The Penn State Earth and Mineral Sciences Museum & Art Gallery is home to a vast collection of earth materials, scientific instruments, and industrial artwork that highlights the history of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences and Pennsylvania’s extractive industries.
The museum, located in the Deike Building, includes major collections of rocks, fossils, fluorescent minerals, mining equipment, cartographic tools, paintings, and sculptures. Exhibits include school-spirited blue and white minerals, historic mining lamps, a geologic relief map of Pennsylvania, and the personal laboratory equipment of Evan Pugh, Penn State’s first president.
The collections that form the basis of the museum were established in 1859 when the Pennsylvania legislature donated a quarter of the state’s mineralogical and geological collection to Penn State, then the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. The collection had been assembled by Henry Darwin Parker during the first and second Pennsylvania Geological Surveys that mapped the geological make-up of the region, conducted from 1836-1858 and 1874-1895.
Further donations were made as aids to the study of geology, and later mining engineering, including a collection of Berks County minerals donated by Dr. D. Heber Plank, a Penn State graduate, in 1894; raw and refined graphite donated by the Joseph Dixon Crucible Company, inventors of the Dixon Ticonderoga graphite pencil, in 1910; and mining and quarrying explosive powders donated by the E.L. DuPont Nemours Powder company in 1912.
These early collections were housed in museum space in Old Main but were transferred to a new Mining Building in 1893, with the establishment of a mining engineering department and expanded instruction in geology and metallurgy. A School of Mines was created in 1896, but funding for the program made for a precarious existence and additional programs became scattered among the engineering and natural science schools until the arrival of Edward Steidle in 1928. He led the founding of the School of Mineral Industries, now the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
A new Mineral Industries Building opened in 1930 and the museum was moved from the Old Mining Building to the rotunda and main hallways of the new building, vastly expanding the displays, and opening many of the collections to public view for the first time, which made it an immediate attraction for campus visitors.
Steidle also established the museum’s extensive art collection. He believed the artwork was another way to demonstrate to students the various industrial processes and the role of mineral industries in Pennsylvania. The initial piece of art in the collection was donated by American painter John Willard Raught in 1918. Titled Black Diamond Breaker, it depicts a coal processing plant in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region.
The museum also exhibits student-curated work. An art exhibit of the earth’s mantle was created by a Millennium and Schreyer Honors scholar. A student intern developed an exhibit on historical mining lamp equipment. Another student intern designed an exhibit focusing on gas detection practices in mining.
After seventy-five years in the Steidle Building, the museum and gallery were relocated in 2004, to its current location, the Deike Building, also home to the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. In April 2024, the museum unveiled renovated space with a brighter, more welcoming environment.
Julia Kushner
Sources:
Earth & Mineral Sciences Museum and Art Gallery, https://museum.ems.psu.edu (Accessed January 17, 2025).
Miller, E. Willard. The College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Penn State. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1992.
Sicree, Andrew. “Mining Art at Penn State University.” Rocks & Minerals, Vol. 71, No. 6, 1996. “EMS Museum and Art Gallery hosting opening to unveil renovated space,” Penn State News, April 16, 2924
First Published: January 31, 2025