been designing a new forestry hall and began 
his tenure at the museum with a preliminary 
plan for the new exhibits. He recognized the 
historical importance of the wood collection 
as “a heritage of the America that is past, and 
that our forests would no longer provide such a 
fine assemblage of material,” and noted that it 
would “become of greater and greater value as 
time goes on.” At the same time, Svenson rec- 
ognized that the future of the department would 
be a departure from its past. The emphasis of its 
work would not be on specimens, which would 
be kept “behind the scenes,” but on illustrat- 
ing the integrated relationships and landscape 
processes represented by forest vegetation.”* 
Toward this end, the existing Hall of Forestry 
was closed on November 1, 1948, after which 
the exhibits were dismantled.”° 
As exhibits were revised, Parr explained in 
1951 that the role of natural history museums 
in the progress of science had been evolving over 
the prior decade. There remained an abiding 
interest in individual organisms, which were 
the realm of basic research and a staple of the 
museum’s scientific program. At the same time 
and increasingly, the museum identified new 
objectives for their work: understanding the 
interactions of organisms with their environ- 
ment (their ecology) and recognizing the neces- 
sity for their conservation in nature. It was in 
these areas where Parr saw the museum’s most 
critical educational mission.” 
An early expression of this philosophy was 
the Felix M. Warburg Memorial Hall of Ecology. 
Occupying the space where the Jesup Collec- 
tion had been exhibited, several new exhibits 
were intended to illustrate the ecosystems of 
New York State and how the human population 
influenced the landscape. Adjacent to this, in 
the southeast corner of the first floor (formerly 
known as Darwin Hall or the Hall of Inverte- 
brate Zoology), the new Hall of North American 
Forests was unveiled on May 14, 1958, featur- 
ing life-sized dioramas of eleven forest types 
from across the continent. Where the hundreds 
of individual trunk segments, separate models 
of foliage and flowers, and illustrations that 
populated the former hall had left their forests 
of origin to the imagination of visitors, the new 
displays revealed integrated forest ecosystems, 
Jesup Collection 41 
with characteristic herbaceous plants, animals, 
and physical elements (sunlight, water, soils) 
conspicuously represented in three dimensions. 
The focus of the new hall was on forests as habi- 
tats, the interrelationships among organisms 
that live in forested regions, and the importance 
of maintaining these ecosystems.”’ 
Although the tree species themselves were no 
longer the raisons d’étre of the new exhibits, the 
new hall was, effectively, an embodiment of 
the ideals that its namesake had hoped to pro- 
mote through the assembly of the original Jesup 
Collection. The new exhibits were met with 
admiration.?® Of all the pieces formerly on dis- 
play, only the large cross-section of giant sequoia 
remained, as it does today. Meanwhile, as the 
penultimate step toward disposition, the woods 
had been officially designated a “scientific stor- 
age collection” in 1953, and the specimens were 
sequestered elsewhere in the museum.” 
Ponderous and Not Easily Handled 
In September 1956, Parr ultimately succeeded in 
convincing the museum’s Management Board 
that “there was no probability of this mate- 
rial [the wood collection] ever being put to any 
real use by The American Museum of Natural 
History.” He asked the board to approve the 
transfer of the Jesup Collection to the Smith- 
sonian Institution, which he hoped “would 
guarantee proper care and use of the material 
in accordance with the purposes for which it 
was collected.”!© With the board’s approval to 
pursue disposition, then-curator of the muse- 
um/’s Department of Vegetation Studies, Jack 
McCormick, initiated correspondence with 
the National Museum to effect this transfer. 
Because the Smithsonian was preoccupied with 
the construction of new buildings and other 
exhibits, these discussions proceeded intermit- 
tently over the next two years. 
The director of the Smithsonian’s Museum 
of Natural History, Remington Kellogg, finally 
submitted a formal request to Parr in Decem- 
ber 1957. His proposal outlined a dramatic new 
vision for the specimens: 
Our plans foresee the utilization of the collec- 
tion in several ways. The large redwood, Sitka 
spruce, Douglas-fir, sugar pine, ponderosa pine, 
white pine, oak, walnut, and longleaf pine trunk 
