Erwin Hinkley Barbour (1856-1947)

Erwin Hinkley Barbour became a professor of paleontology at the University of Nebraska in l89l. He organized the University of Nebraska State Museum, which we know as Morrill Hall, and became its first curator.

The Ohio native, born in 1856, received his education at Yale, and taught at Iowa College before coming to Nebraska. Barbour had been an assistant paleontologist for the United States Geological Survey, and after organizing the Nebraska Geological Survey, became the Nebraska state geologist.

A conservationist, Barbour's interest in irrigation and water wells led him in 1897-98 to investigate and to report on homemade windmills along the Platte River. He published a pamphlet which encouraged the building of windmills, and in 1904, he received a silver metal from the United States Department of Agriculture for the best designed homemade windmill.

At Agate Springs Ranch, owned by James Henry Cook, Barbour in 1905 opened two quarries which he named University Hill and Carnegie Hill. These widely-known fossil quarries are part of an area in Sioux County, designated in 1965 as Agate Fossil Beds National Monument.

Barbour was the Nebraska representative at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. At the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, 1897-98, he was superintendent of mining, forestry, and university educational exhibits. In 1903 he was superintendent of education, mining, and resources at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis.

Barbour was the author of more than 400 scientific books and reports and received many awards and medals for his work at the Expositions and in scientific organizations. Barbour died in Lincoln on May 11, 1947.