Written by Eric Rosenzweig and Laurie Rizzo.

Next time you get off the Broad Street line at the Cecil B. Moore stop, walk up a block to Montgomery Avenue and go see the Wagner Free Institute of Science.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a unique and amazing place. Established in 1865 by William Wagner (1796-1885), who, for ten years prior, was holding classes and lectures out of his own home. He built the Institute at its current location.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science is a natural history museum and educational institution that is dedicated to providing free public education in the sciences, and is the oldest program of that kind in the United States. The Institute includes an exhibit gallery, classrooms, and a library.

The Natural History Museum on the third floor was organized according to Darwin’s evolutionary theory by Joseph Leidy, a renowned scientist, who became director of the academic programs of the Wagner Free Institute of Science after Wagner’s death. The Leidy’s display remains virtually untouched in the Museum to this day. The Institute very much feels like a museum within a museum.

The collections Eric and I worked on at the Wagner’s Library and Archives were institutional and mainly financial documents. Financial materials from the late 19th and early 20th century are certainly aesthetically more interesting to look at than contemporary financial records. The most challenging part was understanding the terminology associated with the documents. For example, often terms like voucher and canceled check were used interchangeably to describe the same material, other times the materials were clearly different. The confusion with terminology may have been a result from the collection being previously processed.

Through processing the collections, we learned that Wagner owned a large portion of land surrounding the Institute. He built and purchased buildings that he rented as apartments or stores as revenue for the Institute. Although the Institute no longer owns these properties, they were instrumental to its founding and development. Things certainly have changed, what once was a series of late 19th century row houses is now a modern police station. Some houses in the area appear to have been built during the same era as the buildings Wagner rented out, giving us a sense of how things might have looked during his time.

I highly recommend taking a trip to the Wagner Free Institute of Science, especially if you have an interest in the natural sciences or the history of science. It is a beautiful and fascinating place.