Haffenreffer Museum

The Haffenreffer Museum of the American Indian was acquired in December 1955 as part of the property in Bristol, which was given to the University by the Haffenreffer family. In 1917, when Rudolph F. Haffenreffer II purchased the Bristol estate called Mount Hope, where King Philip lived and died, he found arrowheads and other Indian artifacts on his land and began to collect them. He then began to acquire more of these objects from other places, and in 1928 built a museum to house his outstanding collection of Indian objects from North, Central, and South America. After Haffenreffer’s death in 1954, his widow and sons decided to give the 500-acre estate with the museum to Brown. J. Louis Giddings, an authority on early man in North America, was hired as associate professor of anthropology and director of the museum. The museum had been called the Haffenreffer Museum of the American Indian. After its collections were expanded by Giddings to include material from Africa, the Pacific, and the Arctic, the name was changed to the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. When Giddings died in 1964, his widow, Ruth Warner Giddings, stayed on as administrator of the museum. In 1968 Alex F. Ricciardelli, an authority on the North American Indian and a former student of Giddings, was appointed curator. Mrs. Giddings turned her attention to an educational program for school children who visited the museum. Anthropology professor Jane Dwyer was director of the museum from 1971 until her death in 1982. For the next six years the museum was under the direction of the chairman of the Department of Anthropology and the associate director of the museum, Barbara Kirk Hail ’52. Shepard Krech III has been director since 1988. The world-wide collections of the museum contain over 12,000 ethnographic and 100,000 archaeological artifacts.