Henry Ward
The naturalist from Rochester, New York, who supplied museums worldwide and built one of the largest private meteorite collections of his age.
Key facts
- Born
- 1834
- Died
- 1906
- Nationality
- American
- Field
- Naturalist and dealer
Henry Augustus Ward was a geologist and collector who founded Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, in the 1860s. The company supplied fossils, minerals, stuffed animals and skeletons to museums, universities and schools across America and beyond.
In the last part of his life Ward turned his energy to meteorites. He travelled across the world to visit falls, museums and collectors, buying and exchanging specimens wherever he could. He went to Mexico, South America, Europe and elsewhere in search of new material, and he cut and shared many masses so that museums could hold pieces.
By the early 1900s the Ward–Coonley collection, as it was called, held samples of several hundred different meteorites, one of the largest collections in the world at the time. Ward published catalogues of it, which were useful records of known meteorites.
Ward died in 1906 after being struck by a car in Buffalo, New York, one of the earliest people killed in a motor accident in the United States. Many of his specimens are now in museum collections.