Between 1890 and 1893, two young Americans, Frank Swift Bourns and Dean Conant Worcester, travelled through the central and southern Philippines on a zoological expedition. Both men were recent graduates of the University of Michigan. The expedition was supported by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Science, with funding from Louis Menage, a Minneapolis-based real-estate tycoon and civic booster whose support of the expedition was motivated in part by the desire to elevate the city's standing as a center of science and culture.
In addition to collecting animal specimens, the two men took more than one hundred and fifty photographs. The photographs were originally part of the collections of the Academy of Sciences, which operated out of the Minneapolis Central Library. When the Academy folded in 1929, the library inherited the Academy’s collections and continued to display them in a “science museum,” which operated into the 1980s. The collections from the Academy have been deaccessioned over the years, since they are no longer within the scope of the library’s collections. In 2023, the photograph collection was gifted to the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, which houses over 4,700 glass plate negatives related to Dean Worcester’s photography. Many of the photographic prints in the Menage Expedition collection are represented by glass plate negatives in the Museum’s Worcester Collection.
For an in-depth exploration of the Menage Expedition, including additional photographs, visit: The 1890-1893 Menage Expedition to the Philippines: An account of the activities and observations of Frank S. Bourns and Dean C. Worcester near the end of the Spanish colonial period. Created by Mark Rice, professor of American studies at St. John Fisher University and author of Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines (University of Michigan Press, 2014).
