Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Spring 2009 - (Page 80) Fins, Feathers The Louisiana State Museum once housed a vast collection of natural history specimens MODERN-DAY museum-goers generally view history and culture museums in a category separate from natural history museums. However, like many museums, the Louisiana State Museum once had a natural history collection, and the story of that collection tells a story much deeper than the mere tale of a curious collection of taxidermy specimens. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Opening ceremonies for the Louisiana State Exhibit and Museum at Washington Artillery Hall took place in New Orleans on May 3, 1905. Exhibits for the new museum had been shipped from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, where Louisiana had displayed a variety of artifacts, models, natural-history specimens, and other items in the fair’s “palaces.” A graphic compendium of the state’s educational progress and a model of a cane sugar factory, along with photographs and & Furs statistical information provided by the Sugar Experiment Station of Audubon Park, had occupied the Palace of Education and Social Economy. A more detailed and faithful sugarhouse model was exhibited in the Palace of Agriculture, as was a rice mill model, irrigation devices for rice cultivation, cotton gins and presses, and tobacco of various types, including perique. Louisiana’s exhibit in the Palace of Horticulture highlighted the state’s ability to One of the more unusual acquisitions for the natural history collections included the skeleton of an African elephant exhumed near Bossier City in 1921. The elephant had died in a circus train wreck about ten years earlier. 80 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Spring 2009 LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM http://lsm.crt.state.la.us/
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