It was a sunny afternoon in the canyons of Bluffton, Texas. A local rancher spotted an odd-looking fellow camped near the riverbed, napping in a cot, a necktie draped over his dusty clothing. The rancher approached the sleeping man, Baylor faculty member John K. Strecker, and asked with some reservation: “Are you the bug-hunter?”
Unamused to hear the scope of Strecker’s research, the rancher then pestered Strecker for a drop of precious whiskey, hoping for a fiery sip from a traveler’s silver flask. Strecker extended an arm, offering up a glass jar of the liquor, which was preserving an eight-inch centipede meant for display at the Baylor University museum.
Today that same centipede almost certainly lies in storage with the Mayborn Museum, which still stewards the tens of thousands of biological specimens and historical artifacts that Waco’s very own Indiana Jones brought to Baylor — the “bone pile” of internationally-renowned adventurer, John K. Strecker.
BAYLOR’S FIRST MUSEUM — A CABINET OF CURIOSITY
Today’s Mayborn Museum, an institution whose doors opened in 2004, was first conceived in spirit in 1857. Baylor’s trustees had requested a cabinet to keep minerals and shells in for use as educational materials, and in Independence, this was the seedbed of the University’s museum efforts. By 1893, Baylor had acquired enough material and space to open the Baylor University Museum.
At its start, university alumni, students, and Christian missionaries would gift the museum with treasures from their travels. Orlando Clarke Charlton was made the first curator, followed by Baylor royalty James Carroll. Strecker replaced Carroll in October 1903, and it was under Strecker’s direction that the museum became something completely unique for a Texas college.
JOHN KERN STRECKER — BAYLOR’S VERY OWN ‘INDIANA JONES’
Strecker was arguably a cornerstone of Baylor history from his tenure of 30 years, serving as both museum curator and university librarian. The majority of contents comprising Baylor’s original museum system were acquired through Strecker, either via expedition or donation.
He travelled all over Texas and around the United States to find animals, insects, shells, and eggs for Baylor’s collection of biological specimens. Strecker remarked in his own writings that growing up, people found his passion unorthodox.
“They not only shook their heads sadly, but pointed to their foreheads in a suggestive fashion,” he wrote in a zoology manuscript, published posthumously by the Baylor Bulletin. “While conditions have improved, as a result of the teaching of nature study and zoology in high schools and colleges, in many parts of the country it is still impossible for one to chase the festive red-winged butterfly or swift-footed lizard, or crawl his belly through the shadows of some stream in quest of fresh-water mussels, without some moron suspect him of being what old-timers call a ‘nateral.’”
Strecker was described by his peers as a man who would sleep peacefully with a bag of live rattlesnakes tucked under his bed. He was bold and unblushing when searching the wild for specimens, and his quirky, jovial nature added to the air of intrigue around him.
Strecker’s obituary notes his great sympathy for animals and interest in their world. Though he killed them for scientific research, Strecker was politically protective of animals. He once penned an essay for the 1928 edition of the Texas Humane Review, repeatedly condemning people who destroyed animals and their habitats, damaging food chains and ecosystems.
One Baylor alumnus wrote in a 1925 Baylor Monthly letter that Strecker had more friends than anyone on campus. He was a renowned scientist whose acquisitions were recognized by scientific societies and publications far beyond Waco, yet he was also a compassionate friend to every student with whom he interacted.
“To be loved by one’s neighbors, to be respected by one’s professional associates and honored by one’s colleagues is indeed a worthy estate – one to be coveted by all,” wrote the alumnus, J.W. Harrell. “Such is the heritage of John Kern Strecker.”
THE BONE PILE — WHAT’S BURIED IN BAYLOR’S BASEMENT?
Though Strecker was once called ‘the bug hunter’ on his adventures, as relayed in one of his personal writings, the sheer volume and breadth of treasures he acquired for Baylor eclipse any entomologist’s most aspiring beetle collection. Just a few noteworthy items acquired by the Baylor University Museum are as follows, according to Baylor publications and Strecker’s own accounts:
- A meteorite, a mammoth tusk, Inuit clothing and totem pole from Alaska, a humpback whale skull, a puma, a brown bear, a grey wolf, and a mountain sheep. The museum had skeletons and skulls of all kinds of animals, including a jaguar and seal skull. There were thousands of reptiles, bugs, frogs, fossils, eggs, birds, and fish.
- In Strecker’s tenure the museum had 3,000 mineral specimens, as well as a collection of 5,400 shells.
- A 1910 article from The Lariat notes the museum housed ‘ethnological’ items like ‘race skulls,’ the head of an Egyptian mummy brought to Baylor from Israel by B.H. Carroll, and a baby Native American mummy from West Texas. The severed hand of a Native American chieftain could also be found on display at one time.
- The museum held Aztec and Native American artifacts from more than a dozen tribes. Baylor owned several war relics from North American conflicts and personal effects of General Sam Houston.
- Strecker noted in a 1927 Baylor Monthly letter that he retained a photocopy of a letter from George Washington to a member of the Baylor family (George Baylor, Judge R.E.B. Baylor’s dad), along with other treasures belonging to famous Baylor figures. In 1920, Strecker was gifted 16 Babylonian tablets from an Egyptologist.
Strecker died while active in his career at Baylor, passing in early 1933. A few years following his death, then-University President Pat Neff renamed the university museum the Strecker Museum, a name it kept until the birth of the Mayborn Museum Complex. Baylor’s museum system has continued to acquire more and more specimens and artifacts across time. By the time the Strecker Museum closed in 2003, there had been over 250,000 items cataloged, according to former staff.
Seemingly countless articles and letters addressing the Baylor University Museum and the Strecker Museum note that in each of the pre-Mayborn locations the museum has made home, space for the aptly nicknamed “bone pile” has been limited. The Occasional Papers of the Strecker Museum, a book by Baylor alumna Karen Gerhart detailing the history of Baylor’s museum system up to 1995, chronicles difficulties directors had in organizing and cataloging the mounds of jarred creatures and containers of bones.
The museum was housed all across campus, squeezed into the upper floors of Pat Neff Hall or the basement of the Sid Richardson Building. But, those men and women who cared for Strecker’s legacy always found a way to make everything fit.
HISTORY NEVER CHANGES — MUSEUMS DO
David Lintz, a longtime staffer with the Strecker Museum and for many years its assistant director, was the last man of an era — the last of the men who slept under the stars in dusty canyons to hunt and jar lizards and frogs. He also was the first to step into a new era that was exciting in its own way — an era of mammoth bone discovery, computer integration, and repatriation of things sacred.
Lintz, a 1969 Baylor graduate, was part of the team that dug up the first layers of Waco’s famous mammoth site in the early 1980s. He also helped facilitate the acquisition and assemblage of the Bill and Vara Daniel Historic Village. He worked on the Strecker’s first computer and cataloging system, and he was part of the team that conceived the design for the Mayborn Museum. Though retired, he is still active in Waco’s professional museum community.
“Well, where else do you find your history?” Lintz said of museums. “If you don’t preserve it in a facility that can preserve it, where else is it going to be? Sold, flea market, trash, ruined in an attic or a basement. Things of historical significance need to go to a facility that can take care of them.”
As Lintz had seen the acquisition of more and more new material, he also managed processes of removing material. Lintz was in charge of repatriation of several remains when the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) went into effect in the early 1990s. Some human remains were repatriated, including the body of the aforementioned baby.
No items were ever thrown away due to lack of space or interest, Lintz said. Most things no longer owned by Baylor’s museum now have been returned to original owners or shared with other museums.
“Museums do this all the time,” Lintz said. “They transfer stuff to a museum that is more amenable to that or has that type of collection.”
The Strecker Museum closed its doors in 2003, making way for the Mayborn Museum, which would display many of Strecker’s most eye-catching items, while archiving the mammoth-sized expanse of the full collection in a variety of places.
Though he frequents the Mayborn often, Lintz said he hasn’t been back in the basement of Sid Richardson in 23 years — the one historical relic he doesn’t choose to re-experience.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to go and see what they had done to it, because I was gone when they moved everything out and I’d built everything down there,” he said. “I’d built almost all those cases and all those… . I didn’t want to see any of that anymore. When I walked out of it, that was it.”
STRECKER’S GRANDBABY: THE MAYBORN MUSEUM
Today, the Strecker “bone pile” is in the hands of faculty and staff like Dr. Trey Crumpton, who has been a passionate member of the Mayborn team since the groundbreaking of the museum in 2003, when Crumpton was still a Baylor student.
“Our current mission is the cultural and natural history of Central Texas within about a 200-mile radius of Waco,” Crumpton said. “But before the Mayborn was the university museum. It was everything from all over the world.”
Crumpton and his colleagues receive donations regularly, whether anthropological artifacts, animal remains, or Baylor memorabilia. The Mayborn engages in passive collecting of animal specimens, where dead animals may be donated to it, but the museum staff no longer hunt and kill animals for the collection. Some people have made the museum aware of their intention to donate special historical items when they or a loved one eventually pass away.
“People want to know that the things they have that are important to them are important to somebody else,” Crumpton said. “… A lot of times it is important to us, and they may not realize how important it is to the museum until they ask.”
The museum stores specimens and artifacts both inside the Mayborn campus and at off-site storage locations. All mammoth bones from the Waco Mammoth National Monument are stored inside the Mayborn museum’s upper floors, Crumpton noted.
The Mayborn archives still contain human remains from Baylor’s earliest museum collections, which are not on display.
“The first thing is that it’s disrespectful to those people,” Crumpton said. “Second is that we follow the federal law on human remains.”
Today, the Mayborn is negotiating with relevant tribes in an attempt to ensure the remains are returning to the correct people and locations. Crumpton said the museum leadership has worked with the Wichita and Comanche tribes to build the Mayborn’s newest Crossroads exhibit, with the intention to display Native American items in a way that better tells the story of their heritage.
WHY KEEP THAT WHISKEY-SCENTED CENTIPEDE?
Information about natural sciences and human history is widely and instantaneously available through the tap of a phone screen in 2026, as are images and videos. While museums remain popular tourist attractions, they are now an optional educational experience — though no less vital, according to Strecker’s successors.
For Crumpton, the ethos of the “bone pile” is something not quantified.
“There’s a certain experience that you can only get — it’s called numinous, when you have a numinous experience,” Crumpton said. “And it’s a spiritual, almost a religious wonder that you feel when you’re in the presence of a real thing.”
Hundreds of books and research papers likely exist on centipedes like the one Strecker brought home in a whiskey jar over 100 years ago. One might question whether creating space for a dead centipede in a jar is justifiable, or even rational. To much of the world, a dead bug in a jar, or an old rocking chair that belonged to a late politician, or a photocopy of a handwritten letter, may be garbage fodder. But to the few romantics inhabiting the profession of museums — men like Strecker, Lintz and Crumpton — there is beauty and purpose.
“If such objects are ‘junk,’ then all of the stories of history are just so many idle words that should be blotted out and be no more remembered by men,” Strecker wrote of his museum.
