PORTLAND, Maine — After a 134-year run, the Portland Society of Natural History, and its Elm Street museum, closed up shop in 1970.
The museum’s vast collection of taxidermied animals, shells, fossils, minerals and amassed cultural items were then scattered to the four winds. The varied treasures ended up at a multitude of other institutions across Maine, New England and the globe.
The gargantuan, stuffed leatherback turtle ended up in Presque Isle. A bleached, circa 1890, walrus skull, complete with tusks, landed at the Peary MacMillan Arctic Museum at Bowdoin College in Brunswick. A stately great egret, frozen forever in a taxidermied, half-strut found its way into the Maine Audubon Society’s collections.
But now, thanks to a seven-year detective odyssey by co-curators Tilly Laskey and Darren Ranco, some of the Natural History Museum’s long-separated items have been tracked down and reunited for a special exhibit at the Maine Historical Society in Portland.
The exhibit, called “Code Red: Climate Justice and Natural History Collections,” opens Friday, March 17 and runs through the end of the year.
The exhibition is inspired by the United Nations’ 2021 “Code Red for Humanity” report, which seeks to show how human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land, causing widespread, extreme and rapid planetary changes.
The historical society’s new exhibit not only recreates the look and feel of the old Portland museum; it places its curious collections within the contemporary context of climate change and waning biodiversity. The exhibition explores Indigenous environmental knowledge and the evolution of western scientific methods, as well.
“We have 125 items — a mix of loans from other institutions across the state,” Laskey said. “Maine Historical Society already had the museum’s original records.”
Laskey, a long-time Maine Historical Society curator, said she only learned of the old museum’s existence a few years ago but immediately began envisioning a show featuring its items and taking steps to make it happen.
“I was fascinated from the start,” Laskey said. “We’ve found everything from moon rocks to a bison head to a Maori staff from New Zealand from the 1840s.”
First organized in 1836, the Portland Society of Natural History was one of the first of its kind in the United States. The society was dedicated to the study of the natural world. In the 19th century, before television documentaries and the internet, that meant collecting things and putting them on display.
Likely starting out as a small, curiosity cabinet, the museum’s wide-ranging collection numbered about 3,500 objects by 1900 when it was housed in a stately brick building designed by Francis Fassett on Elm Street, about where the Portland Public Library stands now.
Photographs of the museum’s interior, taken in the 1960s and incorporated into the new show, reveal a tight space, crammed with treasures, including an entire birch bark canoe.
The new show at Maine Historical Society uses objects from the old museum as jumping off points to discuss and explore other topics such as Maine’s shrinking biodiversity.
A stuffed beaver, formerly of the Portland museum and now in permanent residence at the Maine State Museum, is coupled with a historic collection of beaver felt top hats. The juxtaposition points out how beavers were once hunted to scarcity in service to men’s chapeaus.
Likewise, another corner of the new exhibit features a mounted great egret standing in front of a large photo showing where it stood in the former museum, next to a collection of ladies’ hats adorned with bird feathers. Once hunted for their breeding-season plumage, great egrets are now a rare sight in Maine.
The wide-ranging, sprawling exhibition also explores Indigenous methods of natural history study and knowledge. Wabanaki ecological understanding, for example, is tied to generational caretaking obligations not found in western science.
Ranco, the exhibition’s co-curator, is Penobscot and a professor of anthropology at the University of Maine. He’s also chair of the Native American programs there.
“Wabanaki teachings often require communities to care for the thing they have knowledge of,” reads one panel in the exhibit. “Teachings related to sweetgrass require taking care of it so that it will take care of Wabanaki peoples.”
To help illustrate these differing approaches to natural history study, the new exhibit pairs a specimen tray, festooned with dozens of identical butterflies pinned into uniform rows by a western naturalist with a traditional Wabanaki basket woven artfully with the image of a single insect.
Items from the old natural history museum also include 19th century items from Indigenous cultures found along the Pacific Rim. They include a giant fish hook, a Maori staff and two arrows.
“These were sent to the Society of Natural History after they burned down in the fire of 1866,” Laskey said. “The Smithsonian sent them as a kind of museum starter pack.”
Human cultural items were included in 19th century museums because white scientists often thought of Indigenous peoples as just another classification of animal. The new version of Portland’s natural history museum, recreated at the historical society fixes that offensive misconception.
“It’s one thing to put these items back on display,” Laskey said, “But we have to be able to put them in the proper context.”
