Peale's Mastodon: America's First Natural History Museum and Its Fossil Star

Independence National Historical Park — "America's most historic square mile" — once displayed a mastodon skeleton in Independence Hall. The park also holds a mastodon tooth that may have belonged to Benjamin Franklin's collection, and Ordovician fossils in the floor of the Second Bank of the United States. And American paleontology has roots here, in the country's first natural history museum.

Charles Willson Peale, "The Artist in His Museum," 1822. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia.

Peale's museum

Charles Willson Peale, a portrait painter of Revolutionary and early-republic figures — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark — opened his Philadelphia Museum in his family home in 1784, calling it "A Repository for Natural Curiosities." In 1783 he had been asked to draw mastodon bones from Big Bone Lick in the Ohio River Valley, which many consider the birthplace of vertebrate paleontology in the New World, and he hoped one day to show a fossil skeleton beside his art.

As the museum grew, he moved it to Philosophical Hall, headquarters of the American Philosophical Society (APS), which Jefferson led from 1797 to 1814. Jefferson was out to refute the French naturalist the Comte de Buffon, who claimed New World animals were weaker than Europe's. Americans were gripped by the mysterious "American incognitum" — the mastodon — whose bones had turned up since the first tooth was recorded in 1705, and the APS wanted a complete skeleton.

The first American dig

In early 1801, word came of mastodon remains on John Masten's farm in the Hudson River Valley. The APS lent Peale $500; he hired workers and brought pumps, ropes, pulleys and augers to the marl pit, reported his field notes to Jefferson, and came home with two partial skeletons — what is considered the first paleontological expedition in the new United States.

Charles Willson Peale, "The Exhumation of the Mastodon," about 1806–7. Maryland Historical Society.

Rebuilding a monster

No one on the team had ever seen the animal whole. Its likeness to elephants and Siberian mammoths was known, but its tusks and teeth convinced them it was a carnivore: they set the tusks pointing down, like a walrus's, and billed it as a fierce predator. For missing bones, Peale used bilateral symmetry and other bones to carve accurate wooden replacements — a new technique then, much like modern conservation practice. It became the second fossil skeleton ever reassembled, and the first in America.

Édouard de Montulé's drawing of Peale's 11-foot mastodon skeleton, 1816, with the tusks turned down to make it look fiercer. American Philosophical Society Museum.

The team included Peale's son Rembrandt, sculptor William Rush, and Moses Williams, an enslaved man and gifted silhouette artist, remembered as the first Black museum professional in U.S. history. Peale later wrote that Williams "fitted pieces together by trying, [not] the most probable, but the most improbable position, as the lookers-on believed... Yet he did more good in that way than any one among those employed in the work."

Silhouette of Moses Williams, attributed to Raphaelle Peale, after 1802. Library Company of Philadelphia.

The skeleton was unveiled on Christmas Eve 1801. To publicize it, Peale sent Williams through the streets in a feathered headdress on a white horse, with a trumpeter, and handed out bills retelling a Shawnee legend of a thundering monster from "ten thousand moons ago." It was a huge success.

Independence Hall and after

In 1802 the museum spread into both Philosophical Hall and the Pennsylvania State House — now Independence Hall — and moved there fully in 1810, for the next decade. After Peale died in 1827, his children ran it until the money ran out. The portraits were auctioned, and about a third were bought by the City of Philadelphia; they are now in NPS care, shown in the park's Second Bank. Most of the natural history collection went to P. T. Barnum and was lost in a fire. The mastodon went to Europe and was bought in 1854 by the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany, where it is still on display.

A model for museums

Peale balanced spectacle and science — between American museums chasing profit and European ones seen as elitist. His was among the first to use Linnaean taxonomy, labeling specimens in Latin, French and English, and he pioneered dioramas of animals in their habitats, lit by artificial light. Museums worldwide followed.

Charles Willson Peale, "Self-Portrait with Mastodon Bone," 1824. New-York Historical Society.

The mastodon became a symbol of American fortitude and the mascot of American paleontology. Jefferson's interest in fossils, and in Native American accounts of them, fed his interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition, partly funded by the APS. Rembrandt Peale called the mastodon "the first of American animals, in the first of American museums." Peale never won the government backing to make his museum the national museum, but about two decades after his death the Smithsonian Institution was founded "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge" — much as he had envisioned.

Sources

Based on Megan Rich (American Geosciences Institute, NPS partner researcher), "The Peale Museum: America's First Natural History Museum Features a Mastodon," Park Paleontology News, Spring 2024, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The paintings and drawings are public domain by age.