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Presidents come and go, but their hair lasts forever — or at least for hundreds of years. And this weekend, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia will display some of the ornate pages from its unusual hair albums.
As David Nogueras reports, the books include bits of hair from many prominent people, including more than a dozen U.S. presidents.
DAVID NOGUERAS: Robert Peck meets me in the reading room at the Academy of Natural Sciences. He's a senior curator here and he's leafing through the first of three large books.
Mr. ROBERT PECK (Senior Curator, Academy of Natural Sciences): We begin right in with the first page with George Washington.
NOGUERAS: Right there on the page is a snippet of hair. It's a little more than an inch in length and bound with light blue ribbon. It's wild and scraggly. At the top of the page is a picture of the man whose hair we're looking at.
Below that, a poem clipped from a newspaper in the early 1800s. It's a tribute to America's first president.
Mr. PECK: It says "Fame spread her wings and with her trumpet blew, great Washington has come, what praise is due."
NOGUERAS: For Peter Arvel Browne(ph), the man who created this collection back in the 19th century, due praise for Washington apparently meant collecting a lock of his hair. Browne also managed to get locks from 13 other U.S. presidents.
Collecting hair samples was common in Browne's time. He considered himself more of a naturalist than a memento collector and his family donated the books to the academy when he died. Mostly, the albums contain bits of animal hair, cataloged under subheadings like camel or goat or sheep.
But as Robert Peck began to look through the large collection, he saw some names of people he recognized.
Mr. PECK: The politicians began to pop up one name after another and I couldn't believe as I went through page by page that I was seeing American history roll out in front of me. I suppose it's as close as I'm ever going to come to any of these figures.
NOGUERAS: The same can be said for almost anybody who've used the Philadelphia exhibit this holiday weekend. Peck says Peter Arvel Browne's unusual collection tells many stories at once. He says the book is like a snapshot in time of many important figures in American history. The entries include correspondence to and from the family members of past presidents. But mostly there's hair - tangible little pieces of America's founding fathers.
Mr. PECK: Here's John Adams. Very heavy thick tuft of hair. And although there's a little portrait that's glued onto the page here shows him almost bald, he does have a bit around the ears in the back.
Another page, his excellency, James Madison.
Here is Thomas Jefferson's hair. Quite a small sample. I suspect this was also in great demand in its day, and clearly taken toward the end of Jefferson's life. It's almost completely white although you can see a little bit of red in it.
NOGUERAS: To be honest, it just looks gray to me. But if people can interpret the writings of Thomas Jefferson for more than 200 years, perhaps they can see things in his hair.
David Nogueras, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.