Lewis and Clark will move from Monticello to Philadelphia in May, with help from Lewis & Clark College. The Portland, Oregon-based private liberal arts college will move its traveling exhibition "The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition" to Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences. The exhibit opens May 5 and remains on view there through Sept. 14.
Stephen Dow Beckham, Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College, is the curator of the exhibit. The college's exhibition is on a national tour, returning to Oregon in 2006.
"The literature of the Lewis and Clark expedition is an integral part of world travel literature," said Beckham. "This exhibition helps us learn about the people associated with the expedition literature and sets those publications in historical context." The exhibit draws on materials in the College's collection.
The Academy's own collection includes an extensive herbarium that includes 226 sheets of plants collected during Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery journey. Richard McCourt, associate curator for botany and the herbarium, is an alum of Lewis & Clark College.
"We are thrilled by the opportunity to take part in the bicentennial commemoration in such a significant way through this traveling exhibition," said Sherry Manning, director of bicentennial programs at the College.
The exhibition features up to 60 items in 11 display cases and a number of framed wall pieces with items drawn from the College's unmatched library of expedition-related literature acquired over the past 20 years.
In February 1803, Jefferson described the Corps of Discovery's mission. "We are now actually sending off a small party to explore the Missouri to its source, and whatever other river, heading nearest with that, runs into the Western ocean; to enlarge our knowledge of the geography of our continent . . . and to give us a general view of its population, natural history, productions, soil & climate," Jefferson wrote. Under the leadership of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the journey lasted 28 months and covered nearly 8,000 miles.
The College's collection includes editions of every journal in English, Dutch, French, and German, multiple printings of expedition narratives, maps, contemporary newspaper accounts, government documents, broadsides, review notices and secondary literature. The College also owns the only copy of the Coues-Anderson manuscript, which is an exact replica of the original Lewis and Clark journals housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Writer and copyist Mary Anderson created this word-for-word, drawing-for-drawing copy in 1892 for Elliot Coues, historian and scholar, and Francis Harper, a New York publisher.
The traveling exhibition is organized around six topics: the traveling library, early expedition notices, Patrick Gass's expedition journal, surreptitious and apocryphal expedition accounts, compilations and editions from Lewis and Clark manuscripts and general histories and centennial publications. The exhibition includes rare books, maps, newspapers, photographs of engravings, hand-colored plates, a period compass, Indian artifacts and other items.
The Academy of Natural Sciences was founded in 1812 "for the encouragement and cultivation of the sciences, and the advancement of useful learning." The Academy is the oldest natural sciences institute in the Western Hemisphere. Expeditions that explored new territories of the U.S. brought natural science discoveries to the Academy for cataloguing and study. Currently, the Academy's scientific collection contains more than 25,000,000 specimen.
The Academy of Natural Sciences is located at 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Viewing hours are Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., and weekends and holidays, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. For more information, call 215-299-1120 or visit the Academy's Web site at http://www.acnatsci.org.
In October the exhibit moves to Kentucky and will be on display at the Louisville Free Public Library.
For more information about related events and activities, visit http://www.TheJourneyContinues.org or contact the College's bicentennial programs office at 503-768-7207.
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