Thomas A. Greene Geological Collection

The 19th-century Greene Geological Collection consists of over 56,000 fossils, mostly from the Silurian and Devonian rocks of Wisconsin and Illinois, along with 11,000 minerals from North America, Europe, and Japan. Assembled during the 1860s-1890s by Milwaukee businessman Thomas Arnold Greene, it is historically unique in its focus, documentation, and preservation. Many of its fossils were collected from now inaccessible localities previously related to the 1862 discovery of Paleozoic reefs (Mikulic, 1983), and it represents one of the largest collections of Silurian reef fossils in the world (Mikulic and Kluessendorf, 2024). James Hall (1889) described the exceptional importance of Greene’s collection compared to other contemporary private collections. Most fossils are accompanied by Greene’s original labels, some with notes by prominent paleontologists, while various minerals retain commercial dealer labels. The university archives house Greene’s extensive correspondence with prominent scientists, collectors, quarrymen, commercial dealers, and scientific organizations, along with other documents related to the development, character, and use of the collection. In combination, these specimens, labels, and correspondence demonstrate how 19th-century collectors assembled their collections, and the important role they had in contemporary research. Housed in Lapham Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the collection is used in educational and research programs.