Geology Hall

Designed by architect Henry Janeway Hardenburgh, Geology Hall was built in 1872.

Geology Hall, formerly Geological Hall, is a building located in the historic Queens Campus section of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey's College Avenue Campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Designed by architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, Geology Hall was built in 1872 with funds raised by the college's president, William H. Campbell for the purpose of facilitating the expansion of science and agriculture education. Rutgers expanded these programs after being named New Jersey's only land grant college. As part of the Queen's Campus, Geology Hall was included on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.

At present, the building houses administrative offices and the university's geological museum. The museum, which is among the oldest collegiate geology collections in the United States, was founded by state geologist and Rutgers professor George Hammell Cook in 1872. It features exhibits on geology, paleontology, and anthropology, with an emphasis on the natural history of New Jersey, that include fluorescent zinc minerals from Franklin and Ogdensburg, a dinosaur trackway discovered in Towaco, a mastodon from Salem County, and a Ptolemaic era Egyptian mummy.

History

In 1864, Rutgers College was named New Jersey's sole land grant college which provided federal funding pursuant to the Morrill Act of 1862 for the development of engineering, scientific, agricultural, and military education at one school in each state.^{[1]:pp.87–88[2]} The state's selection of Rutgers (instead of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University) was largely influenced by the efforts of George Hammell Cook (1818–1889), a professor of chemistry and natural sciences who became the college's vice president and appointed state geologist in 1864.^{[1]:pp.87–88[3][4]:p.27} With the college's land-grant status and funding appropriated for scientific studies, Cook's role would grow to include research and teaching in the areas of geology and agriculture.^{[1]:pp.87ff.[4]:p.27}

Professor George H. Cook was instrumental in Rutgers becoming the state's only land-grant college and developing the college's programs in the sciences and agriculture.

Six years later, in 1870, the college's board of trustees decided to erect a building to house the college's new scientific programs.^[1]:p.101 At this time, Rutgers was celebrating the centennial anniversary of its second charter (1770) and college president William H. Campbell (1808–1890) solicited donations from alumni and other supporters in an extensive fundraising effort aimed at supporting these new programs.^[3] With these funds, the trustees commissioned a design for "a Geological Hall" from Henry Janeway Hardenbergh (1847–1918), a young architect from New Brunswick.^[1]:p.101[5] Hardenbergh received these contracts through family connections, as several members of his family were graduates, trustees, or associated with the school. His great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Jacob Rutsen Hardenbergh (1736–1790), was Rutgers' first president and one of its founders, and his grandfather, Rev. Jacob Janeway served as vice president of the college, and turned down the post of president in 1840.^[5][6]

Hardenbergh's design was described as employing both Gothic elements and classical forms that preceded the extreme eclecticism that was to mark a later Victorian Gothic Revival period.^[7] The original plans called for the building to be constructed out of red brick.^[7] However, Hardenbergh and the trustees agreed that building with brick would be too expensive, and the design was revised to use New Jersey brownstone that would complement the exterior of the college's oldest building, Old Queens (built 1809–1823).^[5][8] Geology Hall, built on the south side of Old Queens, was the second of three projects that Hardenberg designed for the college, following an addition to a building (now Alexander Johnston Hall) that housed the college's grammar school (now Rutgers Preparatory School) the year before. The third project, Kirkpatrick Chapel (1873), was designed to complement the simple Gothic Revival style of Geology Hall and was erected on the north side of Old Queens.^[5]

Completed in 1872 at a cost of US$63,201.54 (2013: US$1,215,365.62),^{[3][lower-alpha 1]} Geology Hall's first floor provided the college with rooms for laboratory and lecture instruction, and housed the college's armory.^[1]:p.101 The second floor was designed to accommodate a geological museum.^[1]:p.101 The first-floor classrooms would house the college's physics, military science, and geology departments.^[9][10] Geology Hall also provided instruction space for courses in agriculture, chemistry and engineering for several years, until Rutgers built New Jersey Hall (1889) to house the Agricultural Experiment Station, and buildings for the Chemistry and Engineering departments (1909 and 1910 respectively).^{[1]:pp.148,157}

Today, Geology Hall houses offices of the university's administration and the Rutgers Geology Museum. Previously, it housed the offices of the Rutgers geology department, now called the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, from 1872 until 1979, when it moved to the university's Busch Campus in Piscataway. This was the last of the university's science department to move across the Raritan River to the Busch campus.^[11] In 1973, Geology Hall was included with six other buildings on Rutgers' Queen's Campus on the New Jersey Register of Historic Places the National Register of Historic Places.^[7][12]

Rutgers Geology Museum

The interior of the Rutgers Geology Museum, seen in 2011

Cook established the university's geology museum in 1872 with specimens collected during the New Jersey Geological Survey which he directed as New Jersey's state geologist.^[13] Since then, the museum has operated on the building's second floor, offering free tours to small groups, schools, and to the general public.^[13][14] The museum's collections, of which only a small portion is on display, features exhibits on geology, natural history, paleontology, and anthropology, with an emphasis on the natural history of New Jersey.^[14][15]

The museum's earliest collections began to coalesce in the 1836 from the work of Lewis C. Beck (1798–1853), a physician, botanist, entomologist, chemist and geologist, who taught at Rutgers in the mid-nineteenth century from 1830 until his death in 1853.^[4]:p.37[14] Many of the exhibits feature items that are unique to New Jersey, including Native American artifacts, minerals, and fossils, including a set of fossilized dinosaur tracks believed to belong to the carnivorous Grallator, from the Jurassic-period discovered near Towaco in Morris County,^[16] and the skeleton of a 10,000-year old mastodon (Mammut americanum) discovered in Salem County in 1869.^[15] The mastodon, found in a marl pit near Mannington, was sold by a local farmer to a travelling circus before it was acquired by Rutgers for display.^[17][18]

A collection of 2,400 specimens of fluorescent minerals was donated to the museum in October 1940 by George Rowe, a mine captain with the New Jersey Zinc Company. This collection consists of rare minerals, many of which are found only in New Jersey, such as those discovered during nineteenth- and twentieth-century zinc mining operations in Franklin and Ogdensburg in Sussex County.^[19] This museum's holdings were augmented with the donation of 6,000 fluorescent mineral specimens collected by Anne and Milton Hershhorn.^[14] This exhibit opened to the public in October 2002.^[20]

The museum displays a 2,400-year old female Egyptian mummy on loan from the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. The mummy, which dates to 320 or 330 B.C. in the Ptolemaic era, was discovered in Northern Egypt and brought back to the United States by a Dutch Reformed missionary who served in Egypt in the early 1700s.^[16][21] Little else is known about the mummy's origins, but it was stored in a closet at the seminary until 1968 when it was first put on display.^[21]

In 2013, rumors suggested that the university administration was planning to place the museum's exhibits in permanent storage, close the museum and renovate Geology Hall for use as an auditorium.^[15] A letter-writing campaign from alumni and the general public successfully convinced the administration to commit toward continuing the museum and expanding its mission.^[22][23]

References

Notes

Citations

External links

• Rutgers Geology Museum (official website)
• Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Coordinates: 40°29′55″N 74°26′47″W / 40.498588°N 074.446504°W / 40.498588; -074.446504