George Gustav Heye - Life and Career

Life and Career

Heye was the son of Carl Friederich Gustav Heye; and Marie Antoinette Lawrence of Hudson, New York. Carl was a German immigrant who earned his wealth in the petroleum industry.

George graduated from Columbia College (now Columbia University) in 1896 with a degree in electrical engineering. While superintending railroad construction in Kingman, Arizona in 1897, he acquired a Navajo deerskin shirt, as his first artifact. He acquired individual items until 1903, then he began collecting material in larger numbers. In 1901, he started a career in investment banking that lasted until 1909. In 1915 Heye worked with Frederick W. Hodge and George H. Pepper on the Nacoochee Mound in White County Georgia. The work was done through the Heye Foundation, the Museum of the American Indian, and the Bureau of American Ethnology, and was some of the most complete work of the time including numerous photographs. In 1918 Heye and his colleagues publish a report entitled The Nacoochee Mound In Georgia. He accumulated the largest private collection of Native American objects in the world. The collection was initially stored in Heye’s Madison Avenue apartment in New York City, and later, in a rented room. By 1908, he was referring to the collection as "The Heye Museum", and he was soon lending materials for exhibit at what later became the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia. In 1916, he purchased from J. E. Standley of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop the collection of Alaskan Native artifacts that had won the gold medal for ethnological collections at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Eventually, the Heye collection was moved to the Heye Foundation’s Museum of the American Indian at 155th Street and Broadway, which broke ground in May 1916. In 1919, he established the journal Indian Notes and Monographs. The museum opened to the public in 1922, and closed in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution opened the Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian in the former Custom House in lower Manhattan. Heye died on January 20, 1957.