Presidents' hair is unlocked
PHILADELPHIA — It might be the strangest way to spend Presidents Day.
For the first time, the Academy of Natural Sciences will display a scrapbook that includes the hair from the first 12 U.S. presidents. It will be on view from Saturday to Monday.
The presidential "hair album" was assembled by Peter Arvell Browne, a Philadelphia attorney and scholar of the natural sciences who collected thousands of samples of animal fur and human hair in the 1840s and 1850s and organized them in a dozen leather-bound volumes.
Browne (1762-1860) wrote to living presidents and to the families of those who had died. His letters and their responses are included in the book, along with the strands of hair, tied together with a thin blue ribbon.
Because of the scrapbook's age and delicate contents, it will be displayed under glass and opened to the page featuring the brown-and-gray locks of George Washington. Photographs will be shown of the other presidents' hair, from John Adams to Zachary Taylor, each affixed to its own page framed by a Victorian filigree-design border.
The hair varies in length, depending on the style at the time. Thomas Jefferson's hair was reddish with gray when he died and James Monroe had dark curls.
In his first letter to Brown, Andrew Jackson's son apologized that he could not immediately send a lock from the seventh president, noting that his father recently had a "close cut" that would take a fortnight to grow out.
"There's something very human and touching about it," longtime academy curator Robert Peck said of the collection. "It gives you a sense of who they were as people."
Browne also acquired the hair of Napoleon Bonaparte, Daniel Webster, many Pennsylvania governors, signers of the Declaration of Independence and other political figures.
His original focus was categorizing different wool from around the world to determine the best uses for each. When he saw that wool from different sheep breeds looked different under a microscope, he decided to broaden his scope.
Browne enlisted expeditioners to collect the hair samples of camels, horses and other animals they encountered in their travels. In the 1840s, he expanded his collection to human hair: first from the Pacific islands and eventually from American notables and Indian tribal chiefs.
Though classifying people by hair type may seem offensive or distasteful by modern sensibilities, Browne's attempts to ascertain whether different races and ethnicities shared biological similarities was an accepted scientific practice in his time.
Browne wrote directly to the living presidents and vice presidents and to family members of those who had died. He and his burgeoning collection were already known in learned circles, so the respondents eagerly complied.
It wasn't an odd request at the time, as saving a loved one's locks in a family "hair album" was popular in the 19th century.
"He was trying — just as phrenologists were trying to figure out from bumps in the head — whether the hair would reveal anything about intelligence or leadership ability or any character trait," Peck said.
Each lock is accompanied by correspondence backing up its history.
Though Browne's comparative surveys did not turn out to be useful for distinguishing people, they could be worthwhile future sources of nutritional, environmental and genetic information through DNA testing, Peck said.
"A hundred years from now it may shed light on how humans moved around the world, who populated which parts of the world," he said.
