The Academy of Science, St. Louis (also rendered Academy of Science – St. Louis and historically the Academy of Science of St. Louis) is a learned society and non-profit organization in St. Louis, Missouri, devoted to the advancement and public understanding of science. It was founded on March 10, 1856 by fifteen men, twelve of them physicians, together with the engineer James B. Eads, the lawyer Nathaniel Holmes and the fur trader Charles P. Chouteau. A charter incorporating the Academy was approved by the Missouri General Assembly on January 17, 1857.
For its first century the Academy maintained a natural history museum and a research library and published Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, a journal that by 1904 was exchanged with 584 scientific institutions around the world. Its members included the botanist George Engelmann, who was president sixteen times and whose friendship with Henry Shaw helped shape the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the zoologist Charles Henry Turner, who published in the Transactions and was commemorated in a memorial issue of it after his death in 1923.
The Academy operated a succession of public museums, the last being the Museum of Science and Natural History in Oak Knoll Park in Clayton, Missouri, which opened in 1959. Voters placed that museum in a new regional tax district in 1971, and the Academy transferred it and its collections to a public board of commissioners; the collections passed in turn to the Saint Louis Science Center, whose Forest Park building opened on November 2, 1991. The Academy continued as an independent organization and now runs the St. Louis Science Fair, the Junior Academy of Science, a public speaker series and the annual Outstanding St. Louis Scientists Awards.
History
Predecessor society In late 1836, a group meeting in St. Louis organized the Western Academy of Natural Sciences, which obtained a charter from the Missouri General Assembly dated February 6, 1837; its incorporators included the physician and botanist George Engelmann. Frederick Starr, who called it the Western Academy of Science, described it in 1898 as "perhaps the first society for scientific research established west of the Alleghany Mountains," founded through the efforts of Engelmann and Adolphus Wislizenus. The society bought several acres near Eighth Street and Chouteau Avenue, where Engelmann began a botanical garden and arboretum on a small scale; the venture failed and the land was sold. In 1843, the older society elected John James Audubon to honorary membership on a diploma signed by Engelmann as president. On August 4, 1856, its surviving members donated its library of 120 volumes and its mineralogical and geological collections to the new Academy.
Founding and charter The Academy of Science of St. Louis held its first regular meeting on March 10, 1856 in the hall of the city's Board of Public Schools. Fifteen men answered the roll: the physicians George Engelmann, Moses L. Linton, William M. McPheeters, Moses M. Pallen, Simon Pollak, Charles A. Pope, Hiram A. Prout, Benjamin F. Shumard, Charles W. Stevens, William H. Tingley, John H. Watters and Adolphus Wislizenus; the civil engineer James B. Eads; the lawyer Nathaniel Holmes; and the fur trader and traveler Charles P. Chouteau. Engelmann was elected the first president, Prout and Holmes vice-presidents, Shumard and Tingley secretaries, and Eads treasurer.
The original constitution declared that the Academy "shall have for its object the promotion of science: it shall embrace zoology, botany, geology, mineralogy, paleontology, ethnology (especially that of the aboriginal tribes of North America), chemistry, physics, mathematics, meteorology and comparative anatomy and physiology." Fourteen standing committees were created at once, with astronomy and meteorology added in the second year; Starr judged the scheme "sufficiently detailed and heavy to kill a modern society," adding that "the academy was incorporated to last, and it survived." The act of incorporation was approved on January 17, 1857 and accepted by vote of the Academy on February 9. It empowered the Academy to hold property for the advancement of science and the establishment of a museum and library in St. Louis, and provided that on dissolution its collections and library would pass to the City of St. Louis for educational purposes. Membership grew from the original 15 to 104 by the end of 1856 and about 150 by 1860.
Civil War, fire and recovery During the American Civil War the Academy received the natural history and anatomical collections of McDowell College when that building was converted into the Gratiot Street Prison. In May 1869, a fire broke out in the St. Louis Medical College building where the Academy met and, in Starr's words, "the whole museum was swept out of existence"; only a few specimens survived, although the library and most of the stock of the Transactions were saved. Henry M. Whelpley, the Academy's historian, wrote that the loss followed closely on the death of the Academy's president, Benjamin F. Shumard, and "struck terror to the strongest hearts." Engelmann told the members afterwards that "some are dead, others have removed from here, and few remain to help the work." Starr called it the darkest hour in the institution's history; no volume of the Transactions had appeared since 1868. The Academy resumed publishing and meeting, moving in turn to the rooms of the school board, to Washington University in 1881 and to the Missouri Historical Society building in 1893.
New building and fiftieth anniversary After nearly five decades as a tenant or guest, the Academy entered its own building at 3817 Olive Street in November 1903, the gift of Eliza McMillan and her son William Northrop McMillan, with $5,000 from President Henry W. Eliot to fit it out. William Trelease, then director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and for ten years the Academy's secretary, wrote that "with the opening of the fall, therefore, the academy, for the first time in its existence, meets in its own home."
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 brought the Congress of Arts and Science to St. Louis, and the Academy used the occasion to elect seventeen visiting scientists as honorary members "in recognition of their valuable services to science." They included the chemists Svante Arrhenius, J. H. van 't Hoff, William Ramsay, Henri Moissan and Wilhelm Ostwald, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, the physicist and chemist Ernest Rutherford, the bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato, the pediatrician Theodor Escherich and the anatomist Wilhelm Waldeyer; all seventeen accepted.
The Academy marked its fiftieth anniversary with an open session on March 5, 1906 and a banquet five days later, and struck a commemorative bronze medal bearing the Academy's seal and a portrait of Engelmann. Among the guests, T. C. Chamberlin of the University of Chicago, speaking of his own city's academy, told the banquet that "the Academy of St. Louis is the senior institution of its class in the interior of this country."
Closure, mergers and revival Interest lagged during World War I, and in 1917 the Academy closed its building for lack of funds and placed its library, by then about 50,000 volumes, with the St. Louis Public Library for safekeeping; it was later shelved at the Washington University Library and then at Saint Louis University. Three successor organizations were absorbed over the following decades: the St. Louis Natural History Museum Association turned over its assets in 1922, the St. Louis Museum of Natural History in 1934 and the St. Louis Museum of Science and Industry in 1939. In 1939 the Academy sponsored, with the Works Progress Administration and the Missouri Resources Museum, an archaeological excavation of mounds and village sites in Jefferson County; the finds were divided among the Smithsonian Institution, the Missouri Resources Museum and the Academy.
A building at 4642 Lindell Boulevard, given by Joseph Desloge in 1944, allowed the Academy to open the Museum of Natural History, Science and Industry on March 21, 1945. In 1947 the widow of Henry M. Whelpley gave his collection of Native American artifacts, then valued at about $75,000. In 1950 the Academy replaced its twelve-member council with a twenty-five-member board of directors, and in 1956 a woman was elected to that board for the first time in more than fifty years.
Museum of Science and Natural History The Academy sold the Lindell Boulevard building in 1958. That same year it hired Murl Deusing, curator of education at the Milwaukee Public Museum, as director at $12,000 a year (equivalent to $ in ), with offices to be in a planned museum in Oak Knoll Park in Clayton. The project was seeded by a $50,000 gift from J. Lionberger Davis, a St. Louis lawyer and banker, and by a $45,000 grant from the trust fund of A. P. Greensfelder, which required the Academy to raise a further $135,000. Academy president Stratford Lee Morton said he hoped to raise $500,000 in all.
In 1959, the Academy opened the Museum of Science and Natural History in two stone mansions in the park, the fourth in its series of public science museums, paying the City of Clayton one dollar a year in rent but carrying the cost of upkeep. Admission was free. Displays included a reconstruction of the burial chamber of the 19th-dynasty official Sennedjem and the mummy of Henut-wedjebu, a woman of the reign of Amenhotep III; a "Transparent Woman" model shown in its own theater from November 1960; and, after 1983, the mounted body of Mzuri, a lowland gorilla from the Saint Louis Zoo. A 1971 federal directory recorded the Academy's study collections as Missouri archaeology, rocks and minerals, mollusks, Missouri herpetology, and antique lamps, lighting equipment and radios, and noted that nearly all of its 90,000 library volumes were by then deposited at Saint Louis University's Pius XII Memorial Library and the Washington University Library. Its archives held roughly two linear feet of meeting minutes and other Academy documents from 1856 to 1941.
Zoo-Museum District and the Science Center Within a few years of the museum's opening the Academy was struggling to meet the cost of maintaining the buildings, and the Saint Louis Zoo and the Saint Louis Art Museum faced similar difficulties. Legislation passed in a special session of the Missouri legislature in 1969 authorized voters of the city and county to create the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District. The district was approved in the spring of 1971 and began operating in 1972 with three institutions, one of them the Museum of Science and Natural History. Governance of the museum and ownership of the collections passed to a board of commissioners. The Academy's president that year, Jules Campbell, announced that the Academy would continue as an independent organization, and the commissioners agreed to provide it with office space in any future museum building.
The museum acquired the city's James S. McDonnell Planetarium in 1984 and, after a $3.2 million renovation, reopened there as the Saint Louis Science Center on July 20, 1985; the Clayton museum closed, and its contents were transferred to the new institution. A $34 million building on Oakland Avenue, linked to the planetarium by a bridge over Interstate 64, opened on November 2, 1991. The City of Clayton leased one of the Oak Knoll mansions to the St. Louis Artists' Guild in May 1989, and the other has been in use as a childcare facility since 1990.
According to the Science Center's guidebook, Academy members provided leadership, funding and volunteer support as plans for the Science Center developed, and "the Saint Louis Science Center exists today because of the organization now known as [the] Academy of Science – St. Louis." The Academy's offices are at the Science Center's address on Oakland Avenue.
Transactions