Philadelphia Museum to sell thousands of donated gems, minerals

PHILADELPHIA - Philadelphia's natural-history museum is abandoning the rocks-and-minerals business.

Trustees of the cash-strapped Academy of Natural Sciences voted last week to sell more than 15,000 minerals and gems that hadn't been cleaned or displayed for decades. Workers then began boxing up specimens for an unnamed private dealer, acting academy president Ian Davison said.

"To me, it's a very sad day when this kind of thing happens," said Stephen G. Wells, president of the Geological Society of America, which in an ironic coincidence is meeting through Wednesday in Philadelphia.

Orphans Court Judge Joseph D. O'Keefe cleared the move this month with the consent of the state Attorney General's Office. The sale price was not disclosed, but the items form the bulk of a collection with an estimated value of several million dollars.

The academy must return to court for permission to sell its remaining 7,000-odd pieces - including silver, gold, diamonds and everyday quartz - because William S. Vaux, who donated them 123 years ago, requested that they never be sold.

The items represent a bit of old Philadelphia, when gentlemen amateurs went off collecting in exotic locales and sometimes bestowed their finds on public institutions. These legacies can present a quandary when museums change their missions and face dwindling resources.

No one disputes that the academy, having suffered through staff cuts and a string of deficits, can use the money. The proceeds will go to its endowment to support its library. Given that some of the minerals will end up with other museums, some say they are better off being sold and seen than locked up at the red-brick facility on Logan Circle.

Yet the move has drawn fire inside and out of the world-renowned, 194-year-old institution, home to 17 million fossil, plant and animal specimens.

Two employees who oppose the sale said Davison had told the staff not to talk to reporters.

Davison said he had done that because most staffers did not know all the facts and had never seen the collection, which has been shut in a vault for most of the last half-century. Some specimens are crumbling and will have to be thrown out, he said.

"Staff who are unhappy about something, complaining about something, and potentially disseminating inaccurate information are not going to help an institution like the academy," Davison said.

Opponents outside the museum include Trina Vaux, great-great-niece of the man who donated the items that still require approval before a sale.

"I think the entire collection represents a really important part of Philadelphia's heritage," said Vaux, who lives in Bryn Mawr, Pa., a Philadelphia suburb. "This is really the cradle of American mineralogy."

Maria Luisa Crawford, a research professor of geology at Bryn Mawr College, said it might be reasonable for the academy to sell the collection because it had no one on staff to study and care for it. According to a court petition filed by academy attorneys, there has been no mineral lab or curator since the 1950s, except when a grant was used to hire one from 1976 to 1981.

The problem, Crawford said, is that the collection might be broken up.

"Many of the pieces may be bought by individual collections and therefore disappear" from public view, she said.

Davison said the academy had tried to find another museum to buy the entire collection. That effort began five years ago when the board opted not to maintain a collection not tied to active research.

The buyer of the non-Vaux pieces represents a consortium of "private parties," Davison said, but has agreed to offer selections of local minerals to museums in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

The agreement of sale also requires that the small number of samples of special scientific significance be given to another research institution, he said. There are perhaps a dozen of these so-called "type" specimens, used as the standard by which other samples can be identified.

Some say the proceedings have been handled badly. John S. White, a former curator of minerals and gems at the Smithsonian Institution, accuses the academy of allowing a conflict of interest.

An agent who tried to sell the collection was also involved in appraising it, White wrote in a letter to former academy president D. James Baker.

Davison said that agent had not been involved in the eventual sale, and there was no conflict.

A Philadelphia-area expert on nonprofits said the academy still should have considered hiring someone else.

"To me, arm's length is arm's length in this business," said Nancy Burd, vice president for grant-making at the nonprofit Philadelphia Foundation. "Just try to stay as clean as possible."

In Orphans' Court, O'Keefe approved the academy's determination that there were no restrictions on the non-Vaux items.

And while an 1883 agreement with the family directs that the Vaux items never be sold or broken up, judges sometimes allow bequests to be altered, said Virginia Sikes, a Philadelphia lawyer.

There is a public interest in encouraging people to make museum donations, but there can also be a public interest in allowing changes in wills when circumstances dictate it, she said:

"Maybe courts are more willing when many, many years have lapsed."

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(Staff writer Sandy Bauers contributed to this article.)

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(c) 2006, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Mclatchy-Tribune News Service.