Increase Allen Lapham

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by Paul Hayes

The whiskered visage of Increase Allen Lapham, whose wanderings in pioneer Wisconsin turned up the stuff that eventually formed Milwaukee Public Museum's core collection when the museum opened 115 years ago, looks kindly day and night upon the fourth floor geology laboratories.

The bronze bust was acquired no-one-remembers-when, but then no one remembers the museum not possessing it. It apparently lacks a number that would suggest a catalog record and it lacks the signature of the artist, although that's not certain either. The entire bust cannot be studied conveniently because some years ago it was bolted to the wall, lest some visitor pull the beard of the gentle Quaker and thereupon bring down upon himself a heavy retribution. Alas, the bolt makes the bust immovable, hence one can not easily look behind or under it for information.

Then again, it was noted by Peter Sheehan, MPM curator of geology, that the bolt not only protects those who might topple it; it also keeps Lapham in the geology department.

Lapham was one of those early 19th century scientists who dabbled in all disciplines, and many claim him: historians, geographers, zoologists, ecologists, meteorologists, educators, engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists, limnologists, botanists. You name it, Lapham likely did it. But more people than Sheehan believe that Lapham was predominantly a geologist, and so it is proper that lie be secured, if even by a bolt in the wall, in the geology department.

Those who are aware of the Lapham bust include Edward Green and Nancy Lurie, both retired museum employees, and both of whom say it preceded their tenures. Green said it came out of storage when the museum moved from its old quarters above the Milwaukee Public Library to its new quarters across Wells Street.

Lurie, former curator of anthropology, who wrote "A Special Style," the 1982 centennial history of the Museum, also remembered the bust, but not its history. Still, little surprises Lurie. She once puzzled over the disappearance of a stuffed adult giraffe, the, evidence for which is in a photograph of an exhibit of mammals that was in the old Exposition Building in the 1880s, but of which there is neither a single hair nor spot left behind. It was a time, she said, when documentation was less diligent and when deaccession-the word for the routine that a modem museum follows to unburden itself of obsolete, duplicate or unimportant objects-was less formal.

In a way, the Lapham bust represents the beginnings of the great Milwaukee Museum. It speaks of Lapham's presence, to be sure, but provides little direct information about his contributions.

When Wisconsin entered the union in 1848, an event that will be celebrated all year next year as the state's sesquicentennial observation-its 150th birthday party-Lapham had been at work on its natural history, its antiquities and its climate for 12 years.

The pioneer naturalist, self-taught in all of the sciences he dabbled in, already had established himself as the expert on Wisconsin's natural history. He arrived in Milwaukee, then a city of 1,000 persons, on July 1, 1836, four days before Wisconsin territory was formed out of the Michigan territory. By the end of that year he had finished the first scientific paper published in Wisconsin, called "A Catalogue of Plants and Shells Found in the Vicinity of Milwaukee on the West Side of Lake Michigan."

Born in New York in 1811, he came here at the age of 25 to be chief engineer in building Byron Kilbourn's Milwaukee-to-Rock River canal, so as to be able to ship lead mined in southwestern Wisconsin to Milwaukee without it having to go down the Mississippi River, through the Gulf Mexico, up the Atlantic Coast, west through the Eric Canal and thence by Great Lakes schooner to Milwaukee. The job didn't last. Within a year it was evident that railroads would do the work faster and cheaper and Lapham turned his attention to, other ways of making a living. By 1844 he had published Wisconsin's first book, "A Geographical and Topographical, Description of Wisconsin, with Brief Sketches of its History, Geology, Mineralogy, Natural History, Soil, Productions, Government, Antiquities, etc. etc."

The book sold in the east where it was plagiarized by an unprincipled opportunist in Buffalo, New York, and between the two of them, they widely promoted Wisconsin as a fine place to settle in. The place grew rapidly. The very year Wisconsin achieved statehood, a liberal revolution in Germany failed, and its refugees comprised the first major wave of German immigration to hit the western shore of Lake Michigan.

As Lapham traveled Wisconsin to do his research, he gathered the evidence of its natural history, Silurian age fossils (of which one brachiopod was named for him); grasses (which he shared with the famed Harvard College botanist, Asa Gray), mosses and other plants; shells, minerals and Indian artifacts. He mapped Wisconsin, selling the maps; surveyed effigy mounds for his most impressive book, "The Antiquities of Wisconsin," which was published by the Smithsonian Institution; catalogued fishes, birds and plants, made assessments of the mineral potential of the state; studied its lakes, recorded weather data and lobbied for a storm warning system.

He was a founder of the Milwaukee Female College, which later became Milwaukee Downer College; a charter member of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and a founder of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Toward the end of his life, he was Wisconsin State Geologist.

Lapham watched as Milwaukee changed from a frontier town settled by Yankee entrepreneurs to a German-dominated city. One of the "forty-eighters, " as those Germans who fled the failed revolution were called, was university-trained Peter Engelmann, who was drafted by Milwaukee's German community to start a school.

Engelmann became the first principal of the German-English Academy when it opened in 1851. As such, he believed in hands-on education and he began to assemble a cabinet full of natural history specimens. Lurie's history reports that the collection grew rapidly, prompting Engelmann to organize the Deutscher Naturhistorischer Verein Wisconsin (German Natural History Society of Wisconsin) to take ownership of the collection and to oversee its systematic expansion.

The society's members, mainly parents of German-English Academy students (Lurie called them Milwaukee's first museum volunteers) kept adding to the collection. it outgrew its cabinet and then a complete room. Finally, it was housed in an assembly hall that filled the entire third floor of the school.

In 1865, Lapham donated a sizable collection of his specimens to become the property of the educational institution raising the most money for the establishment of a Soldier's Home for Civil War veterans in Milwaukee. It boiled down to a competition between Engelmann's academy and the Milwaukee Female College, of which Lapham had been the first president.

The academy won by raising $1600, which became part of the $165,000 fund that persuaded the federal government to build the Soldier's Home at Wood, Wis. Another happy result was that Engelmann and Lapham, like-minded men, became fast friends; Lapham became an honorary member of the Naturhistorischer Verein; both men lectured at the other's school.

Engelmann died in 1874 and Lapham in 1875. In 181/ 9, the Verein was reorganized under a state charter as the Natural History Society of Wisconsin, and its membership quickly realized that the collection not only had grown valuable, but it had outgrown the German-American Academy.

A member of the society who also was an alderman led a petition drive to ask the common council to create a free public museum. State laws passed in 1882 empowered the city of Milwaukee to run a museum and enabled the society to convey its collection to the city. The trustees held their first meeting in 1883, electing Carl Doerflinger, a German-English Academy graduate, the first custodian. Later that year, the trustees rented space at Milwaukee's new Exposition Building.

As Lurie put it, "The problem of inadequate room at the Academy was now replaced by the problem of too much room at the Exposition Building. The approximately 20,000 specimens (valued at $30,000) from the Natural History Society were barely sufficient for Engelmann Hall [the name of the new space]."

The museum quickly arranged for the Henry Ward's Scientific Establishment in Rochester, New York, to ship 1575 specimens, including some large and showy items, to fill what was to become Lapham Hall. The Milwaukee Public Museum was underway.

Lurie notes that no good records exist of what Ward's supplied nor was there sufficient documentation for the Natural History Society's collection. The best record we know was published in the First Annual Report of 1883, listing 4370 minerals, fossils and rocks; 4400 plants-, 2690 insects,- 1900 marine invertebrates; 1630 coins, and lesser numbers of seeds, mounted animals, birds' eggs, and books, maps and charts. Only a few objects in the Museum today can be traced to the Lapham-Engelmann collection.

But Increase Lapham's presence in the Milwaukee Museum, while scattered and scant, is not restricted to his bust in the geology lab. Among 250,000 specimens in the botany department's herbarium, half-a-dozen were collected, identified and described by Lapham, according to Neil T. Luebke, assistant curator for vascular plants. These are not from the original collection of the German-American Academy, but were acquired in the 20th century from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Furthermore, the specimens have been remounted since Lapham's day.

A prize of 19th century science also resides in the botany department. in a scrapbook entitled "Mosses," a title that has little to do with its contents, Lapham mounted ferns, lichens and other botanical miscellany. This, too, is a relatively recent acquisition, Luebke said, having been purchased in 1979 from a Chicago area woman who found it in an antique store.

But the elegant little scrapbook contains many handwritten notes of Lapham's and offers an insight into how the gentle scientist may have spent long winter nights in Milwaukee 150 years ago.

A visit to the Museum library turns up a thick stack of entries in the card catalog by and about Increase Lapham. Most entries refer to his presence in other books, including the 4-volume "Geology of Wisconsin" which was begun under his tenure as state geologist.

The library also holds rare editions of Lapham's books, including the general book about Wisconsin, the book about its antiquities, and a couple of Lapham's scrapbooks, one of which contains 59 pages of gatherings about the fauna and flora of Wisconsin. Another is called "The Fishes of Ohio."

This scrapbook consists of clippings taken from a newspaper called the Family Visitor, which evidently ran an illustrated article featuring a different fish each issue. Lapham painstakingly clipped each of these, pasted each in the book, and noted on each when and where he had encountered similar fish in Wisconsin's waters. It was one of his projects in 1867.

All of this provides some insights into the man and his times and the state of science on the frontier in the 19th century, but it's a thin film considering how much he collected and how much he published.

Happily, the Milwaukee Public Museum harbors a Lapham gem.

One spring day in 1858, a German farmer named Korb was plowing his 40 acres in the town of Trenton, northwest of Milwaukee. His plow turned up a metallic rock, and for a time Korb thought he'd struck a rich vein of iron ore. Eventually word got out, and the farm was visited by Increase Lapham and Carl Doerflinger. Lapham recognized the rock as a meteorite and disabused poor Korb of his get-rich-quick dream. Lapham acquired several pieces of the meteorite that had fallen on the farm years earlier. One piece was as large as 60 pounds and others weighed in at 33, 16,10, 8 and less. Lapham himself kept one of the larger pieces in his cabinet for a time and it became the prop for the most distinctive photo portrait of the scientist.

He placed the meteorite carefully on two books, themselves stacked on a table. He sat down at the table, showing his profile to the photographer and carefully held a magnifying glass on the meteorite. The photograph became a stereopticon slide and was widely copied. Modern articles about Lapham often use this profile shot.

We know that pieces of the meteorite were sent to J. L. Smith, a friend of Lapham's in Louisville, who analyzed it as mostly iron and some nickel. Its interior, which was not melted when it flew white hot through the atmosphere, retained the characteristic cross-hatch markings known in the meteorite trade as the Widmanslatten pattern. Smith noticed a smaller pattern he hadn't seen before, and he named these "Laphamite markings."

Now we are back in geology, near the Lapham bust, and Peter Sheehan is tracking down the Trenton meteorite. Some small pieces, not even fist size, are in a drawer, but the bigger one is not around. We track it to the desk of Carol Stephenson, in the education department. It is a weighty thing with one side cut and polished. Stephenson is ready to pack it into a box of stuff she will take on an educational tour to Wisconsin Rapids. It is the same meteorite that is in the charming picture of the late scientist, and it is safe, known and in use.

Lapham couldn't know this, but Sheehan said the nickel-iron composition of such meteorites often dates from the time of the very formation of the solar system, up to 5 billion years ago, and suggests the composition of the interior of the Earth itself. This is the story it will tell to some scout groups in Wisconsin Rapids.

Lapham's legacy of collecting and educating lives on.