Eggscentricity – The Pember Museum and Library, Granville New York

The Pember’s newest exhibit will run from June 18, 2024 to May 17, 2025.

Behind the Eggs by Bernadette Hoffman

When I started working for the museum in 2008, I was told that the 100+ year old chest shown here was “Williams’ Egg Collection.”

Over the years I’ve tried to find documentation for every item in the attic and museum to create an acquisition list. I ran across the file pertaining to the chest and found that it had been gifted to the museum by Wayne & Linda Thomas in 1996.

A few years ago, I began instructing volunteers to inventory the egg chest and I compared our list with one taken at the time of acquisition. The volunteers would gently transfer the eggs from their original box to a temporary one. They removed the top portion of the cotton, which was dirty, wiped down the box and numbered the box with the drawer, row and box number like 1:1:1. The eggs were then transferred back to their original box. We did not attempt to clean the eggs. I would clean the drawer interior so the boxes could be returned to a cleaner environment. The egg chest is not airtight and you can imagine the dirt, dust and dead bugs that had collected on the cotton and eggs for over 100 years. This task took several years, and our inventory was completed in late 2023.

Before

After

Within the donation documentation it mentioned that Williams’ log and a cigar box of 233 data cards were included. I found those in the attic’s storage room and thought I would match the cards to the eggs. A young volunteer, Zachary Lu (age 15) helped with this task by using our inventoried sheets. I would then take the data card, his suggestions as to the egg set(s) it might be pertaining to and compared it to the old inventory that listed the set marks. Now, our inventory includes eggs that have a data card. Data cards or sheets include the collector’s name, date and place of the collection along with other scientific information. From there I started looking through Williams log to match eggs that didn’t have a card and this project has not yet been completed. I have also scanned the cards and his log to eliminate the need to handle the aged documents.

Once I got into this project, I recognized many of the collectors because their eggs were also in the Pember’s collection. I started questioning who were these egg collectors from the late 1800’s to early 1900’s and thought it would make for an interesting exhibit. I began researching them which wasn’t so easy. After all, there are roughly 300 collectors! Some were famous, some not, and some were hired to collect for others. The task was overwhelming, but Zachary was thrilled to take on the research. The exhibit would not have opened on June 18th without his assistance. So, I’m very grateful that he’s interested in natural history.

For the exhibit, my first quest was to determine how Mr. Thomas came to own Williams’ collection. There was no provenance information included in the donation paperwork. So, we don’t know why or how but using my personal ancestry account helped to connect the two individuals. It took some time, but the collection belonged to William John Babcock Williams (1866-1934), a distant cousin to Mr. Thomas. There is a shared ancestor, John B. Williams (1780-1851) and his wife Emma Jones (1780-1860). John Williams is Mr. Thomas’s 4th great grandfather while he was W.J.B.’s great grandfather. Both families lived in Holland Patent, NY at one time.

William started a hatchling record in 1878 at the age of twelve. In 1882 at 15, he began an Egg Memorandum with observations of birds and their nests. The first set he collected was of the Phoebe-bird on May 12, 1882, in Cambridge, NY, where his father, John Gollicar Williams, was the Cambridge Academy principal. It is at this time that William began collecting, purchasing, and exchanging eggs with other collectors.

I thought I would display egg sets from each collector in the exhibit. The eggs would be from a species that’s not currently on display. We have limited space and a biography with an egg set is all that would fit, and I managed to feature 16 Oologists and egg collectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from Williams’s, Bert Nichols’s, and Mr. Pember’s collection. Each of them did business with many of the same collectors.

How did I decide on 16 collectors from 300? William Williams was a given since it’s his collection I had been working on. I also wanted Bertram “Bert” Nichols because in our collection there are around seventy sets of eggs, and he was local along with working at the Pember Museum. I looked for biographies with a photo and which eggs they collected. However, there are a few without photos.

Sources: Islapedia, Wikipedia, Ancestry, Find a Grave, Harvard, TSH, Internet Archives (the Oologist, Ornithologist, Young Oologist, Young Ornithologist, Hawkeye Oologist & Ornithologist, the Auk, the Taxidermist publications), Biodiversity Heritage Library, NYS Historic Newspapers, Newspapers.com, San Diego Museum, Ornithology.com.

While researching, I came across an advertisement Franklin Pember posted in an 1885 edition of the Young Ornithologist. We know he sold eggs because in our timeline exhibit there is one of his catalogs. I thought you’d find this information interesting.

Pember’s 1885 Ad

Pember’s 1883 Egg Catalog on exhibit

The Exhibit: Eggscentricity

Collecting bird skins and eggs became a popular hobby in the late-19th century. It was mostly men and sometimes boys who bought, sold and traded eggs. They were commonly referred to as Oologists, a person who studies eggs. An oologist’s goal was to locate and gather as many different bird eggs as possible in the name of science. There was other less than professional individuals that gathered eggs. Some egg collectors were fanatical about collecting them. They wanted eggs from every species. Rarer birds were even better, and they didn’t stop at one egg but often took all the eggs to trade with other collectors or to prevent competitors from getting any hard-to-find eggs. When bird eggs were collected, they typically came with a history such as date and place of collection, species identification, nest description along with other information which was written on a data card or data sheet as it is sometimes called.

For a few individuals, collecting bird eggs became a field of serious scientific inquiry that helped lay the foundation for the modern field of ornithology.

Bird and egg collectors had a severe impact on bird populations. In 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed banning the collection and possession of nearly all wild bird eggs along with skins, feathers and nests. Most American egg collectors handed over their collections to museums but such was not the case with collectors in Britain.
Source: Ornithology.com

Here is the layout of the exhibit.