Minnesota Museums Month
May is Minnesota Museums Month! Have you visited a museum yet? Why not make a visit to the Bell Museum of Natural History? Marie Godfrey visited the museum in 1921 (when it was known as the Zoological Museum and housed…
Thomas Sadler Roberts
Tuesday Tweet: Celebrating 99 years
On page xv in Annals of the Museum of Natural History 1872-1839, Thomas Sadler Roberts, museum director and author of the publication, printed the following entry in the Log of the Museum for the year 1915: May 6 – Thomas…
Monday Mystery: The Stillwell baby – solved!
It is time once again to share images from the “M” numbered, or “Mystery,” negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records. This installment is about three images from the negatives in drawers 51-56 of the 6,918 glass plate…
Itasca State Park Week: Heinzelman’s
Welcome to day three of Itasca State Park Week, the week that Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History celebrates the 123rd anniversary of Minnesota’s first state park by sharing early images of the park found within the natural history collections at the…
Itasca State Park Week: Douglas Lodge
On April 20, 1891, the Minnesota state legislature adopted an act to establish the first public park for the state of Minnesota on land that surrounded the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca. “An act to establish and…
Remembering Itasca State Park
While I don’t claim to have a photographic memory, my work over the past several months on the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project has fine-tuned my ability to remember images. Having viewed over 12,000 images from negatives, lantern slides, and…
Tuesday Tweet: Let’s talk turkey
Back in November I shared the only then known image of turkeys from the ~6,900 glass plate and film negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records. A good portion of the negatives were produced by Thomas Sadler Roberts…
Catch of the Day
With Minnesota fishing licenses set to expire tomorrow, we thought we should share some of the fishy photos from the negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records to commemorate the close of the 2013 angling season. Cast your…
Tuesday Tweet: The Winter Bird-Life of Minnesota
In February of 1916, Thomas Sadler Roberts, associate curator of the Zoological Museum, released the first of what he termed “Occasional Papers,” a series of bulletins issued from the “Zoological Division of the Geological and Natural History Survey.” The content…
Wednesdays with Walter: The Spruce Grouse
Well it is Wednesday again, which means it is time to revisit the wilderness adventures of Walter Breckenridge, former preparator, curator, and director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. His description from his autobiography, My Life in Natural History,…