Preconfederation Ornithology

(1758-1826)

Thomas Delvecchio was born in Italy in 1758. He and his brother emigrated to Quebec in the late 18th century with a group of Italian families mostly from northern Italy. Many settled in Montreal and pursued business opportunities in trade, hotels and real estate.

In 1812 Delvecchio was known to be running an inn, the Auberge des Trois-Rois, in downtown Montreal. To assist his enterprise he opened nearby his Museo Italiano in February 1824. The museum was not a natural history museum in the traditional sense, more a museum of curiosities with natural history specimens selected for their beauty or their curiosity value in an attempt to attract as wide a clientele as possible. As Raymond Ducharme in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DC) points out:

visitors could admire a large natural history collection of stuffed quadrupeds, amphibians, reptiles, birds and fish. They could also see waxed figures of a South American Indian family, and some Philadelphia and Montreal beauties, as well as automatons, musical instruments, and many other curiosities, among them a lamb with eight legs, a pig with two bodies in its lower part, four ears, and eight legs, and a ram’s head with four horns.

Despite modelling his museum after conventional tastes of the time the Delvecchio Museum was not successful. When Delvecchio died 1826 some of the artifacts were offered to the new Montreal Natural History Society Museum run by the newly-formed Montreal History Society (MN'S). The Society declined to purchase and the Museum struggled on until 1847 when the contents, largely unchanged since the 1820s were sold at public auction.

Some details on the ornithological elements of the collection are provided by Harry Kuntz in his “Science Culture in English-Speaking Montreal”:

The bird collection comprised an ostrich, an albatross, a pelican, a Russian hen, a toucan, a   scarlet ibis, a bird of paradise and several species of pheasants and parakeets.( P. 125)

It seems certain that at no time in its short life did the mission of Delvecchio Museum ever intend to be a serious natural history museum. As a result, despite its status as one of the earliest museums established in Canada, it played no part in the Canada’s ornithological history.

Bibliography

• Ducharme, Raymond. 2000. Thomas Delvecchio. Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 1821-1835. Volume 6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press
• Kuntz, Harry 2010. Science Culture in English-Speaking Montreal PhD Thesis. Montreal: Concordia University