THE WARD PROJECT: STUDYING THE IMPACT OF HENRY WARD (FOUNDER OF WARD SCIENCE) ON THE TEACHING NATURAL SCIENCE STARTING IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY AND CONTINUING TODAY

Soon after the University of Rochester was founded in 1850, it became closely associated with Henry A. Ward and his business enterprise of collecting, trading and selling biological and geological specimens to natural history museums worldwide. In the late-1800’s the third largest natural history museum in the United States was at the University of Rochester. This museum (the University of Rochester Museum of Natural History – URMNH) housed material purchased almost entirely from Ward’s Natural Science Establishment (WNSE - today called Ward Science). Here we present a new project compiling and making available on line original catalogs and bulletins of WNSE, hand-written correspondence between Henry Ward and global contributors to and customers of WNSE, and international collections of specimens originally sold by WNSE, including photographs and 3D scans. The Ward Project’s aim is to make the specimens associated with the URMNH, and the extensive collection of papers associated with the Ward’s Natural Science Establishment housed in the Rare Books Collections of the River Campus Libraries of the University of Rochester broadly available to the public, historians, biologists, and institutions worldwide. The Ward Project focuses on the period from 1860-1906 and is intended to facilitate research into the important contributions that Rochester made to the development of natural history museums, natural history education, and the conservation movement. The project is available at wardproject.org.