218 Bell Museums Creator of Wildlife Dioramas - webapps8

Creator of Dioramas
illustrator, he spent much of his career
designing and creating educational
experiences to help us become
familiar with the natural world.
Anyone who has hiked trails in our
state parks lias been exposed to
Breckenridges work. Many children
saw their first moose or bear in a
Breckenridge diorama at Bell Museum.
In the museum s Touch and See
Room, they stroked a wolfs pelt or
touched the points on a rack of antlers.
These exhibits expressed the
spirit and philosophy of Walt
Breckenridge.
But this sophisticated level of environmental
education is a relatively
recent phenomenon. During Breckenridges
school years, little or nothing
was taught about natural history.
"When I was a boy," he recalled,
"no teacher ever mentioned anything
that was out-of-doors. Reading, writing,
and arithmetic were all they
thought about. I got acquainted with
outdoor things by playing hooky from
school and going down to play along
the creek."
At the University of Iowa, Breckenridge
studied zoology. Graduating
in 1926, he came to UM as a preparator
and taxidermist.
The museum, then housed in the
Zoology Building, was headed by the
well-known ornithologist T. S. Roberts.
Roberts had left a successful
medical career 10 years earlier to
pursue his interest in natural history
— compiling ornithological observations,
experimenting with bird photographs,
and directing the construc-
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tion of dioramas. Breckenridge was
just the person Roberts needed.
Grass Machine. The young preparator's
first project was the Pipestone
Prairie diorama. The prairie
scene required more than 100,000
blades of artificial grass. The same
exhibit contained a buffalo-berry bush
for which 9,000 leaves were cut with
stencils and assembled by hand. Ordinarily,
plants for dioramas were
carefully hand-sculpted from colored
waxes and molds.
Faced with this daunting task,
Breckenridge set about devising a new
method of creating a prairie. He built
a machine operated by a foot pedal
which produced 2,500 blades of grass
in a day. Preparators mounted each
blade in a papier-mache base among
dead grass to produce the lifelike
plants in the prairie exhibit.
Breckenridge then constructed a
series of portable dioramas, one of the
museum's earliest efforts to extend
education beyond the walls of the
University. The cases, two feet square
and 10 inches deep, included scenes
of birds and other animals in small
slices of natural habitat.
These portable dioramas circulated
among schools — teachers used
them in natural history lessons. In
1927, 15 schools participated in the
program; by the next year the number
had doubled. Eventually more
than 150 cases were built. Many are
still used today.
When the museum's new home, the
Bell Museum, was completed in 1940,
Walter J. Breckenridge in workshop at Bell Museum, Minneapolis,
with animals prepared for exhibit — cormorants on rocks in 1942
(top, right), and wolves in 1941 (bottom, right).