Windows on Pennsylvania’s Natural Places: Restoring Mammal Hall at The State Museum

The white-tailed deer diorama in Mammal Hall is full of Pennsylvania state symbols, starting with the white-tailed deer itself, which is the state animal. Also included are the state flower, mountain laurel, to the immediate left of the deer; the state bird, ruffed grouse, on the far lower right; and the state tree, eastern hemlock, behind the deer.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

At The State Museum of Pennsylvania, the beavers are busier than ever repairing their dam. The mountain lion gazes more intently at its prey, advancing stealthily upon a slanted tree trunk. And you might imagine you feel a chill as you approach the freshly fallen snow in the bison’s nighttime scene. If you haven’t visited the museum’s third-floor Mammal Hall recently, you’ll now notice that the animals seem more alive. The changes are subtle, but thanks to a wholesale restoration completed in 2018, these dioramas look more uncannily real than ever.

The State Museum in Harrisburg’s Capitol Complex opened in 1965 with exhibits in the first-floor gallery only. But the building’s architects had planned for Mammal Hall from the start; they included the 13 alcoves that enclose the dioramas in their design. For three years after the building was completed, museum curators, artists, preparators and others worked at a furious pace to create the dioramas. The result: a sequence of scenes that rival the best natural history dioramas in any museum. Each one represents a moment frozen in time — a close-up view of a Pennsylvania mammal in a specific place, season and time of day.

Mammal Hall was part of the original plan for the new State Museum of Pennsylvania building, as shown on this sketch dated March 15, 1962. The museum opened to the public in 1965, with the completed Mammal Hall following in 1968.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

When Mammal Hall opened in 1968, it was the second gallery installed at the museum. Ever since then, it has arguably been the most popular attraction — the first stop for many who visit, especially the 40,000 schoolchildren who come to the museum each year. But after half a century, despite a couple of cleanings, the dioramas had become dusty. The lighting was outdated, and the animals’ fur had faded under its ultraviolet rays. Plant specimens dried out. Snow in the winter scenes — originally Epsom salt — had degraded. And the simple identification key that accompanied each diorama failed to answer many visitors’ questions.

“Painstaking effort went into creating these dioramas,” says museum director Beth Hager. “They are real gems, and they represent Pennsylvania. We knew they were due for a cleaning. But they are so beloved and of such high quality, we mounted the effort to do more — to fully restore them.”

“Pennsylvanians love nature,” adds Dr. Walter Meshaka Jr., the museum’s senior curator of zoology and botany. “And people want to look at animals in the context that dioramas provide.”

Planning for the restoration of Mammal Hall gained momentum when State Museum staff learned how another museum had carried out a similar project. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City had recently completed a restoration of its iconic Hall of North American Mammals. The artists, taxidermists and other museum specialists who had worked on that project developed and tested new techniques for coloring bleached-out fur and restoring vitality to dusty, withered plant specimens and deteriorating models.

What’s more, several members of this team — who ultimately came to Harrisburg to restore Mammal Hall alongside State Museum staff — were experts in the materials and techniques historically used in making dioramas. They approached the dioramas as works of art, understanding the need to respect their integrity while enhancing their appeal and ensuring that they remain in good condition for decades into the future.

Planning of Mammal Hall began with sketches of the animals, which biologists then reviewed for accuracy.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

The animal specimens were mounted in preparation for installation while the diorama scenes were being created.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

The Original Dioramas

Long before video, or even color nature films, museums began displaying their taxidermy specimens in scenes evoking each animal’s natural habitat. It was a way for visitors to get an up-close view of the animals, behaving as they would in the wild. The setting also could be chosen to transport — and teach — museum audiences about places they might visit. Many of the mammal dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History portray national parks, which were relatively new when those dioramas were made between the 1930s and 1950s.

At The State Museum, curators planned the 13 dioramas in Mammal Hall to show visitors real places across Pennsylvania. Animals native to the commonwealth would include familiar ones like the groundhog and the rarely seen bobcat, as well as the wolf and the mountain lion, which were hunted out of Pennsylvania a century earlier. The scenes would show how animals go about their daily business — foraging for food, seeking prey, building homes, caring for young, and establishing territory. The curators also planned for the dioramas to represent all seasons of the year and various times of day and weather conditions.

Much of this discussion took place in the museum. But the creators of the dioramas also put on their hiking boots and went out into the field to choose the actual diorama sites, sketch and photograph them, and collect samples of plants and rocks. They took detailed notes about birds and other animals they saw, the weather, the forest and plant communities, and streams and ponds.

Back at the museum, artists and preparators worked from field notes to create small models of many of the dioramas. Sculpting in clay, they positioned the animals and mapped out the drama in each scene. They painted miniature backgrounds, experimenting with colors and themes and solving the problem of how to merge background and foreground.

John Kucera was the prime contractor responsible for the artistic development of Mammal Hall. He and a staff of 12 completed the project in three years.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania

At the same time, curators set about collecting the animals to display. None were hunted—the Pennsylvania Game Commission donated many that had been killed on roads or illegally shot or trapped. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service provided the bison. Other specimens were already in the museum’s collections; an earlier “mammal room” in The State Museum’s previous location (in what is now the Speaker Matthew J. Ryan Legislative Office Building, adjacent to the State Capitol) had featured taxidermy.

When construction began, preparators built a sturdy wood frame out of two-by-fours and other lumber inside each diorama alcove. Then they laid plaster over the frame to create a base that could hold heavy rocks, if needed; some of the rocks are skillfully crafted lightweight models. After that came the plants. For some dioramas, the preparators hauled in dead trees from the field sites and found ways to prevent them from cracking.

But the lush greenery of the spring and summer dioramas was another matter. The museum purchased plastic models when appropriate ones could be found; however, much vegetation was fashioned in-house. To copy the plants at each diorama site, workers made plaster molds of the leaves collected there. Then they pressed thin sheets of acetate into the molds, trimmed them, and assembled the leaves on wire stems. It took four museum staff members three years to create thousands of flowers, leaves, stems and tree branches.

Essential to setting the mood of each diorama was the background mural. Two artists created these large-scale works, John Kucera and Jerome Connolly. Kucera, who earlier had worked at the Smithsonian Institution, was also responsible for the overall design. He collaborated closely with State Museum preparator John Schreffler to ensure that the background and foreground merged seamlessly. Lighting added the final touch. With colored panels and selected spotlights, the preparators adjusted the tone — warm after-noon glow, cloud-filtered, whatever the diorama called for.

Preparator John Schreffler builds a tree for the mountain lion diorama. The State Museum of Pennsylvania

Restoring Mammal Hall

In 2014 The State Museum embarked on two years of careful planning that would both restore the original beauty of the dioramas and enhance their meaning for visitors. Museum director Beth Hager formed a Natural History Advisory Committee made up of representatives from Pennsylvania agencies concerned with natural resources, environmental protection, fishing and hunting, as well as the State Library of Pennsylvania. After committee members visited the restored mammal hall at the American Museum of Natural History, Hager invited Stephen C. Quinn, the diorama artist who led the work in New York, to evaluate The State Museum’s Mammal Hall.

The restoration project began with work on the fox dioramas. Wildlife diorama artist Stephen C. Quinn, left, led the team that included master taxidermist George Dante and State Museum preparator Jonathan Schreffler.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

“I was so impressed with the hall and the high quality of the dioramas,” says Quinn. Also, Hager and her colleagues “knew the value of the dioramas and how critically important they are to the museum and its educational mission.” Quinn assembled a team of experts, including master taxidermist George Dante, whose work has been featured in National Geographic; conservators Eugenie Milroy and Rachael Arenstein, experts on natural history and dioramas; and landscape artist Sean Murtha. At the same time, with the assistance of consultant Laura Allen, the committee developed an interpretive plan for the entire third floor. In Mammal Hall, museum staff evaluated how visitors interacted with the dioramas. What questions did they have? Was anything confusing? The information collected informed the process of creating new labels for each diorama. In the restored hall, these interpretive panels encourage visitors to discover the drama playing out in each scene and help them identify birds, plants and animals at a glance.

The project began with just two dioramas — the gray fox and the red fox — the ones most noticeably in need of cleaning. The exhibitions team put up a temporary wall that would secure the work area but also allow visitors to watch the progress through windows. At last, in February 2015, the glass was lifted off the dioramas. For the first time in decades, it was possible to step into the scenes, peek around the sides and up at the lighting, and assess the work to be done to make them vibrant again.

Before touching anything, the team documented each diorama in high-quality photographs. Every aspect of the restoration was carefully tracked and catalogued. As museum workers gingerly removed plants, stems, leaves, rocks and other foreground materials, they labeled the objects and precisely marked the places to which they would return after being restored. Experts in museum conservation mentored Danielle Perdue, exhibition technician, in this process. Together, they found the right solvents to clean fragile specimens and models, as well as paints and dyes that would bring them back to life — and make them last.

Cantilevered platforms were set up to carefully remove the animals without disrupting other elements in the dioramas.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Beth Hager

State Museum curator Walter Meshaka examines the head angle of the mountain lion mannequin to get it just right. “Tweak, look; tweak, discuss,” as he puts it.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

In most cases, entering a diorama required cantilevering a platform through the diorama opening, or building a scaffold to walk on, so as not to disturb the diorama materials. Museum preparator Jonathan Schreffler — whose father had contributed so much to creating and maintaining Mammal Hall — worked with Stephen Quinn and George Dante to detach animals from their mounts and gently lift them out of their scenes.

Many of the animals were crated and shipped to Dante’s studio, Wildlife Preservations, in New Jersey. There he examined the mounts for damage — faded fur, cracked noses and more — and applied state-of-the-art techniques to making them look lifelike again. Nearly all required a color touch-up. For this, Dante uses a powdered dye dissolved in solvent and applied by airbrush. The solvent dries, leaving the color behind. The result is both long-lasting and reversible.

Many of the freshened taxidermy animals returned to their dioramas. But some had to be replaced, and this opened the opportunity to make them even more lifelike. One of these was the doe in the white-tailed deer diorama. In this springtime scene, she is nursing one of her fawns. To create a replacement doe, Dante obtained a new skin. The skin and fur of an animal are the “real” part of a taxidermy mount — the animal’s insides are discarded. The next step was to create a mannequin — a form, like a dressmaker’s mannequin — to clothe with the prepared animal skin.

The traditional method, still in use when Mammal Hall was originally installed, was to sculpt an animal in clay, make a mold, and then make the taxidermy form out of a kind of papier-mâché. Today, Dante can order a standard deer mannequin from a supply house. Yet much work remains to be done to create a lifelike mount. Dante and his coworkers started with the urethane-foam mannequin and sculpted it into the posture of a nursing doe, adding rods and wires to keep it stable. The doe’s shoulders and pelvis are dropped, and her back is arched. They widened the stance of her back legs. They also adjusted the angle of her head to look in the same direction as a second fawn that stands next to her. Only then did they fit the real skin over the form and sew it in place.

The beavers also needed replacing, and again attention to detail has produced a scene that is believable and lifelike. Instead of sitting passively, as it did for 50 years, the young beaver at right now seems in motion, carrying a stick to add to the dam. Dante also positioned the arm of the large beaver at left, “to give him some attitude.”

Stephen Quinn restores the simulated snow in the bison exhibit. The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

Back at the museum, Stephen Quinn led the team that meticulously restored color and life to elements of the dioramas. In some cases, specimens were too delicate to touch. The scarlet tanager is Pennsylvania’s brightest bird. But the specimen in the white-tailed deer diorama had faded to a pale orange. In the diorama, it sits on a branch of a particularly fragile eastern hemlock. Removing the bird would have caused the tree to drop all its needles, so Quinn worked carefully with his paintbrush, standing inside the diorama, to dye the bird’s feathers their natural red.

With the dioramas mostly emptied of their animal and bird inhabitants, artist Sean Murtha could step in and set to work restoring the background murals. Dust and time had taken a toll. In addition, some had been painted in a bright palette that reflected the artist’s personal interpretation rather than an accurate depiction of nature. Murtha’s job was to tweak the colors and emphasis of the original art while respecting its intent. He did this by applying many thin layers of paint until the effects of light and clouds in the sky were just right. The autumn sky behind the black bears is one example of Murtha’s expert technique.

Exhibition technician Danielle Perdue cleans specimens in the black bear diorama.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

While the dioramas were open, museum workers also replaced outdated lamps with state-of-the-art LED lighting. As in every aspect of the restoration, they paid rigorous attention to detail. Did the direction of the sun match its place in the background painting? Were the colors appropriate to the time of day? The LEDs, adopted by many museums, produce a more natural quality of light and are expected not to damage the objects.

At last, the dioramas could be reassembled. Leaf by leaf, every plant, then each bird, snake and butterfly — and finally, the mammals — were securely set back in place. At last the museum team sealed the glass front on the final diorama. Once again, the mammals of Pennsylvania are frozen in a snapshot of time — now a vibrant, high-definition picture.

The mountain lion was one of the specimens that was replaced in the restoration. The diorama is set in the 1800s, before mountain lions were hunted out of the state.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

Merging Art and Science

In Mammal Hall, meticulous attention to detail produces a startling blend of art and science. Plump groundhogs look up from their munching, while butterflies sip nectar from bright purple thistles — you can almost reach out to see if one will land on your hand, but that would disturb the goldfinch. Across the hall, the elk’s fresh tracks glisten in the mud. Approach the bobcat, and you may instinctively look over your shoulder to follow the animal’s gaze.

New interpretive labels encourage visitors to think about what will happen next in each scene — will the bear cubs eat the porcupine? As a whole, the exhibit invites visitors to understand and connect with Pennsylvania’s mammals and wild places and ultimately to consider their future. When the dioramas were first made, Pennsylvania’s forests were just beginning to recover from clear-cutting. Bobcats were rare in the 1960s but have since made a comeback. Where the background mural of the red foxes shows farm fields, a housing development now stands. The dioramas represent a snapshot in time. What will happen next? The restored Mammal Hall will keep Pennsylvanians asking this question for another 50 years.

Pennsylvania’s free-roaming elk herd, the largest of its kind in the northeastern United States, is represented in this diorama, now fully restored. The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

Mammal Hall

The 13 dioramas feature mammals in actual locations throughout Pennsylvania and represent all seasons of the year and times of day.

Beaver • Wayne County, a morning in early August
Black Bear • Lycoming County, October around sunset
Bison • Crawford County, a January night in the 1700s
Bobcat • Near Kettle Creek, Sullivan County, early March
Elk • Allegheny National Forest, a late September afternoon
Gray Fox • Bear Run Nature Reserve, at dawn in March
Groundhog • Lebanon County, late August
Mountain Lion • Evitts Mountain, Bedford County, early March in the 1800s
Raccoon • Pickering Creek, Chester County, an August night
Red Fox • York County, an early morning in May
Striped Skunk • Allegheny River, Armstrong County, at dawn in late August
White-Tailed Deer • Rothrock State Forest, Huntingdon County, a morning in early June
Wolf • Colton Point Park, Tioga County, a late June morning in the 1800s

Artist Jerome Connolly paints the curved back wall of the elk diorama. He also painted the background for the mountain lion and gray fox dioramas. The State Museum of Pennsylvania

How Dioramas Bring the Outdoors In

“Natural history dioramas are illusions,” says diorama artist Stephen C. Quinn. “But not trickery—they are executed with the discipline of science. The animals, plants and background are made with a high degree of accuracy, so much so that they convey a compelling sense of place.”

But dioramas also elicit wonder and awe. How do they do it? Some time-tested techniques heighten the sense of virtual reality. Museum scientists and artists developed these methods a century ago, before television or the dramatic wildlife photography we take for granted today. It was a way to transport visitors to wild places and allow them to observe animals and their surroundings up close.

First off, the overall hall is kept dark, so the diorama windows glow and beckon visitors to approach. The large diorama windows extend nearly to the floor, and they angle out. The effect: as visitors come near they may have the sense of falling into the scene.

The back wall of a diorama is curved, both left to right and top to bottom. No distracting corners interrupt the sweep of the painted sky or a distant vista. The background mural merges with the plants, trees and rocks in the foreground. There, the stars of the show — the mammals — go about their lives oblivious to onlookers. A supporting cast of birds, reptiles, insects and other creatures put the scene in context and add to its realism. Lighting helps establish the season and time of day.

Ultimately, says Quinn, science and art merge in the Mammal Hall dioramas “to nurture an awareness of the value of wildlife and wild areas, spark a lifelong appreciation of conservation and protection, and create pride in the state’s natural beauty.”

Artist Sean Murtha paints Pine Creek Gorge at Colton Point State Park, which is the backdrop for the wolf diorama.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

Restoring the Wolf Diorama

In 2017 two taxidermic wolves stood on a platform in a warehouse workshop in New Jersey. One looked healthy — and ferocious — its tail raised in a display of dominance. The second wolf’s faded fur and cracked nose matched its submissive posture.

Both had been removed from the wolf diorama at The State Museum of Pennsylvania. Restoration specialists soon began to bring vitality back to the second wolf. With fine paintbrushes, they carefully darkened each of the long, stiff guard hairs of its outer coat and enhanced the gray and tan markings on its soft undercoat. Before returning the wolf to the diorama they also repainted its tongue and jaws a more realistic color and gave it a new nose. Visit the diorama today, and the pair have resumed their 50-year-old face off over their next meal — a dead fawn that was chased down and killed by one — or perhaps both — of them.

The wolves create the central drama of the diorama. But restoring them was just part of bringing the scene to life. Members of the museum team also traveled to the diorama’s setting in May 2017 — Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon at Colton Point State Park.

Wolves no longer live in Pennsylvania, and the diorama shows an imagined scene from more than a century ago. Artist Sean Murtha says that it was important for him to visit the site to get a sense of color and distances in the landscape. “What surprised me was that we were able to find the exact diorama site, which is now a pull-off where you can park, and view the canyon from a nice, paved, railed area,” he adds. “It is exactly this view.”

To make the diorama more accurate scientifically, the museum team replaced the elk fawn that was the wolves’ prey in the original diorama with a deer fawn. Deer were more likely to have been common when wolves lived here. Murtha’s adjustments to the painting emphasize the steep drop to the valley from the cliff where the wolves stand. The new fawn looks convincingly real. And the wolves have had their snarls restored. These details combine to make the finished scene perhaps the most riveting one in Mammal Hall.

The wolf diorama reflects an imagined scene at the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania in the 1800s, before wolves were extinct in Pennsylvania.
The State Museum of Pennsylvania/Photo by Don Giles

The restored Mammal Hall is now open on the third floor of The State Museum of Pennsylvania. A 50th-year anniversary rededication event will be held in fall 2018. Watch for details at statemuseumpa.org.

Elizabeth Hanson writes about science and develops exhibition content for natural history museums. She is the author of Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos.