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On December 22nd, 1917, Williston Hall, the building for the natural sciences and arts, burned down. Built in 1876, it housed the botany, zoology, physiology, and geology departments. Mount Holyoke lost lecture rooms, laboratories, and our vast natural history collection in the fire. This collection included taxidermy birds and mammals, mineral and rock specimens, wet biological specimens, and an impressive collection of paleontological casts. Because the fire occurred 3 days before Christmas, most students and faculty were on holiday break, and the blazing fire wasn’t discovered until it was too late. Abby Howe Turner, who founded the physiology department at Mount Holyoke, wrote an account of the fire. She stated that she saved 26 microscopes from Williston, along with microscope slides, but little else was salvageable. This display seeks to showcase the valuable geological specimens that were lost. The megatherium skeleton cast was part of a greater collection purchased by Mount Holyoke from Ward’s Natural Science Establishment which “was the pre-eminent supplier of specimens to museums, colleges, and universities all around the world”. The college purchased all of the paleontological casts from Henry A. Ward’s collection, which cost $3,000 in 1876, about $86,000 today. Completed in 1924, Clapp Laboratory sits directly on top of the empty lot the Williston Hall fire left, and instead of standing amongst giant armadillos, mammoth skulls, and a plesiosaur, it stands alone.
The floor plan of Williston Hall, named the ‘Natural History and Art Building’. The third floor held the college’s art museum until 1902, when it moved to Dwight. If the art museum hadn’t moved our earliest fine art collections would have been lost in the fire. The second floor is full of unspecified cabinets, probably of botanical, zoological, and physiological specimens. The first floor had a lecture hall, two display rooms and professor’s offices. The vast geological collections were held in the basement, and while fossils and rock slabs can survive flame, they were crushed under the weight of three floors above. The broken pieces of our lost fossil collection could still be beneath Clapp.
Photo of the paleontological cabinets. The very same megatherium skeleton can be seen all the way on the right, in much better condition than about 150 years ago when it was made. Casts of extinct giant armadillos are to the left of the photo. Smaller fossils are filling the cabinets lining the walls of the room, and the plesiosaur fossil hangs on the wall.
Photo from another angle of the paleontological cabinets. From this angle we can see the once impressive condition of our megatherium skeleton. There is a cast of a mammoth skull in the bottom left corner, and more fossil casts decorate the walls.
Photo of the ichnological display room. Ichnology is the study of traces left behind by living things (tracks, burrows, nests etc.) A large, articulated whale skeleton was displayed in this room hanging from the ceiling.
Photo of the mineral cabinet. This floor to ceiling cabinet, spiral staircase included, displayed our vast collection of rocks and minerals.
Photo of the shell of Williston Hall after the fire. This was the same site on which construction for Clapp Laboratory commenced.
Photo of Mignon Talbot (second from the left) sifting through the debris after the fire. Talbot was the first woman to teach geology at Mount Holyoke and she discovered Podokesaurus holyokensis which was voted the Massachusetts state dinosaur in 2021. The Podokesaurus fossil was destroyed in the fire, but fortunately high quality casts were created of it. After the fire, Talbot pushed for a museum wing to be added to Clapp Laboratory, and we currently have 200 fossils in our paleontology collection thanks to her efforts.
Learn More about Mount Holyoke Fires: https://artmuseum.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/catalogue_mount_holyoke_afire_UA.pdf?bc=node/1833 Learn More about Henry Ward:https://wardproject.org/about
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