The Rise and Fall of America’s First Enlightenment Shrine

Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, the first major museum in the United States, opened its doors in 1786. It was nothing short of an enlightenment temple and a gem of the fledgling republic. The museum began as an extension of Peale’s house on Lombard Street, but grew exponentially, first moving to the halls of the American Philosophical Society and eventually taking residence in Independence Hall, one floor above where the Declaration of Independence was signed and right below where (what we now call) the Liberty Bell rang each day.

By the early 1800s, the museum was home to over 100,000 natural history, ethnographic, mineralogical and mechanical items, many of these exhibited under exquisite portraits of Washington, Franklin, Paine, Lafayette, most painted by Peale himself. Lectures and live experiments in chemistry and electricity, sometimes accompanied by music, were soon added on, as was a small menagerie with red doves, eagles, baboons, mongooses, hyenas, and more for the interested museum visitor. As the museum grew, it brought into its orbit almost every scientific, political, and celebrity persona of the day from Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin to Humboldt, Lewis, and Clark to name just a few. Annual attendance in the early years is estimated to have been as high as 12,000, which in a Philadelphia of 54,000, was a sure sign the museum was making its mark.

The museum had many missions, but for Peale the most important was that it “be beneficial, curious or entertaining to the citizens of the new world.” He thought such a place should ultimately become a national museum, and though no one was better positioned than Peale to make such a thing happen—he appealed on numerous occasions to his dear friend President Jefferson—that was not to be. Some six decades after it opened, Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, as well two spinoff museums that his sons Rembrandt and Rubens had opened in Baltimore and New York City, was gobbled up by P.T. Barnum. It need not have ended that way.

As we consider decisions today about government support for contemporary enlightenment institutions, we would do well to look back to the earliest days of our republic and contemplate what happened, and didn’t happen, with Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum.

For more on Peale’s Museum, see Dugatkin, Lee. 2020. Behind the Crimson Curtain: The Rise and Fall of Peale's Museum (Butler Books).