Founding
The earliest local organization dedicated to natural history was the Santa Barbara Society of Natural History, which operated a museum at 1226 State Street from 1875 into the 1900s. [8] [9] Among its leadership were pioneering American female botanists Caroline Bingham and Sarah Paxon Moore Cooper, as well as American paleontologist, Lorenzo Gordin Yates. [10] This first organization appears to have dissolved by the time a separate group of locals first met on January 31, 1916, to organize what would become the precursor to today's museum. [9] This new effort was led by ornithologist William Leon Dawson who donated his extensive collection of bird eggs as well as two structures on his Mission Canyon property to establish the Museum of Comparative Oology. Former president of Wellesley College, Caroline Hazard, would join the museum's board of directors in 1918 and quickly became among its most important leaders and benefactors. [9]
Dawson would head the museum until his resignation in 1923 following disagreement with the board of directors, which wanted to expand offerings from oology into other areas of natural history, a proposition Dawson vehemently opposed. He was succeeded by educator, botanist, and ornithologist, Ralph Hoffmann. [9] Noted archeologist and anthropologist, Harold S. Gladwin would also join as Curator. [11] Anticipating these organizational changes, in 1922 Caroline Hazard donated some of her estate to the museum while her sister-in-law, Mrs. Rowland G. Hazard, donated funds to construct the first structures which would become the modern-day museum grounds. [9] [12] The museum thereby moved from its first location on Puesta del Sol road, down the street to its current location and reopened in April, 1923. [13] The building's architect was Carleton Winslow. [14] During this time, American sculptor Elizabeth Mason also provided dioramas of early Native American life for the museum. [9] [15] Upon visiting the museum with his wife in 1931, Albert Einstein remarked, "I can see that this museum has been built by the work of love". [16]
Hoffman was succeeded in 1933 by Paul Marshall Rea, former president of the American Association of Museums and director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. [17] Rea was succeeded in 1937 by Arthur Sterry Coggeshall, a career museologist who had worked at various prestigious museums, such as the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. As condition of his agreeing to take the position, Coggeshall convinced Max Fleischmann, local heir to the Fleischmann Yeast fortune, to fund the construction of the museum's auditorium, now known as Fleischmann Auditorium. [9] [13] Coggeshall would hold the position for 21 years, during which time he professionalized the museum and acted as a central figure in the founding of the California Association of Museums and the Western Museum Association. The museum would also benefit from the unusually high number of nationally renowned artists residing in Santa Barbara at the time, receiving contributions from Carl Oscar Borg, Belmore Browne, John Marshall Gamble, Fernand Lungren, Douglass Ewell Parshall, and Lilia Tuckerman. [9] [12]
Coggeshall was succeeded as director upon his death in 1958 by Dr. Vertress L. VanderHoof, a research geologist from the University of California, Berkeley who served in the role until 1963. [13] Nora Morres served as interim director (as she had temporarily done following Coggeshall's death) until the naming of Dr. Frederick H. Pough director in 1965. [13] Pough was a vulcanologist and mineralogist from the American Museum of Natural History. In 1972, following further interim directors, the museum hired Dr. Dennis Power, an evolutionary biologist specializing in the biogeography of island birds. Power was a native Californian who at the time was an Associate Curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. [13] He would become the longest serving director, serving 22 years until 1994 when he left to become executive director of the Oakland Museum of California. [18]
