Thomas A. Greene
Thomas Arnold Greene (1827 – 1894) was a druggist from Rhode Island who, in 1848, moved west to open a pharmacy in Milwaukee, WI. Thomas Greene was a prolific naturalist and avocational geologist throughout his life, amassing a vast collection of approximately 65,000 fossils and minerals—most of which he collected, bought, or traded in the 1880’s and 1890’s. His fossil collections were extensive and consisted primarily of invertebrates—particularly brachiopods—from the Silurian Niagara Formation derived from quarries in the vicinity of Milwaukee. He also collected fossils from sparse outcrops of the Devonian Hamilton Formation, including both invertebrates and placoderm fish. Thomas Greene worked closely with quarry workers and contemporary geologists to catalog and describe this scientifically valuable collection. He purchased approximately 5000 specimens from fellow geologist Fisk Holbrook Day which he collected from the nearby Schoonmaker Reef, a site discovered by Dr. Day and Increase Lapham and in 1844. This fossil reef—recognized and described as such by James Hall in 1862—was the first in situ fossil reef described anywhere in the world. The Thomas A. Greene Geological Museum represents the most proximate repository of fossils from this federally protected locality. Thomas Greene also curated an extensive mineralogical collection containing many rare and exotic forms from mines and quarries across the globe. These include unusual specimens of ores like copper, cobalt, and nickel, beautiful examples of Japanese stibnite, exceptional red amethysts from Thunder Bay along Lake Superior, and many, many more. The collection is also home to half of the Washington County meteorite—the largest meteorite to ever strike Wisconsin.
Thomas Greene died in 1894, and in 1911 his descendants, H. A. J. Upham and Howard Greene, donated the collection to the Milwaukee-Downer College—a private women’s institute that predated UWM. In 1913, the Thomas A. Greene Memorial Museum building was constructed on campus to house and display the collection. Milwaukee-Downer College would be purchased by the state of Wisconsin in 1964 and transformed into UWM. Due to its historical and scientific value, the Museum was deemed a National Historic Landmark in 1993. However, the collection was later moved out of the Memorial building and into Lapham Hall—named in honor of Increase Lapham and present home to UWM’s Department of Geosciences. The bulk of the collection in stored in in the basement of the building, with a small exhibit space on the first floor (Lapham 168) colloquially referred to as the ‘Greene Gallery.’ These spaces represent the collection’s current home.