The Natural History Museum Opens in an Old Gun Storehouse

On May 22, 1871, the American Museum of Natural History opened to the public for the first time, not in the sprawling limestone halls it occupies today but inside the Arsenal, a squat brick building in Central Park that had been built decades earlier to store the state militia's guns. The museum existed on paper since April 6, 1869, when Governor John T. Hoffman signed the legislation creating it, with the merchant John David Wolfe as its first president. The real push behind it came from Albert S. Bickmore, a naturalist who had been dreaming up a great American museum of natural history since 1861 and spent years lobbying wealthy New Yorkers and Albany lawmakers to make it real. The Arsenal was meant to be a temporary home while the institution found its footing. It worked well enough that within a few years the crowds outgrew the building entirely.