One hundred years ago, on August 12, 1926, an accidental discovery paved the way for a Cleveland Museum of Natural History symbol: that of the Johnstown Mastodon.
The find drew thousands of visitors from across the country, all people who gathered to witness an incredible example of Ohio's natural history. And one year after its discovery, in 1927, the mastodon was put on exhibit at the Museum, where it became one of our earliest major displays. For decades, this mastodon was even featured in the Museum's logo. That same mastodon is now on display in the Museum's Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears Dynamic Earth Wing.
In celebration of this moment, we're re-publishing the following articles from the Museum's archives. Downing N. Mann's piece, "The Johnstown Mastodon," details how the discovery captured the imagination of onlookers near and far. And "The Excavation Scene" by Emma Lynn Hanna shares the writer's firsthand account from the scene where the mastodon was discovered.
We hope you enjoy this look back into both Ohio's natural history and Museum history—and be sure to stop by the Dynamic Earth Wing to visit the mastodon, where new exhibit content shares even more details from this historic discovery.
THE JOHNSTOWN MASTODON
by Downing M. Mann
Originally published by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Explorer Magazine, Sept-Oct 1962
The Cleveland Museum of Natural History acquired its symbol and largest mammalian fossil, the Johnstown mastodon, because two hogs drowned in a watering trough.
The mastodon was discovered in a quiet, marshy pasture in Licking County. It had lain undisturbed for eight thousand years. But in the next year and a half, before it took its important place in the Museum's collections, it was at first a stellar attraction, then a dismal failure, in the gaudy world of carnivals.
On Discovery Day, Thursday, August 12, 1926, Friend Butt, owner of a farm near Johnstown, Ohio, found the dead hogs. Mr. Butt summoned his tenant, Jim Bailey, and his own twelve-year-old nephew, Charles Lake, to help him dispose of the mortal remains of a considerable financial loss. As a burial site, they selected a low spot, not too far from the barn.
Spading in, they struck something hard, so they moved farther on and buried the hogs. It is the Museum's good fortune that Mr. Butt and Mr. Bailey and young Lake, tired, hot, and angry as they must have been, were still curious to know what their spades had struck.
They returned to the first burial site and began to dig again. When they found part of a large tusk, they abandoned their spades and dug by hand until they had uncovered the top of a huge head with great openings for eyes and nose.
Excavation site on the Friend Butt farm near Johnstown, Ohio, after removal of the mastodon skeleton.
Mr. Butt immediately called The Ohio State University. Next day, Friday, the Columbus Dispatch headlined the news that a mastodon fossil had been found in Licking County.
Some Dispatch readers went immediately to see the exciting discovery. Among them were Mr. John Woodruff of Utica and his daughter, Emma Lynn.
Emma Lynn Woodruff is now Mrs. William E. Hanna, manager of the Museum's Collectors' Shop. She was one of the few privileged to watch the excavation of the ancient beast in quiet seriousness. After that, began the most hectic two months in Johnstown's history.
On Saturday, August 14, Mr. Butt began to charge a ten-cent parking fee. On Sunday, D-day plus three, he raised it to a quarter. License plates from seven states were noted at the site, and Mr. Butt cleared a thousand dollars. Small wonder he declined the thousand-dollar offer for the fossil made that day by the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society.
Sunday also, the Associated Press reported the discovery of "new bones, believed to be those of a giant reptile ... The head of the second beast," the story continued, "has not yet been unearthed, but bones from the shoulders, vertebrae, and legs, when reassembled, indicate an animal like a kangaroo, with short front legs adapted for prehension, a characteristic of brontosaurus."
Local imagination, with more enthusiasm than regard for the geologic timetable, promptly decided that a dinosaur and a mastodon had slain one another in furious combat.
On Monday, four days after the find, Professor J. Ernest Carman of the geology department of The Ohio State University and Dr. H. R. Goodwin, registrar of the Ohio State Archaeological Museum, visited the excavation and declared the bones were those of a mastodon. This seems to have done little to dampen the ardor of supporters of the giant-lizard, prehistoric-elephant death duel. For some weeks they remained confident that new discoveries would prove their theory.
The mastodon's head and tusks come to light as digging progresses. Water was a continual nuisance to the workers.
Now came a note of skepticism that the bones were at all ancient. Attorney A. A. George of Zanesville suggested that they were only the remains of "Old Hannibal," an elephant that had been a stellar attraction at a circus in Zanesville fifty years before. Old Hannibal had died on the trek to the circus's next stand, and was buried close to where he fell in Licking County.
The press did not record the visit of Mr. Max Hirschberg that Monday, but a week later, D-day plus eleven, H. T. Mackender of the Cleveland Plain Dealer got the story, which he reported at length in the Tuesday morning, August 24, front page.
The digging continued into October. The crowds diminished gradually, and even the most romantically optimistic came to realize that the bones of the "giant lizard" were actually a part of the mastodon. After two months, an area 20 feet long, by 20 feet wide, had been excavated to a depth of seven feet. The skeleton was found to be complete except for one foot and some vertebrae from the tail.
From the time of its discovery, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History had coveted the Johnstown Mastodon for its collections. However, no funds were available to buy it. Undoubtedly, this is why a letter dated November 22, 1926, from Mr. Hirschberg to Museum Director Paul Rea, went so long unanswered. Mr. Hirschberg, writing on the elaborate letterhead of "Prehistoric Exploration Association Co., Inc.," inquired if the Museum would like to buy the fossil.
About a week before Christmas, Mr. Edgar Bowerfind, assistant to Mr. Rea, received a telephone call. The caller, Mr. M. F. Bramley, president of Cleveland Trinidad Paving Company, wondered if the Museum were interested in acquiring the mastodon. Sadly Mr. Bowerfind began to explain the Museum's financial plight. Mr. Bramley interrupted—he would like to buy the mastodon for the Museum.
Mr. Bramley was prepared to give the Museum as much as ten thousand dollars to purchase, ship, mount, and prepare the mastodon for exhibition. In return, he asked the Museum to permit him to exhibit the fossil for the following two summers at Luna Park, a Cleveland amusement park in which he had a considerable interest. The expenses of installing, protecting, insuring, and taking down the beast would be borne by Luna Park in addition to Mr. Bramley's gift.
The long overdue reply to the Prehistoric Exploration Association Co., Inc. was in the mail in a matter of hours. Dr. J. E. Hyde, curator of geology, informed Mr. Hirschberg on December 20 that he would be in Johnstown on the 23rd. A hastily drawn document in the Museum archives, dated the 23rd, witnesses that the Museum, for the sum of $25.00, had obtained an option to purchase the fossil on or before January 1, 1927.
With great speed after Christmas, contracts were drawn up between Mr. Bramley and the Museum, between the Museum and the mastodon's owners. Early on December 27, Mr. Bowerfind prepared to take the papers to Mr. Bramley for signature and a check. Mr. Bramley was not in his office, nor was he at home. Later that day, it was learned that the Museum's generous benefactor was hospitalized—a very sick man. Next day, with misgivings, but zealous determination, Director Rea and Mr. Bowerfind visited Mr. Bramley's bedside where the documents were signed. Mr. Rea's letter of thanks includes an apology for invading the hospital room.
The option was exercised on December 30. The Museum had acquired its first great fossil for the sum of $5300.
Mr. Peter Bungart, Museum preparator, was sent to Johnstown immediately after New Year's to supervise packing the bones for shipment to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. There, with the helpful guidance of the staff, he began the painstaking task of reassembling the great beast. It was returned to Cleveland in nine large crates on March 18. There still remained considerable work before the opening of Luna Park in mid-May.
Mr. Bungart assembling shattered pieces of one of the tusks.
Despite intensive publicity, the crowds that flocked to Johnstown were not duplicated at the amusement park. At the end of July, Colonel Clarence Bleum, the park manager, wrote sadly to Director Rea that the mastodon was not attracting enough customers to pay the wages of its guards or ticket taker. From a monetary viewpoint, it was "a most decided deficit." Colonel Bleum hoped the Museum would assist by paying a $283 insurance premium. The Museum Trustees agreed.
During the remainder of the park's 1927 season, the great mastodon show continued to operate at a loss. On February 2, 1928, Colonel Bleum wrote a final letter, asking the Museum to take the fossil back and, if possible, pay for doing it. Once again the Trustees consented.
Today the Johnstown mastodon is one of the most impressive exhibits in the Kirtland Hall of Nature. It is recognized by paleontologists, the world over, as one of the best specimens of the ancient beast ever to be recovered.
When the mastodon was acquired by the Museum, the late Dr. T. Wingate Todd, Henry Willson Payne Professor of Anatomy at Western Reserve University, made a detailed study of the fossil. That report, with Mrs. Hanna's eye-witness account of the excavation, follows to complete the story of the great mastodon accession.
THE EXCAVATION SCENE
by Emma Lynn Hanna
Originally published by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Explorer Magazine, Sept-Oct 1962
In August 1926, the Columbus Dispatch carried the headlines that a mastodon had been found near the village of Johnstown, Ohio. At this time I was living at Utica, about an hour's drive from the scene of the discovery.
We did not wait, but that afternoon my father and I drove over to see the discovery. To me it was more wonderful and awesome when I first beheld it than it has ever been since. Only a few of us stood on a mound of freshly upturned earth and looked down on the huge head. There was nothing said as we stood there—each of us a little awe-stricken, quietly forming his own conception of how an animal with such a massive skull must have appeared as he stalked through the great prehistoric forests of Ohio. Until yesterday he had been lying here undisturbed for 8,000 years.
A farmer had gone out in the early morning to bury a pig. He had dug down three or four feet when his spade struck the tusk of the mastodon. The farmer thought he had struck a decaying log, for old ivory is dark brown and not unlike wood in appearance. Digging a little farther, he struck the skull and knew he had found something unusual. The skull was obviously far larger than any farm animal's. So he summoned The Ohio State University. Thereafter, the excavating was done under the direction of experienced paleontologists.
The paleontologists had not yet arrived when I first saw the mastodon. The huge head was thrown up and backward, as if this tremendous animal were trying in his last throes to free himself from the bog which became his tomb.
We went again a few days later to see the progress of the excavation. The neighboring farmers had gathered to see the fossil and were standing around in groups, eager to talk about this strange creature that had suddenly become a reality. Now, the right shoulder and a few ribs were exposed. The head still looked very large and more massive from our vantage point above it than it does when mounted. There was a great deal of careful work to be done, and we did not return for a few weeks.
Crowds gather at the excavation site.
By this time the mastodon had been widely publicized, the farm had taken on the air of a county fair. A railing had been built around the excavation to keep back the crowds. Parking space was twenty-five cents per car. Even hot dogs had made their appearance.
The mastodon itself was just beginning to reveal its story. We could now look down upon the backbone; the pelvis with the nick had been discovered. Scientists had been there, and the story was now familiar that this strange animal had been injured sometime before its death. Its injury had healed because the edges of the broken pelvis were rounded, the broken ribs had mended, and this young bull mastodon had hobbled down when he had come to his regular watering place to drink. Keener imaginations saw from the nick in the pelvis bone that he had been in a fight with another mastodon and had been gored by his opponent. He may have been in a weakened condition and unable to free himself from the death grip of the bog. I could picture him in despair, struggling vainly to keep above the water. I could even visualize his upturned head, and the power still evident in the huge shoulders after 8,000 years.
My next trip, and my last to Johnstown, in late September, was disappointing. The mastodon had been removed to temporary quarters. A shelter had been hastily constructed to protect the massed bones as well as the Sunday spectators who were still coming to see it. My dismay was natural, for the mastodon looked so entirely out of place waiting to be shipped. However, the man who had brought him had made good on his investment, and with cold weather coming on gladly sold him.
It was not much more than a year after that I came to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, and here was my old friend. I still see in him the power and glory of ages long past.
The Johnstown Mastodon on display in the Museum in the 1960s.
