Field Columbian Museum

An institution created after Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893 to provide a permanent display of the exposition’s natural history exhibits. Created by a group of philanthropists, the museum was one of many similar museums emerging as educative centers designed to supplement the work of schools and colleges by bringing education to the unschooled. Indeed, the philanthropists who created the Field and other Chicago museums envisioned making Chicago the Florence or London of the American Midwest.