The Baker Museum served as a primary repository for collections of ethnographic, artistic, and archaeological material at Rollins College from the 1920’s to the 1970’s. The collections consisted of material donated by benefactors, alumni, and friends of the college in response to a fire that destroyed the original Rollins Museum located in Knowles Hall.

Many of the objects assembled for the Baker Museum are now part of the collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. These materials currently feature as part of an exhibition at CFAM entitled Storied Objects: Relics and Tales from the Thomas R. Baker Museum, which examines the set of circumstances that connected individual and institutional donors with Rollins College during the mid-20th Century.

Students from ARH 315: Digital Methods in Art History and Archaeology have produced this companion site based on research conducted during Spring 2020.

History of the Baker Museum and Its Collections

The first light of the morning on December 2, 1909 revealed to the crowd of students, staff, faculty, and administrators standing on what would become Mills Lawn the extent of the tragedy that had occurred sometime between 3:00-5:00 am the previous night. Flames had engulfed Knowles Hall, one of the two original campus buildings. Knowles Hall was a complete loss and neighboring Pinehurst Cottage was only saved by the diligence of a group of students who had served as a make-shift fire crew battling the spread of the fire. The side of Pinehurst Cottage facing Knowles Hall had sustained damage and much of the siding hung in charred strips from the building, but the structure itself was largely intact. Among the observers must surely have been Thomas R. Baker, Professor of Physics, Chemistry, and German whose science labs had been located in Knowles Hall. In addition to the loss of Baker’s experimental teaching space, an extensive collection of botanical, faunal, and cultural materials had been destroyed in the fire.

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In the aftermath of the fire, Prof. Baker engaged in a nation-wide letter writing campaign targeting both individual donors and institutions in an attempt to replace the lost collection.

“We are making a museum collection to replace the large and valuable one destroyed in the burning of Knowles Hal, and are asking our friends to aid us in this work by contributing specimens of rocks,ores, well-drillings, special clays, good roads material, relics from shell-heaps, crystals, mounted birds, insects, etc. – anything of geological, mineralogical, zoological, or botanical interest.” – Thomas R. Baker, January 21, 2010

Donors, including alumni, friends of the college, and major national cultural institutions responded in a significant way to Baker’s request and by 1920, the college had amassed a new collection of objects that served as the seed of Rollins’ second campus museum, the Thomas R. Baker Museum. Between 1920 and its closure in the 1970’s the Baker Museum amassed a collection of over 10,000 objects. Many of the archaeological and ethnographic objects within the Baker Collection were integrated into the holdings of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum where they remained in storage.