In 1919, the trustees of Emory College were preparing to move their small but thriving school from its cradle in Oxford, Georgia, to the booming, bustling city of Atlanta, where the college would become the school of liberal arts in Emory University, newly chartered in 1915 and beginning life in the suburb of Druid Hills. The leaders in this enterprise were the brothers Asa Candler, chair of the board, and Warren Candler, the chancellor. Older brother Asa was the Coca-Cola magnate who had put up a million dollars and seventy-five acres to jump-start the new university. Warren was an Emory alumnus and former president of the college, now a leading bishop in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Both men were resolute in their high ambitions for their university.

That year, 1919, would bring the move of not only Emory College but also the collection of odds and ends that the college called a museum. Perhaps seeking to preserve the eclectic collection from an uncertain fate while the university was still taking shape, Chancellor Candler had asked the trustees formally to establish the Emory University Museum. Its aim, he said, would be to display what he called the “ethnic, biological, geological, archaeological, and historical” artifacts of human culture. A hundred years later, here we are.

I think of the museum’s biography as having seven chapters, like the days of creation, although day seven in this case is hardly a day of rest. These seven chapters include one about ancestry, as many life stories do. A biography of Winston Churchill must say something about his socially prominent parents, just as a biography of Lincoln must climb up out of the unpromising bleakness of his early years. So it is with the museum at Emory, whose origins echo the modest circumstances of Lincoln’s youth and some of the grandeur of Churchill’s maturity. So first some notes on the museum’s antecedents.

The first history of Emory University was published in 1936, on the centennial of Emory College. The author, Henry Morton Bullock, dates the earliest stirrings toward a museum to 1839. In that year, the College purchased from a Dr. I. J. Cohen “a mineral cabinet containing a collection of 500 gems.” By the opening volleys of the Civil War, in 1861, that collection had grown to number 20,500 rocks of various shapes, sizes, and types.

This rock collection may seem to be the Neanderthal ancestor of the sleek and cerebral homo sapiens that is the current museum. In fact, that’s true. But in at least one important way, this mineral collection resonated with the later mission of the Emory museum. For the purpose of the mineral collection was not simply for people to view a lot of pretty things; it was a tool for teaching. Today’s professors of art history, classics, religion, Middle Eastern studies, and other departments who send their students to the museum would understand the desire of their forebears to have their students see the actual artifacts in their three-dimensional reality, which is more instructive than a classroom description.

The Civil War, unfortunately, wrought havoc on the Oxford campus, as Emory College closed for the duration. When the college reopened in January 1866, the mineral collection and other valuables had vanished. It took President Atticus Haygood to sow new seeds for a museum. In 1876, he commissioned John Fletcher Bonnell, professor of natural science, to communicate with “scientific gentlemen in all parts of the country with the view of exchanging mineral species and thus increasing our own.”

For historian Bullock, this mineral collection marks the beginning of the Emory museum, which would live in various places on the Oxford campus for the next forty years.

The museum at Oxford gained new direction when a Methodist missionary named William Pattillo Turner, Emory College class of 1889, sent from Japan a trunk full of “Japanese costumes, trinkets, and antiques.” These became the nucleus of an Asian collection that would come to include Thai pottery, a Korean wine pot, a brick from the Great Wall of China, Japanese samurai armor, and—perhaps foreshadowing in some karmic way the future commitment of Emory to Tibetan Buddhist studies—a Tibetan prayer wheel. Significantly, the museum that had begun as a kind of natural sciences center now had a mission to exhibit the varieties of human experience.

A related area came into focus in 1911, when Bishop Warren Candler purchased a collection of Wesleyana from an Englishman named Robert Thursfield-Smith. The trove included some of the first Methodist hymnals, correspondence of the Wesley family, and odd personal items of early Methodist leaders, like Bishop Francis Asbury’s razor.

In that same year, 1911, a flock of birds alighted at the museum, as the Reverend William H. LaPrade gave his alma mater a collection of stuffed Georgia birds, which were multiplied five years later when a Mrs. Robert Windsor Smith donated her late husband’s collection of four hundred specimens.

By the end of its first chapter of existence, then, the Emory museum had collected an assortment of objects that made the word “museum” a term of aspiration as much as a description. It was an omnium gatherum, a gathering of many things, all intended to help Emory students see firsthand the wonders of nature and the curiosities of human culture that they learned about in their classes. It would require the courage and imagination of a professor of the Hebrew Bible for the museum to take its first step toward eminence.

In chapter 2, the museum moves to Atlanta and becomes mummified.

Gary S. Hauk

Sources:

Michael C. Carlos Museum Records. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Archival collection. Office of the Registrar and Collections Manager. Michael C. Carlos Museum.

 

 

In a fifteenth-century building in a quaint French town along the Loire River, about a hundred miles south of Paris, a young American woman gave up her life a century ago for the sake of men who had risked their own lives in the “war to end wars.” Her name was Camille Louise O’Brien, and for nearly a hundred years — until this month — she had lain in an unmarked grave in southwest Atlanta.

The granddaughter of an Irish immigrant, Camille O’Brien grew up near Madison, Georgia, but moved with her father and twelve siblings to Atlanta after her mother’s death. In time, she enrolled in a nurses training program at Crawford Long Hospital (now Emory Hospital Midtown), and then completed her training at St. Joseph’s Infirmary (now St. Joseph’s Hospital, part of the Emory Healthcare system).

When the United States entered World War I, Emory physicians and nurses responded to the call for volunteers to establish a base hospital. Inducted in early 1918 and trained at Fort Gordon, outside Atlanta, the unit arrived in Blois, France, in July and set up Base Hospital 43. There, until the end of January, the physicians and nurses treated every kind of wound, injury, and disease among the soldiers who came to their makeshift wards—more than nine thousand cases in seven months. Nurse O’Brien, admonished for overworking to the point of making herself ill, remarked, “I cannot rest while men are being brought in faster than their wounds can be dressed.”

At the end of January 1919, with the armistice three months old and demobilization underway, the Emory Unit decamped for home but left behind a few volunteers to tend to the soldiers who were still recovering. Nurse O’Brien was one of those volunteers. Two months later, as the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 swept through Blois for a second time, she became ill. Back in Georgia her former comrades were saying their goodbyes to each other at Camp Gordon and heading home to their families and friends. In Blois, Nurse O’Brien’s health continued to deteriorate, and on April 18, 1919, she died of spinal meningitis.

She was laid to rest in Blois with full military honors, in line with soldiers who had succumbed to their wounds.

Two years later, her body was exhumed and sent back home, where it once again was laid to rest, this time in historic Greenwood Cemetery. The VFW, the Red Cross, and other organizations paid tribute to the hero nurse. But no one thought to mark the grave. Or perhaps the family could not afford a stone. In any case, while the location was noted in cemetery records, there Nurse O’Brien lay, with only a patch of earth above her, until the hundredth anniversary of her death.

Members of the Georgia World War I Centennial Commission became interested in Nurse O’Brien’s story and determined to mark her grave at last. Along the way, they learned that a memorial plaque had been created and installed at the Emory University Hospital in September 1919. Last May I received a series of emails asking me if I knew of this plaque. Indeed I did not, but along with archivists, Campus Services staff, and many others I began to search. Months went by with no luck.

Then, amazingly, my colleague Sally Wolff King, the official historian of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center, happened to be walking past a bank of elevators on the basement floor of the hospital and looked up to see — the plaque to Camille O’Brien. Sally told me about the location, and I passed along the word to the commission, and before long the plaque had been removed, refurbished, and made ready for a display that will help to perpetuate the memory of this hero nurse.

On April 18, 2019, representatives of Emory,  the Red Cross, the VFW, the Georgia World War I Centennial Commission, Georgia Humanities, and Camille O’Brien’s family gathered to remember her and to mark her grave at last. The quiet, windswept hilltop with a view of the Atlanta skyline in the distance suggested that peace at last had come to Camille O’Brien.

For more information about the Emory Unit, see History of the Emory Unit, Base Hospital 43, U.S. Army American Expeditionary Forces, available at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

Gary Hauk