Professor was the 'Indiana Jones' of his times

Sally Parker//October 7, 2011//

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By following an early curiosity about the natural world, Henry Augustus Ward built a successful business and positioned Rochester at the forefront of 19th-century scientific advances.

Ward was born in Rochester in 1834, the year the city was incorporated. His parents, Henry Meigs Ward and Eliza Chapin Ward, were well-educated, and his mother encouraged him to study religion. But he was a curious child who preferred exploring the outdoors, scavenging for fossils and minerals. As a preteen, he started building a geological collection, setting the foundation for his life’s work.

During the first half of the 19th century, philosophy, religion, language and the arts remained pursuits of the learned. Natural science, because it explored Earth’s origins, was viewed with suspicion. But as science advanced—Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” was published in 1859—exploration of the natural world exploded. Dozens of science study groups sprang up in cities across the country, and Rochester was no exception; anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan—whose studies of Native American culture brought him fame—headed one such group in Rochester.

Ward came of age during this time, continuing to build his geological collection, or cabinet. Formal education did not suit him—he studied briefly at Williams College and the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, where he was an assistant to noted paleontologist Louis Agassiz—but soon left to travel through Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Russia in search of geological specimens.

At age 26, he returned to Rochester to become a professor of natural sciences at the University of Rochester. There he grew his collection, starting with a base of roughly 40,000 specimens ranging in size from tiny semi-precious stones to plaster casts of extinct creatures to blocks of basalt. The cabinet eventually grew to fill two buildings at the campus, Cosmos and Chronos Halls, on College Avenue. In those buildings Ward trained apprentices, several of whom went on to successful museum careers, and stored the collections he accumulated on his travels.

In spring 1862, Vassar became the first customer of what would later be known as Ward’s Natural Science Establishment when officials of the college hired Ward to build a geological cabinet. He sourced some specimens from his own collection.

After a fire destroyed both buildings in 1869—wiping out roughly 75 percent of the specimens held there—Ward left his professorship and started rebuilding the collection as an independent scientific venture in a new building across the street. The firm later moved to North Goodman Street and, in 1942, to Irondequoit before relocating in the early 1980s to its current headquarters on West Henrietta Road.

Even as he grew the business, Ward continued to travel incessantly, collecting specimens from around the world to mount and sell to colleges and museums, according to UR history records. He loved adventure, said Noel France Vache, marketing communications manager of VWR International LLC, the company’s current owner.

“We like to call him Rochester’s Indiana Jones because he really traveled all over the world to look for meteorite specimens,” she said.

Ward employed 18 people on the original staff, including for several years his son Charles, to prepare specimens for colleges and universities. As the business grew, demand for related services increased. Taxidermy was one such service; the company prepared mounted birds and animals. Ward developed a lifelong friendship with William Cody, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill, when the Wild West entertainer hired him to preserve buffalo heads. Ward went on to do the majority of Buffalo Bill’s taxidermy work.

He also preserved all of P.T. Barnum’s exotic animals. When the circus man’s elephant, Jumbo, was hit by a train in St. Thomas, Ontario, Ward and his team within six months had reassembled the elephant’s skeleton, including its crushed skull, and preserved its skins. Barnum added the remains to his show and is said to have made more money off Jumbo after his death than before, Vache said.

Ward in 1893 mounted the largest single display at the Chicago World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition. It was prepared by 74 workmen and occupied 30 train cars. Retailer Marshall Field purchased the display and presented it to the city of Chicago as the basis of the Field Museum.

Ward’s dealings with big-name entertainers and his own adventure travels made him “something of a rock star” for the times, Vache said.

He also pioneered a technique of injecting latex into arteries and veins of preserved specimens so they were much more visible as bright red or blue, Vache said. Medical students used the specimens in dissection labs.

“It made them much more lifelike for those dissections and also a lot safer to use in the lab,” she said.

The technique opened doors into the education market beyond the geological cabinets the company had long provided. By the 1880s and 1890s, as the study of science grew into a more mainstream, accepted pursuit, Ward’s products included materials for consumers to use in building home collections. Museum mounts for butterfly and insect studies at universities also were added.

Ward died in 1906 after being hit by a car in Buffalo, leaving the company to family members. As colleges established taxidermy departments and funded expeditions of their own, the company’s focus shifted further to supporting science education, and in 1928 Ward’s original collections were donated to UR.

The focus on education, particularly in science, has proved to be the firm’s mainstay. The company began to expand into the lower grades in the early 1900s as schools increased science education. During the 1950s, Sputnik and other advances brought a new fervor to the study of natural science, and Ward’s expanded into activity kits and lab supplies such as beakers and test tubes.

Today Ward’s also supplies the growing health care education market with probeware for the collection of digital data, torso and skeleton models, medical simulators and microscope slides.

Family members continued to run Ward’s until the 1930s, when it was sold to the first of a series of owners who kept the focus on science education. Current owner VWR International is based in Radner, Pa.; it owns related brands in Tonawanda; Ontario, Canada; and San Luis Obispo, Calif. Roughly 150 employees work at the Ward’s headquarters in Henrietta.

“Just as Henry was the pioneer to do the latex injection, we try now to stay on the cusp of advancement in science education,” Vache said.

In science, technology, engineering and mathematics classes, “we want to lead the innovations for what the subject areas are that teachers are requesting. We still work very closely with teachers and we are always in touch with them as far as what’s most needed in their classrooms,” she said.