Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1895 — A Missionaries' Museum. [ARTICLE]

A Missionaries' Museum.

One of the most interesting museums in Boston has been removed to Hartford—the museum of curiosities collected daring 75 years by the missionaries of the American board, and for many years displayed in cabinets in a little dark room in the Congregational House. The collection is to be deposited in the library of the Hartford Thelogical Seminary, and Boston will know it no more. Many of the objects were worthless—unless from a sentimental point of view—pebbles from Palestine,bits of wood or stone broken from temples and the like—but others were of the greatest rarity, interest and scientific value, and some were unique. There were little idols from India, models illustrating life and manufacture in China or Japan, and savage arms and implements from the South Seas. Unlike many similar objects seen nowadays, they were genuine “documents” of savage or barbarous life before it had been touched and influenced by Western civilization. To the ethnographer they were invaluable. Particularly interesting were the idols and curiosities from the Sandwich Islands, all of them obtained by the earlier missionaries. They included the great idol of the Hawaiian war god, one of the most interesting things in its way ever brought to America, The Hawaiian portion of the collection was not sent to Hartford, but, through the influence of Mr. Gorham D. Gilman, the Hawaiian Consul in Boston, it has gone to enrich the Bishop Museum of Hawaiian antiquities in Honolulu.