Museum Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History traces its history to 1861, when the treasurer of Central Park recommended in his annual report to establish a natural history museum in the park’s vicinity.
The Civil War prevented any fundraising to develop the idea, but by 1869, the time was right for a group of NYC millionaires to fund the purchase of some European natural history collections that would form the core of a natural history museum for New York City.
That year, J. Pierpont Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. and 17 other men — many of them amateur naturalists who collected their own natural history artifacts — gathered at Roosevelt’s East 20th Street home to found and sign the charter for the American Natural History Museum.
The museum’s first home was in the Arsenal Building in Central Park, and it opened to the public in April 1871.
It wasn’t that long before the museum petitioned the New York State legislature for a new home. It received 16 acres of undeveloped land known as Manhattan Square, adjacent to Central Park on West 79th Street in an isolated area of run-down farms, rugged outcrops and stagnant pools.
Calvert Vaux, the architect of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with designing a monumental building that would convey the importance of science.
On June 2, 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant laid the cornerstone for the new building.
It opened to the public on December 22, 1877, with President Rutherford Hayes presiding.
Calvert Vaux’s design was so monumental that even today it's still only two-thirds complete.
The museum’s remote location made it difficult for the public to visit, but its poor attendance had turned around by the early years of the 20th century.
TR was one of the museum’s earliest donors. In 1872 he gifted the museum with the skull of a red squirrel, followed in 1876 by a Snowy owl from Oyster Bay and a trio of plovers the 14-year-old collected during a family vacation to Egypt, all of which he mounted himself.
In the years that followed TR made many donations to the museum, including a now-extinct Passenger Pigeon and one of the eight African elephants at the center of the museum’s African Hall.
He also gifted the museum with the skin and dung of a giant ground sloth, a bamboo flute and a palm nut bead necklace, all from his expedition to South America in 1913 and 1914, a trip so arduous that it almost killed him.
The Museum is home to New York State’s official memorial to Theodore Roosevelt, the state’s 33rd governor (1899-1900) and the nation’s 26th president (1901-1909).
The two-story Theodore Roosevelt Memorial includes the Museum’s Central Park West entrance, the Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda and the Theodore Memorial Hall.
Designed in the grand Roman style by John Russell Pope, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial was authorized by the New York State Legislature in 1924 and built between 1929 and 1935. The corner stone was laid on October 27, 1931, by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, who was governor of New York State at the time.
He told the crowd that when he was a boy, Theodore had told him, “Franklin, you can learn more about nature and life in the museum than in all the books and schools in the world.”
The museum’s self-guided “Theodore Roosevelt Tour” introduces visitors to the president’s keen observational skills as an amateur naturalist, his love of studying wildlife in their native surroundings, and his concern for their conservation.
In the Roosevelt Family Hall, a sculpture depicts Theodore as he looked during a 1903 trip to Yosemite that he took with the famous naturalist John Muir.
Cultural artifacts like his cowboy jacket and archival photographs and film footage illustrate his lifelong interest in nature, from keeping a journal on insects when he was 11 and camping in the Adirondack Mountains to observing the birds on Oyster Bay and going on international safaris.
A corridor devoted to another famous naturalist, John Burroughs, includes a photo of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt on a July 1903 visit to Slabsides, Burroughs’ cabin in New York. Theodore used the Dutch term for uncle when he gave Burroughs the nickname of “Oom John.”
Three giant “Milestones in Public Life” murals in the rotunda depict his leadership in building the Panama Canal, his role in negotiating the 1905 Treaty of Portsmouth between Russia and Japan, for which he became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906; and his 1909-10 expedition to Africa.