dealers across the country. The list of fellow collectors with whom he com- 
1) + 
unicated early town telephone directory. But Henry Whelpley 
was more than just a collector; he was also a scholar who, without formal training in 
archaeology, was nonetheless greatly respected by both amateur and professional 
archaeologists. He wrote many articles for professional as well as non-professional 
journals. He was President of the Anthropological Society of St. Louis and chairman 
of the committee on archaeology of the Missouri Historical Society. He was 
Vice-President of the St. Louis Society of the American Institute of Archaeology. 
He was a member of the National Research Council State Archaeological 
Survey Committee, the Missouri Archaeological Survey and the Academy of 
Science of St. Louis. 
When Dr. Whelpley died in June of 1926, the collection that he had compiled over 
nearly 60 years went to his wife, Laura. A newspaper article that appeared in the 
Globe Democrat two months after his death described the collection as numbering 
50,000 artifacts and worth $250,000 dollars. The article added that the figure 
50,000 was a guess, since the collection had never been inventoried. When it was 
finally catalogued nearly 40 years later, the total came to fewer than 17,000 
artifacts. While somewhat diminished from original estimates, it was nonetheless 
an impressive collection by any reckoning. 
During the time that Mrs. Whelpley owned the collection, she occasionally gave 
individual pieces to close friends and relatives, so that today portions of the collection 
are still held in private hands. In 1943 Laura Whelpley gave the collection remaining 
in her care to the Academy of Science of St. Louis. Selected artifacts from the collec- 
tion were displayed for a time at the Academy of Science Museum on Lindell, while 
the bulk of the material remained stored in a motley assortment of old spool 
drawers, cartons, crates and other temporary containers, In 1959 when the Museum 
moved to Oak Knoll Park in Clayton, all the collections (including Dr. Whelpley’s) 
were transferred to the new facilities. Shortly after the move, cataloguing the 
Whelpley collection began in earnest. The job required a year and a half and the 
volunteer services of two dedicated and knowledgeable men, Leonard Blake and 
Harold Mohrman. For the first time the scope of this collection was revealed. Most 
of the material was collected in Missouri and IMlinois with lesser but substantial 
numbers of artifacts having been found in the surrounding states of Kentucky, 
Ohio, Oklahama, Tennessee and Arkansas. Dr. Whelpley was a discriminating collec- 
tor, and many of the pieces are unique and among the finest examples of prehistoric 
Indian craftsmanship. The weakness of the collection is one that is typical of older 
collections - detailed information with each piece is either lacking or sketchy. 
Approximately 80 per cent of the artifacts have written upon them the county and 
state where found, but little else. Ten to 15 per cent have no data at all and, perhaps, 
