We return to the cabinet of Dr. Cavalli
Another short-lived Detroit natural history museum
There was a time when I was younger and knew less but remembered a lot more. Today, nearly 15 years since I first wrote anything about Detroit history, I sometimes find myself beginning to re-report a story I forgot I wrote, only to have the good luck to be struck with a sort of déjà vu, or to search my Google Drive and find the answers to my most urgent research questions in a post I wrote in like 2016. It is bound to happen one day. Hopefully no one will notice. Maybe not even me.
Here’s one of those stories that I recently rediscovered. I’m bringing it to you because it’s August, month of re-runs, hiatuses, and little breaks, and because it ties in with history of Detroit’s natural history museums that I’ve been telling here in many parts this year.
Also: TinyLetter shut down earlier this year, so the old letters I wrote on that platform are now just inbox ghosts. Though I realize that most digital media is bound to disappear from the internet at some point, it does seem worthwhile in the short term to archive a few of my old letters, however temporary that archive may be — if only to help me avoid an accidental re-run.
Lightly edited to remove some obsolete context, and to add a little extra research I’ve done on the subject because I can’t help myself, here’s a little letter from 2015 about Dr. Louis Cavalli and his short-lived natural history museum in Detroit. (Plus one he helped establish at Notre Dame!)
Illustration of “Cavilli’s (sic) Museum,” drawn from someone’s memory, in the Detroit Free Press, May 2, 1897.
Dr. Louis Cavalli was a Detroiter by way of Germany, born in Milan, ancestrally from Spain. (The old family name was “Cavalos.”) Upon his death, his obituary in the New York Times reported — as an appendix to the story of a life spent dispatching Napoleon’s business to various kings, hanging out with Napoleon at various battles, and visiting Napoleon during various exiles — that Cavalli should be remembered for one more thing:
We beg to add that the Doctor leaves behind him, as constituting the principal part of his gains for the last twenty years, a cabinet of minerals, Napoleonic relics, and various other curiosities, all most tastefully collected and arranged, and well deserving the attention not only of the curious, but of the studious and learned.
Dr. Cavalli was nearly 50 years old when he came to Michigan in 1834. He had lived a few years before that in Economy, Pennsylvania, where he had tried, and failed, to run a farm. In Michigan, he tried his hand at farming again, failed again, and finally gave up and moved to urbane Detroit in 1843.
Here, he made a name for himself as a public intellectual, an importer of fine French wines and spirits, and an advocate for promoting immigration from Germany to Michigan. Dr. Cavalli was for several years hired by the legislature to translate the Governor’s annual message into German and for a time worked as an emigrant agent in New York, handing out pamphlets and spreading the word about the affordable land in Michigan, and the good jobs to be had in the state’s whitefisheries and lumber yards. An excerpt from one of Cavalli’s dispatches in 1843:
Michigan, without doubt, is the best State for the German emigrant. The climate is mild and healthy and the land good and cheap in comparison with other States, and the facilities for markets in every part of it are vastly superior. During the last twelve years that I have resided in that State, I have never seen a German that was not well off.
On top of all this, Dr. Cavalli was a gentleman scientist, a member of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and a well-known collector — of medals and paintings, preserved insects and piles of interesting rocks. In 1845, the French priest Edward Sorin, who was working to build a Catholic college in northern Indiana, purchased from Dr. Cavalli a “museum collection” for the college’s 40-some enrolled students. At the time, the college consisted of a single “hastily erected building” that served as classroom, dormitory, kitchen, bakery and dining hall. A room was added to accommodate Cavalli’s natural history collection: “This collection of ‘beasts, birds, fishes, reptiles, antiquities, etc. from various parts of the globe’ proved a huge draw among visitors ... and also helped to signal Sorin’s clear aspiration to offer instruction in the various sciences,” wrote Dana A. Freiburger in a 2022 paper about the history of science and Catholic education.1 Sorin’s school, perhaps you’ve guessed, became the University of Notre Dame. Most of the Cavalli collection was destroyed in a fire in 1879, though the museum was rebuilt and still exists.
But Dr. Cavalli must have had plenty of artifacts left over, or else replenished his collection, because starting around 1846, he ran a private museum of art, science and curiosities out of his house at Franklin Street and St. Antoine. The museum was open free to the public, seven days a week, until it apparently closed in 1852 or 1853. (Dr. Cavalli also ran his wine-importing hustle from this home.) Highlights of the collection included 1400 medals commemorating notable historical figures (Duke Augustus of Sax-Gothe once presented him with a collection of medals representing “celebrated men of the reformation”); 600 specimens of minerals, rocks and shells; artifacts from the ancient city of Herculaneum; and a vast collection of insects.
When Cavalli died, on June 4, 1854 — suddenly, dramatically, and asking for wine — his “cabinet of curiosities” was reportedly sold to the Smithsonian, although I have not been able to confirm this. The last contemporary account I can find of Dr. Cavalli’s collection is a warning, in an advertisement in a Washington, D.C. paper the month after his death, not to buy objects from his collection, as the estate was not yet settled, placed by his son Hugo.
Death of Dr. Cavalli: Dr. Louis Cavalli, well known in this city, of which he was an old resident, died last evening, of apoplexy. About 6.5 o’clock, he stepped into Mr. Dermont’s store, on Woodward Avenue, sat down in a chair, and asked for a glass of wine. A clerk went after the wine, was gone a few minutes, and, when he returned, found the Doctor gasping his last. A physician was immediately called in, but his services were of no avail.2
A postscript: Dr. Cavalli, it was pointed out to me after I originally sent this letter, is buried at Elmwood! Naturally. I’ll be visiting him soon.
Some recent posts you may have missed:
The centenarian Martha Lord Miller: Born during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, Martha flew on an airplane when she was 98 years old AND LOVED IT.
A visit to Detroit by Margaret McKee, “Queen of Whistlers,” who sang for the birds on Belle Isle.
I did not cite a source for this in my original Little Detroit History Letter and I can’t find it now, so I’m not 100% sure where this came from, but probably the Free Press.