The University Museum is a historic building that houses several museums belonging to

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. The building is located at 24-28 Oxford Street and 11-25 Divinity Avenue in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston, ...

. It houses both the

Harvard Museum of Natural History The Harvard Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum housed in the University Museum Building, located on the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It features 16 galleries with 12,000 speciments drawn from the col ...

at 26 Oxford Street, and the

Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is a museum affiliated with Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1866, the Peabody Museum is one of the oldest and largest museums focusing on anthropological material, with ...

at 11 Divinity Avenue, as well as several departments of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Mineralogical & Geological Museum. The building is a large U-shaped brick structure, six stories high, whose oldest portion dates to 1859. This section was built to house the Museum of Comparative Zoology; it was added onto in 1876 to provide space for the Peabody Museum, and was expanded several other times between then and 1913. The building is basically Italian Renaissance in its styling. The building was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1986.

References

Harvard University buildings Harvard University museums School buildings completed in 1859 National Register of Historic Places in Cambridge, Massachusetts University and college buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in Massachusetts 1889 establishments in Massachusetts Brick buildings and structures 1850s architecture in the United States Renaissance Revival architecture in Massachusetts {{CambridgeMA-NRHP-stub

See also

References