Museums - Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and Art

A Scranton physician and businessman, Dr. Isaiah Fawkes Everhart held a fond interest for natural history. After military service in the Civil War, he conceived the idea of assembling a comprehensive collection of Pennsylvania’s native birds and animals. As the collection grew in size, Everhart recognized the need to build a museum to house it, and on February 2, 1907, he publicly announced that he would provide funds and guidance for the creation of a museum “for the young and old of this generation and for all of those who follow after ... for their pleasure and education.” Construction soon began and the original building of the Everhart Museum was dedicated on Memorial Day, May 30, 1908. The museum was greatly expanded in the 1920s, and has undergone a number of renovations over the years, the most recent of which was in the 1980s to allow space for effective display of the collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art and the ethnographic material.
The original collection was concerned primarily with natural history and centered around the ornithological collection that Everhart had given to the institution. During the 1920s and ‘30s, another patron, Colonel Watres, added a large number of local Indian artifacts, previously in the collection of Dr. H. Hollister. Mr. and Mrs. John Law Robertson lent significant pieces of American folk art and African and Oceanic art for exhibit in the museum in 1934, most of which was later acquired by the museum. Other works in the collection were donated to the museum by the Museum Association of Scranton, The Gladys Connell Jermyn Estate, and Charles S. Holman, Jr. The single most significant addition to the African and Oceanic collection occurred in 1980, when the museum purchased the collection of anthropologist David Eisler, who had worked extensively in Papua New Guinea.