Gathering Lotuses

Brother Simeon Schwemberger was an amateur photographer at St. Michael's Mission School. Stewart Culin, the Museum's first curator of ethnology, acquired more than ninety of Schwemberger's photographs and used them to illustrate his expedition reports.

After Culin's death in 1929, the Museum's Trustees acquired his personal library and papers, a purchase noted in the Museum's Annual Report as "The important event of the year." Culin was a bibliophile whose personal library numbered close to seven thousand books, periodicals, and pamphlets with texts in several languages, predominantly on the art and ethnology of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Culin's research files and expedition reports are an important resource on the history of the objects he collected and on Native American, Asian, and Eastern European cultures.