Student researchers trace the origins of Worcester’s renowned EcoTarium
It wasn’t the kind of research assignment anyone expected would lead to a public lecture or to newfound genealogical records, but when three Clark students were handed brittle newspaper clippings in their Writing History class, that’s exactly where things ended up.
To mark its 200th anniversary, the EcoTarium, a Worcester museum of science and nature, partnered with Clark’s History Department to help recover and reframe its own past. For Weslee Tyler ’27, Casey Campellone ’27, and Jenny Marks ’27, what began as a modest classroom project quickly became an opportunity to uncover stories that history had overlooked and to add their own voices to the telling.
Marchand’s initial assignment was simple: Write a short academic paper and create a few mock social media posts. But when EcoTarium staff reviewed the work, they were so impressed that they invited the three students to present their findings as part of the Lyceum series honoring the museum’s origins. The student researchers delivered their presentations in February to a rapt audience at the Worcester Public Library.
Throughout the decades, what is now known as the EcoTarium bore several different names (it was founded in 1825 as the Worcester Lyceum of Natural History), and its archives were scattered.
The starting point for the student research team was a single scrapbook housed in the American Antiquarian Society, filled with old clippings from the Worcester Natural History Society, another of the EcoTarium’s previous names. History Professor Melinda Marchand scanned and uploaded pages from the scrapbook, assigning each student five documents and asking them to build a narrative from what little they had.
“It was like detective work,” says Campellone, a history major whose documents described “field meetings” — 19th-century public science gatherings where the head of the Society and community members collected specimens and discussed their findings. “No one’s written about these. You can’t Google your way through this kind of research.”
The materials Marks was given mentioned M. L. Jenks, a woman involved in both entomology, the study of insects, and ornithology, the study of birds. Despite her contributions to fields that were rare for women at the time, there was almost nothing else on Jenks to be found.
“Most women involved in natural science back then were doing things like sketching bodies and flowers from home,” says Marks, who majors in history and women’s and gender studies. “But she was presenting on invertebrates. That really stood out.”
The historical record was thin. Marks could not find a full name or birth date for Jenks, and no trail beyond the clippings. Marks was frustrated and nearly convinced she wouldn’t be able to share much about her research subject. “I was thinking, how am I going to talk about someone I can’t even identify?”
She turned to Ancestry.com to help bridge the gaps left by the scraps, piecing together enough context to build a presentation. But the story didn’t end there. After her talk at the Worcester Public Library, a retired historian who had attended the event emailed Marchand to say he was intrigued and had taken it upon himself to dig deeper. “He found out who she was: Mary Louise Jenks,” Marks recalls. “He even passed along additional research to me.”
Marks chuckles at the idea of being handed a research baton she didn’t anticipate carrying, but says it was meaningful to know her work had sparked someone else’s curiosity. “That’s the kind of ripple effect you don’t think about when you’re writing a three-page paper,” she notes.
Tyler, also a history major, researched Helen Knowlton, a 19th-century painter, writer, and art instructor. Knowlton was known in Worcester, but nowhere in her public biographies or online presence was there any mention of her work in natural history. Tyler came across a series of clippings that revealed Knowlton’s active involvement with the Worcester Natural History Society, including her service as secretary. “There was nothing linking her to the Society until we saw these clippings,” Tyler says. “It had been missing from her story.”
The discovery didn’t go unnoticed. The Needham Historical Society, which hosts an annual Helen Knowlton Day and preserves her paintings, had been unaware Knowlton was involved in natural science previous to learning about this project.
Presenting at the Worcester Public Library was a full-circle moment for Campellone. “My research was literally about field lectures,” he says, “and then I was giving one!”
Campellone is still working with the EcoTarium, where he’s helping organize historical archives.
Marks recalled strangers coming up to her after the library presentation to say how moved they were, with some even crediting her with rekindling their love for history. “That stuck with me,” she says. “It reminded me why this matters. … It wasn’t just about finding facts. It was about giving someone their name back.”
Tyler’s research added a missing chapter to Helen Knowlton’s biography and sparked new opportunities in public history. She’s currently working with the Worcester NAACP on an oral history project and will intern at the Plimoth Patuxet Museums this summer in an administrative role.
“You’re never going to have a complete record,” says Tyler. “But the gaps are part of the work. If you can’t fill them in, you investigate around them.”
History is sometimes regarded as static pages in an old textbook, but the three Clark students hope this project offers a different view — one where history is messy, partial, and sometimes waiting in a scrapbook no one’s looked at in decades.
“You think you need all the answers to start telling the story,” says Campellone. “But sometimes, starting the story is how you find the answers.”
