Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum
Hand-colored glass lantern slide was taken by Donald MacMillan on Peary's 1908-1909 expedition to the North Pole. Photo: Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum.
Opening its doors in 1967, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum remains the only museum in the lower 48 states dedicated to Arctic Studies. Named after Arctic explorers and Bowdoin College graduates Robert E. Peary (class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (class of 1898), the museum captures not only artifacts and expedition equipment from Peary and MacMillan’s work in the Arctic, but films, photographs, natural history specimens, and archival papers.
Peary, a civil engineer, lead a series of Arctic expeditions culminating in his controversial 1909 claim to have reached the North Pole. MacMillan, who studied under Peary and later joined several of his expeditions, went on to become an Arctic explorer in his own right, making roughly thirty trips north over the course of his career and logging some 300,000 miles of Arctic travel. He surveyed and charted unmapped coastline, studied the peoples of Labrador and Greenland, and compiled a dictionary of Inuktitut. In 1921 he raised funds to build his own Arctic schooner, the Bowdoin, which he captained for decades and which still bears the college's name today.
The museum opened in 1967, built around donations from the Class of 1925, alumnus George B. Knox, and other supporters, with an initial collection of a few hundred objects. MacMillan, who continued exploring into his eighties, donated his own expedition gear, anthropological objects, films, photographs, natural history specimens, and papers to the growing collection. The collections quickly outgrew their various museum spaces, and in 2023 the museum moved into a new purpose-built building: the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies. The collections now contain more than 40,000 objects, including a growing body of contemporary Canadian Inuit and Alaskan Yup'ik and Iñupiat art.
The museum, just a short walk through campus from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, is open to the public for free, year-round.
