness.

Despite the local sheriff’s lukewarm support, Elliot ended up having to wrestle the meteorite away from its other claimants, knock one into the counter, and race for the street before a second claimant tackled him. The meteorite rolled out of Elliot’s arms, but he wriggled free of his pursuer, scooped up the meteorite, and jumped into his waiting wagon. From there, Elliot and his driver ran two teams of horses to exhaustion on back country roads to race across the border to a small Minnesota train station. However, Elliot’s adventure was not yet over as the only train, a freight, was already leaving the station. Elliot tossed his coat, suitcase, and the meteorite aboard an empty flatbed which he then rode to Albert Lea where he caught a passenger train to Minneapolis. Once there, Elliot turned the meteorite over to Horace, asking to never see it again. Horace buried the meteorite beneath the floor of an abandoned shed on an empty lot near the university for almost a year until the case was settled, as rival claimants reportedly scoured the university museum in their search for the missing meteorite.

In October of 1892, the Supreme Court sustained the claim of the other buyer who promptly sued the University for the meteorite’s value. A jury set the meteorite’s value at $480, which the University gladly paid having already posted a $400 bond to guarantee their lower court order. Only then did Horace dig up his sequestered prize to place it in the General Museum. According to Calvin Alexander, emeritus professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Horace Winchell’s Iowa Supreme Court’s decision ended up becoming the legal foundation for determining meteorite ownership in the United States, so the Forest City meteorite’s legacy lives on. 

In a much less dramatic fashion, Horace Vaughn Winchell also purchased a 562-gram piece of a second 1890 meteorite that fell in Washington County, Kansas on June 25 of that year.

Although the Forest City meteorite was loaned to the Smithsonian in 1966 along with the bulk of the department's meteorite collection, it was in turn 'loaned' back to the Bell Museum when their new building opened on the Saint Paul campus. Since 2018, it has been on display in the Bell Museum. Consequently, the two most crucial meteorites Winchell used to build the University of Minnesota's meteorite collection remain on our campuses. 

Josephine Elizabeth Tilden entered the University of Minnesota in the fall of 1891 and during her first year took a botany course taught by Conway MacMillan, the head of the Botanical Survey. Tilden, like many students, was initially intimidated by the irascible MacMillan. However, one day MacMillan came into the classroom with a kitten he had rescued from in front of the Zoology Building. MacMillan dropped the kitten on Tilden’s desk, not only finding the kitten a new home but sparking a working relationship that would determine Tilden’s career. Two years later, in her junior year, Tilden joined the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey as an employed assistant. 

Although many female amateur botanists had previously donated botanical specimens to the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Surve, Tilden was the first woman employed by the survey to undertake field research. The university’s annual calendar for the 1892-93 academic year lists two assistants with the Geological Survey, nine with the Zoological Survey, including Thomas Sadler Roberts in his role as the survey’s ornithologist, and four assistants with the botanical survey, including Tilden. As such, Tilden participated in the 1893 Gull Lake Expedition to the University first inland biological station that had been established in 1889 under the guidance of professors MacMillan (Botany), Henry Francis Nachtrieb (Zoology) and Oscar Wilhelm Oestlund (Entomology). In a photograph of the 1893 expedition, Oestlund stands at far left while seated, from left to right, are Nachtrieb, MacMillan, and Tilden, the survey’s only female assistant.

Tilden went on to earn her Bachelor of Science degree in 1895 and the following year, became the first female science instructor at the University of Minnesota. That year, Tilden was one of only three University Scholars who assisted in the university’s laboratory classes as instructors. Tilden taught in the Botany program. At the end of the 1895-96 academic year, Tilden earned her Master of Science degree in algology (the study of algae) chemistry and Latin and was awarded the Albert Howard Scholarship. Tilden then joined the Botany Department faculty, becoming a full professor in 1910 and continuing with the University until her retirement in 1937 at the age of 68. She continued to work post-retirement and maintained her algae collection until her death in 1957.

The first mention of separate Geological Museum and Zoological Museum in the University of Minnesota’s Annual Catalogs occur in the 1894-95 catalog. In addition, the catalog notes a separate herbarium with 90,000 samples. Although Winchell would continue to refer to himself as the State Geologist and Curator of the General Museum in his annual reports up to 1899, 1894 appears to be when the University of Minnesota’s General Museum was formally divided into a Geological Museum, a Zoological Museum, and a non-capitalized general herbarium. The Zoological Museum would eventually become the present Bell Museum.

Also in 1894, the first two Minnesota meteorites were found and eventually added to the Geology Museum collection. The Arlington meteorite had fallen at an unknown time but was found in March of 1894 in Sibley County, Minnesota and procured by Newton Winchell two years later. However, on April 9 of 1894, another meteorite fell near the town of Fisher in Polk County, Minnesota but was not found until that June. Additional pieces were recovered in 1895 and 1898. 

The Fisher meteorite, like the Forest City meteorite, is currently on display in the Bell Museum. In addition, pieces of three other meteorites from the department’s collection are on display at the Bell Museum. Those pieces came from the Coahuila meteorite (Coahuila, Mexico), the Bendegó meteorite (Bahia, Brazil), and the Canyon Diablo meteorite (Arizona, USA).

Frederick William Sardeson earned his B.S. in 1891 and M.S. in 1892 from the University of Minnesota and then taught paleontology here for the next two years. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Frieberg, Sardeson returned to Minnesota to become an assistant professor under his mentor, Christopher Webber Hall. After Hall’s death in 1911, Sardeson clashed with the other geology faculty and was forced to leave the department in 1914. 

However, in 1899, while a paleontology instructor, Sardeson participated in the Union Pacific Railroad’s Fossil Fields Expedition. Building on the public’s fascination with dinosaurs, Union Pacific Railroad invited universities, colleges, and museums to participate in a scientific expedition to Wyoming. Union Pacific offered free transportation and some field logistical support. Eighty-six geologists and paleontologists participated, and Sardeson led a three-person crew from the University of Minnesota. However, Sardeson found that having so many crews competing within a limited space was not to his liking, so the University of Minnesota team broke off from the expedition and left the Freezeout Hills. Sardeson’s party only included two others, Moore and Stewart. Stewart was undoubtedly William B. Stewart, a University of Minnesota student who completed his B.S. in 1900, majoring in Botany. From 1907 to 1919, Stewart served as the Superintendent of Schools for Beltrami County. As of yet, Moore is unidentified but was also a member of the University community. The trio set off on their own to search for fossils in the Bighorn Basin of north central Wyoming. Sardeson’s efforts were successful, and he brought many fossils back to the Geology Museum. Sardeson’s expedition was the University’s only participation in the late 19^th century Dinosaur Bone Rush and was distinctive in that its goal was to gather teaching materials rather than undertake research.

The first page of the February 10, 1900, Ariel (volume 23, number 17) was dedicated to a description of Sardeson’s expedition, written by W.B.S (William B. Stewart).

A large sauropod limb bone collected by Sardeson during this expedition was lost for decades in the clutter of Pillsbury Hall, until I encountered it while clearing out an area for an expanded computer lab. During the department’s move from Pillsbury Hall, Du Anne Heeren and I found glass slides of photographs taken by Sardeson’s party that show the bone in the field, in a plaster cast, and being transported by wagon. A handwritten caption on the slide provided the bone’s location. Since so many 19^th century dinosaur discoveries were illegally taken from Indigenous lands, that caption proved crucial in determining this bone was collected from lands that were not Indigenous lands at the time of its collection. 

We hope to have the bone refurbished by Science Museum of Minnesota staff this summer and put on display to highlight the many dinosaur discoveries taken by museums from Indigenous lands without permission or compensation. Another large sauropod bone bearing the same collection number was in the Bell Museum collections in 2024 that undoubtedly also came from Sardeson’s 1899 trek. 

Winchell’s appointment at the University of Minnesota ends along with the geological activities of the survey. While the survey’s natural history investigations (zoological and botanical) continued, the Geological Survey ended. However, Hall and Sardeson continued geological investigations in Minnesota for the department. 

At the age of 29, Josephine Elizabeth Tilden, traveling with her mother, first came ashore on a remote beach on Vancouver Island on August 4, 1898. Less than two years later, Tilden, a Department of Botany instructor, had built the Minnesota Seaside Station on what would become known as Botanical Beach. From 1901 through 1906, from 25 to 30 instructors and students traveled to Seaside Station to study marine algae and other tide pool organisms. Their research spanned the spectrum of algology, zoology, taxonomy, and lichenology. In tribute to the Botanical Survey’s origins, participants also learned the area’s geology. However, the University of Minnesota hesitated to support a research station on Canadian land, so the initiative was funded by Tilden, Conway MacMillan, and student fees. A Canadian miner, Thomas Baird, donated the four acres the station was built on from his newly acquired crown land grant. Not surprisingly, considering Tilden was its driving force, half the students who worked at Minnesota Seaside Station were women. In light of the time spent in tidal pools, Tilden warned her female students to ‘a short skirt, about 12 inches from the ground’ and to bring a ‘pair of heavy-soled, 10-inch-high bicycle shoes with hobnails.’

Despite its considerable success, the University still refused to support the Minnesota Seaside Station and in 1906 Conway MacMillian resigned in protest of their decision. Tilden attempted to keep the station going on her own, but in 1907 Minnesota’s first international research station closed. Tilden eventually sold the land in 1948, and the site is now part of Canada’s Juan de Fuca Provincial Park. Botanical Beach is still an area of active marine research by both Canadian and United States universities. 

With the closing of the Minnesota Seaside Station, the University of Minnesota switched its botanical emphasis closer to home, opening its Forestry and Biological Station at Lake Itasca in 1907.

The Geology Museum purchases a series of fossils collected by George Sternberg of the Sternberg family famous for their dinosaur finds. 

Although there were originally many more Sternberg fossils in the Geology Museum, only two are known to remain in the department collections. One is a partial mosasaur from the Niobrara of Kansas and the other a partial Xiphactinus. Again, because so many late 19^th and early 20^th century fossils were illegally taken from Indigenous lands, the locations of both fossils were tracked down to confirm neither were taken from what were Indigenous lands at the time of their collection.

After he left the University, Winchell expanded his earlier efforts in Minnesota archaeology. In 1906, Winchell became the head archaeologist at the Minnesota Historical Society. He expanded on the work of Jacob Vradenburg Brower, Alfred James Hill, and Theodore Hayes Lewis to complete The Aborigines of Minnesota in 1911. 

Although I have not been able to confirm dates with the Minnesota Historical Society records, Winchell’s tenure with the society was likely when some of the General Museum’s archaeological materials were transferred to the Minnesota Historical Society collections. 

On May 2, 1914, Newton Horace Winchell dies the day after undergoing prostrate surgery at Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis.

Thomas Sadler Roberts, a retired doctor and part time University lecturer, becomes the Zoology Museum’s associate curator, initially as an unpaid position. 

In 1879, at the age of 21, Roberts had been an assistant to Christopher Webber Hall when Hall was accompanying Winchell’s survey of the North Shore and Arrowhead Region. Beginning in high school, Roberts accumulated an impressive collection of bird skins which he contributed to the Zoology Museum. 

Roberts made the most of his second career. He oversaw the construction of the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History in his early 80s and continued to teach a class on birds at the University until he was 87.

The Zoology Museum moves from Pillsbury Hall to a newly constructed Zoology building, leaving the Geology Museum as the only remnant of the General Museum still in Pillsbury Hall. 

The Natural History Museum is separated from the Animal Biology Department and established as an independent University unit. The name harkens back to the museum's origin as part of Winchell’s Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota.

The Hollandale Mammoth, the most complete mammoth found in Minnesota, was discovered near Hollandale in Freeborn County, Minnesota. Both the upper and lower jaws were present, complete with four molar teeth and half of the remaining skeleton was found (although the tusks were either not present or were taken prior to the skeleton’s final exhumation. Found fifteen feet below the surface in post-glacial deposits on the P. D. McMillan farm one and a half miles southeast of Hollandale. McMillan gave the remains to the Geology Museum.

The Hollandale mammoth was transferred to the Science Museum of Minnesota on March 24, 1949. After Clinton Raymond Stauffer’s retirement in 1944, the Geology Museum divested its collections of many of its large vertebrates as the department's paleontological research emphasis shifted to invertebrates, with most of their mammoth material going to the Science Museum of Minnesota. That material is still in the SMM collections, and the Hollandale Mammoth is on display on the museum’s upper level. 

On June 16, 1931, a highway crew working near Pelican Lake disturbed the remains of a young woman who had died eight thousand years earlier. Indigenous remains previously found in the area by road crews had ignobly been tossed aside. However, in May of 1931, Albert Ernest Jenks, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, had asked the highway department to notify him of any skeletal remains or archaeological materials uncovered during roadwork. Consequently, the Pelican Lake remains were set aside and preserved. 

Although the remains were sent to the Department of Anthropology, two Department of Geology professors played pivotal roles in their acquisition and study. Clifford Raymond Stauffer, then administrator of the Geology Museum, collected the skeletal remains from the highway department and brought them to the university. Stauffer and George Alfred Thiel, another geology professor, also worked with Jenks to excavate the site twice to determine its geological setting and age. 

Although Jenks realized early on that the skeletal remains were those of a young woman; in keeping with the misogyny of the times, he named it ‘Minnesota Man’ and the remains were not renamed until 1976. The young woman had died in a glacial lake, either by drowning or breaking through winter ice, to be buried by lake sediment. Minnesota Woman was one of the oldest known remains at the time. Unfortunately, because of their renown, the remains were exhibited at the Minnesota Historical Society for a decade before being taken off display. 

Minnesota Woman’s remains were not returned to the Dakota community until the autumn of 1999, when they were reburied in South Dakota. 

The ‘Federal Register Vol. 64, No. 152 Monday, August 9, 1999 - Notices 43211, Department of the Interior National Park Service Notice of Inventory Completion for Native American Human Remains and Associated Funerary Objects from the State of Minnesota in the Possession of the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, Bemidji, MN’ also records that at an unknown date, human remains representing 13 individuals were most likely removed from site 21-PO-3, the Pelican Lake Gravel Pit site, Pope County, MN by unknown person(s) and donated to the University of Minnesota Geology Laboratory. The 1931 work crew who found Minnesota Woman reported having earlier come across, and disposed of, skeletal remains from a sand pit near Pelican Lake which is probably the same site. However, there has never been a ‘University of Minnesota Geology Laboratory,’ and no known departmental records mention skeletal remains coming to the General Museum past Winchell’s time. The National Park Service reference is likely tied to remains taken in 1954 from the Pelican Lake Gravel Pit site by Lloyd Alden Wilford, a University of Minnesota Anthropology professor. 

Those Pelican Lake remains were returned to the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council in Bemidji. 

This year saw the first known transfer of archaeological materials from the old General Museum to the collections of the Anthropology department. Matt Edling of the present Anthropology Department found images of a ledger inscribed as ‘The General Museum of the University of Minnesota Archaeological Catalogue 1881’ that records two different symbols for accessions. Fifty-eight registrar entries were marked by a checkmark and a circle about the entry number. Some of those marked items are still in the Anthropology collection. 

Edling also found records of three transfers from the Geology Department to the Anthropology collection. One accession (#212) was ‘Given to Anthropology from collections of the University General Museum’, in 1939. These materials would have been transferred while Clinton Raymond Stauffer was still in charge of the Geology Museum. Stauffer worked with Professor Albert Ernest Jenks of the Anthropology department on various archaeological activities. Although Jenks retired in 1936, Stauffer also worked with Professor Lloyd Alden Wilford, Jenk’s protégé and successor. The transfer was likely an attempt to cull the Geology Museum holdings of non-geological materials. This second transfer is undated but is recorded between two accessions from 1936 and five from 1950. A last accession occurred in 1956. Accession #397 is simply a ‘Gift from Geology Dept’. This last accession occurred as the Geology Museum was being closed down and its contents redistributed.

The list of materials transferred to the Anthropology collection as accession 212 in 1939 is given here. 

Of those fifty-seven registrar numbers, only the following five are still known to be in the Anthropology department’s collections. Many of the Minnesota items from accession 212 may have been transferred to the Minnesota Historical Society collections in the 1990s. 

11. Pounded copper flakes from the ancient mines of Isle Royale. Collected by N. H. Winchell.

62. One iron arrow-point, from near Young Men's Butte. Dakota. Presented by D. P. Jones.

140. Stone implement from Chickamauga creek, near the battle ground, Tenn. By purchase from Powers, 1885.

204. Hand-hatchet. Four-inches by two; of a dark green-stone. By exchange with H.W. Williamson, New Galilee, Pa. Aug. 1890.

215. Large stone axe head. Near Enon Valley, Lawrence Co., Pa. By exchange with H.W. Williamson, New Galilee, Pa. Aug. 1891.

Thomas Sadler Roberts renames the Natural History Museum as the Minnesota Museum of Natural History and with generous support from James Ford Bell, moves its collections into a new building on the southwest corner of University Avenue and Church Street. Later renamed the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History, for the next seventy-eight years this building was the home for many of the biological specimens originally collected as part of the General Museum.

While working with William Charles Bell, Vincent E Kurtz (MS 1949) discovered a Triceratops skull in a Hell Creek outcrop about five miles south of Glendine, Montana. The skull, still in matrix, was given to the Science Museum of Minnesota in December of 1948 (SMM accession number 1097). The gift reflected a notable change in departmental research. As mentioned above, with the 1944 retirement of Clinton Raymond Stauffer, the department’s paleontology program shifted its emphasis to focus on invertebrate studies. 

Consequently, during this interval, the Geology Museum’s mammoth displays were also dismantled and given to the Science Museum. Kurtz’s Triceratops skull was accompanied by a mammoth tooth from the Luverne mammoth (found in a sandpit a half mile south of Luverne, just west of Route 75), along with teeth, partial jaw fragments, and other skeletal fragments of a young Imperial Mammoth (SMM accession number 1098). 

Only three months later, on March 24, 1949, the Hollandale mammoth, discovered in 1923, was also given to the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM accession number 2005).

In a sense, these transfers marked the beginning of the end for the Geology Museum as the department struggled to maintain the museum collections and outgrew its available space. With the department’s growth, the museum’s physical space became attractive ‘acreage’. 

From December of 1957 to May of 1958 the Geology Museum at the University of Minnesota (including the remaining fossil, mineral, rock, and archaeological collections of the old General Museum) was closed down in anticipation of an expansion of the Bell Museum that never occurred. Perhaps out of embarrassment at the museum’s closing, there was no formal announcement, The only paperwork in the Department of Geology’s records concerns the renovation of the museum’s space for classrooms and offices. While the only direct record of the museum’s closing is a note written on the inside cover of the General Museum Registrar Volume 1.

Dec. 1957 – May 1958: 48 cardboard boxes containing rocks and minerals from the geology museum were stored in Pillsbury Hall attic along the north and west walls in the extreme west end of the building. Rocks were removed from display cases and packed in boxes labelled: “igneous” or “sedimentary” or “metamorphic”, but not in order of numbers. Minerals were packed in boxes labelled “oxides”, “sulfides”, “silicates”, etc. “ “ “ [but not in order of numbers]. Most missing samples were so marked in this ledger if their labelled card was found, but no attempt was made to check on every specimen recorded in ledger. Each box was labelled “Property of U. of Minn. Geology Museum”.          R. L. Blake

The closing of the Geology Museum accelerated the dispersal and loss of its materials. Although some were stored, and misplaced, in Pillsbury Hall’s immense attic, this was also the time that many large pieces were donated to the Science Museum of Minnesota. In its haste, the Geology department did not record what happened to most of the remaining pieces. 

A new Bell Museum opens on the Saint Paul Campus. 

Much of the Bell fossil collection is transferred to the Science Museum of Minnesota including many fossils originally collected by Winchell and other members of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota.