Missouri Historical Society. In addition, he served as Vice President 
of the St. Louis Society of the American Institute of Archaeology and 
was a member of both the National Research Council State Archae- 
ological Survey Committee and the Missouri Archaeological Survey. !2 
As an active member of the Academy of Science, Whelpley worked 
on many committees and served as one of the Academy’s directors for 
many years. 
The Academy obtained several consequential donations of 
specimens and artifacts in the years 1909 to 1918, although it did not 
acquire Dr. Whelpley’s impressive collection of Indian artifacts until 
the 1940s. The Academy received a large collection of mineral specimens 
from the Department of Mines and Metallurgy at the 1904 World’s Fair 
in St. Louis, specimens from Arizona’s Petrified Forest, Indian artifacts 
from Alaska, and a fine collection of fossil brachiopoda from Tennessee. 
Some of these items, along with the Academy’s butterfly, pottery, and 
meteorite collections and those few items salvaged from the 1869 fire, 
were exhibited in a hall on the third floor of the Olive Street building. '° 
Collecting, publishing and organizing meetings were all familiar 
activities; however, the roles of property owner and landlord were new 
ones for the Academy. And although the acquisition of the Olive Street 
building in 1903 appeared to be a blessing, even then some nagging 
concerns about the property worried a few members. In his “‘biography”’ 
of the organization written in 1903, William Trelease expressed some 
of these apprehensions. He wrote: 
Ample as the new building is for the present life of the Academy, it is 
but temporarily suited to the housing of valuable collections. . . . | 
unfortunate, too, while the Academy is nominally able for the first time 
in many years to arrange its library and more important collections for 
convenient public use, it is actually confronted by the necessity . . of 
utilizing no inconsiderable part of its new home for the purpose of 
revenue, by housing other homeless bodies, so that . . . its publication 
resources may be maintained.'* 
This early uneasiness about the Olive Street building blossomed 
into full-grown disenchantment among some of the members by 1913, 
who recommended that the property be sold and a new building erected 
at another site. The proponents of this proposal based their recommen- 
dations on the belief that ‘‘the present building was planned for a 
schoolhouse and is not well adapted to the Academy’s needs. ’*!° 
The Academy did not sell the building in 1913, but it did attempt 
to find money to improve and enlarge it. Such funds proved elusive, 
however, and the Academy found itself hard-pressed to come up with 
cash to merely pay bills for repairs, maintenance, and utilities as the 
world stumbled toward war. 
< 
o 
2 
37 
