In its early days, the Arts Quad, writes historian Morris Bishop, was "a bare, undulating, gullied pasture, rather hay than greensward, bisected by an uncertain rail fence and inhabited by occasional cows and baseball players" erected on the remnants of Ezra Cornell's orchard. McGraw Hall, Cornell's third building, built in 1871, became home to one of the university's earliest exhibition spaces. "The central part of McGraw was a large, but dark, three-story Museum of Natural History," writes Bishop. "Of some of the displayed marvels -- the plesiosaurus, the megatherium, the bottled brains of scholars and murderers, the two-headed calves -- the administration was very proud. Of some, such as the Silliman Collection in Minerology and the Newcomb Collection of Mollusks, it still has reason to be proud." The museum continued to operate in one form or another from the 1860s to the 1940s. The Cornell University Museum of Vertebrates, now located at the Laboratory of Ornithology, vacated the space in 1968. Today the space is known as the McGraw Hall Museum and houses the anthropology department collections, which include 20,000 ethnographic and archaeological objects whose origins span the globe, representing over 500,000 years of human history.

-- Adapted by George Lowery from Morris Bishop's "A History of Cornell."