6 J°hn E. Cooper 



hesitate to select H.H. Brimley to collect and prepare native animals for 

 the North Carolina exhibits. He assembled and installed the Fish and 

 Fisheries Exhibit, which again included "aquatic birds," and remained 

 with it in Chicago throughout the exposition. The voluminous collections 

 gathered for the state's many displays, too excellent and valuable to dis- 

 card or relegate to storage, were directed by legislative action to join the 

 State Musuem upon their return to Raleigh. This further strained the 

 holding capacity of its none-too-capacious quarters, although the 

 available space had been nearly doubled by a minor addition in 1893, and 

 the collections remained rather jumbled and unusable. Among the pile of 

 materials were the disassembled bones of a Right whale known as 

 "Mayflower," and in 1894, not long after returning from Chicago, H.H. 

 Brimley was again hired by the board, this time for the singular task of 

 articulating and mounting the 46-foot skeleton for display. Since the 

 budget lacked money for such odd work he was hired under the job title 

 of "fertilizer inspector," as shown in the expenditure ledgers for that year. 

 The task took about three months, and this early piece of Brimley han- 

 diwork is still on display at the museum. 



On April 15, 1895 the next logical step in the inexorable progression 

 was taken, and a new era signalled for the State Museum, when H.H. 

 Brimley was appointed its first full-time curator. He was also the sole em- 

 ployee and, as he wrote later, "I became expert with a feather duster and 

 pushed a wicked carpet sweeper! I had no funds beyond my princely 

 salary of $75 per month." His title remained curator until 1928, when it 

 was changed to director. H.H. continued to collect, prepare, ship, erect, 

 and occasionally to man the North Carolina exhibits at major fairs and 

 expositions. Each resulted in the addition of more and more collections to 

 the State Museum and the accumulation of a store of information on 

 North Carolina's natural history. An ever-growing fund of this informa- 

 tion was put into print in papers by the Brimleys. Not yet employed by 

 the state, C.S. mainly devoted his efforts to "Brimley Bros., Collectors 

 and Preparers." H.H. also continued to work in the business on a part- 

 time basis until 1907 or 1908, when he dropped out to devote his full 

 energies to the growing museum. By this time he had an assistant 

 curator, Tom Adickes, and a janitor, Bob Alston (who presumably 

 relieved the curator of his feather duster and carpet sweeper). The 

 museum now occupied the entire second floor of the Agriculture Building, 

 as well as another annex added in 1897. 



In those early days the museum's holdings, as listed in the 1897 Hand 

 Book of the North Carolina State Museum, were diverse and even somewhat 

 cosmopolitan. Emphasis, of course, was on the geological and 

 agricultural resources of North Carolina, an immediate legacy of the 



