Whitmore's Cabinet
of Natural & Artificial Curiosities
and Sentiments from Our Visiting Public
Welcome, traveler, to the seventy-fourth town on our circuit and the most generous public we have yet had the privilege to address. On these pages our entire collection is arranged in honest alphabetical order, that you may study any specimen at your leisure before, during, or after your visit. Tap any title — the case opens, and the full provenance unfolds. The visitors' book is, as ever, kept open: leave your own impression for those who follow.
A Note from the Director
It has been the joy of my professional life to bring these curiosities before working people who pay their honest dime and ask only to be amazed. A bricklayer in Pittsburgh asked me last spring whether the Megalonyx claw was real. It is, I told him, and so is your question, and so is the wonder on your face. The dime museum is no cheap imitation of higher learning — it is the very front porch of the sciences, and we keep that porch well swept and warmly lit.
We do not hide what is artful in our collection. The Fiji Mermaid is a marvel of taxidermic stagecraft and we say so plainly on her case. A clever fabrication is itself a specimen of human ingenuity, and the visitor who arrives at that conclusion has done a piece of real scientific reasoning. There is no shame in either side of the boundary; there is only attention.
— Augusta R. Whitmore, Director & Proprietress · winter quarters, Hartford, Conn.
(an admiring word on a certain wrapped resident? try her name, five letters, at any keyboard.)