38 Arnoldia 78/5-6 « October 2021 
which drew examples from the Jesup Collec- 
tion, she expanded on themes of ecology and 
conservation that were not only current but 
had long been advocated by the collection’s pro- 
genitors, Jesup and Sargent.®! Just two years 
after Jesup’s death, museum president Henry 
F. Osborn reported, “The Jesup Collection of 
North American Woods is being rearranged and 
installed in a way to bring out more clearly the 
classification of trees, their relationship and 
their economic uses.”*®* With the wood col- 
lection numbering 505 specimens on display, 
additions were made for several more years in 
the form of watercolors, photographs, and wax 
models of foliage, flowers, and fruit;’> Mary 
Sargent had continued to add to the watercolor 
series, until more than four hundred paintings 
were on display with the logs. Space continued 
to be a problem as time went on (there, and 
throughout the museum}, and activity centered 
around rearranging specimens to avoid crowd- 
ing to the extent that was possible.*4 
Aside from Sargent, who had contributed 
his knowledge during the collection’s gene- 
sis, only an oversight committee—chaired in 
absentia by Gifford Pinchot (cofounder of the 
Yale Forest School) and James W. Toumey (the 
school’s first Morris K. Jesup Professor of Silvi- 
culture)—afforded forestry expertise after the 
turn of the century. It was not until 1917 that 
the department had the benefit of an in-house, 
credentialed forester. During an era of very lim- 
ited departmental budget, Yale graduate and 
future forest ecologist Barrington Moore had 
been hired as assistant curator, and it was hoped 
that his experience would contribute to topical 
research and education at the institution.®° He 
was shortly called to service in the First World 
War, however, and by 1920 both he (for other 
opportunities) and Dickerson (for health rea- 
sons) had left the museum. This loss of exper- 
tise and energy only compounded the obstacles 
faced by the wood collection and related sub- 
jects that Jesup had promoted. As institutional 
memory of the collection’s formation had been 
episodically lost since the turn of the century, 
and the collection’s place of priority eroded 
after the death of its creator and benefactor, 
its fate became inexorably linked to that of the 
department going forward. 
An Old-Fashioned Systematic 
Arrangement 
Unlike other collections and exhibits prepared 
by the various dynamic and actively growing 
departments of the museum—especially Mam- 
malogy and Ornithology, Paleontology, and 
Anthropology—the wood collection remained 
little changed from the 1910s through the 
1930s. While the curatorship went unfilled, the 
Jesup Collection had a champion in museum 
director Frederic A. Lucas, who in 1922 wrote 
to President Osborn, “It is extremely impor- 
tant that we should revive our forestry depart- 
ment, for its own sake and also in memory of 
Mr. Jesup.”°° Following Lucas’s death in 1929, 
George H. Sherwood, as museum director and 
curator of the Department of Education, became 
its defender. After his death eight years later, 
the scientific staff of the museum proposed 
that “an attempt be made to place some one in 
charge of the wood collection.”8’ For another 
decade, the Department of Forestry and Conser- 
vation was again chaired and staffed by scien- 
tists borrowed from other departments, until a 
curator was hired for the position in 1946. 
In the meantime, the finished logs not only 
occupied an entire exhibit hall but myriad 
smaller duplicates and miscellaneous wood 
samples took up valuable storage space when 
lack of such space at the museum was a chronic 
problem. Discussions about disposing of the 
Jesup Collection began to stir at least as early as 
1937, when museum director Roy C. Andrews 
(Sherwood’s successor) had suggested that the 
collection be donated to the New York Botani- 
cal Garden “or some other institution” in order 
to create space for new exhibitions. In response, 
the museum’s Council of the Scientific Staff 
resolved that the collection remained impor- 
tant scientifically as well as to the work of the 
Department of Education, and argued that to 
give away this “superb gift” could discourage 
other donations to the museum.*® 
When the question resurfaced in 1942 under 
the museums new director, Albert E. Parr, calls 
to abandon the wood collection were again met 
with protest. Informal opinions attributed to 
the museum’s Advisory Committee on Plan 
and Scope included regret “that serious pro- 
posals have been made to burn up the collec- 
