
William Jacob Holland
William Jacob Holland (1848–1932) was the eighth
Chancellor of the
University of Pittsburgh (1891–1901) and Director of the
Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. He was an accomplished
zoologist and
paleontologist, as well as an ordained
Presbyterian minister.
His 1890s administration is best known for dramatically growing the university (then called the Western University of Pennsylvania).
Holland was born
August 16,
1848 in
Jamaica,
West Indies, the son of a minister. He attended
Moravian College and Theological Seminary;
Amherst College, (A.B., 1869), and
Princeton Theological Seminary (1874).
In 1874 he moved to
Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania to become pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church in the city's
Oakland neighborhood. At this time Holland was also a trustee of the Pennsylvania College for Women (now
Chatham College), where he taught ancient languages. He also was active in the sciences, serving as naturalist for the United States Eclipse Expedition, which in 1887, at the bequest of the
National Academy of Sciences and the
U.S. Navy, explored
Japan.
In 1891 he became chancellor of Pitt, where he taught
anatomy and zoology. In 1901 his friend
Andrew Carnegie hired him as director of the Carnegie Museum, where he remained until retirement in 1922. During this time, he achieved international renown when he supervised the mounting of several casts of the
sauropod dinosaur
Diplodocus, a donation by Carnegie to natural history museums throughout Europe. His trip to Argentina in
1912 to install a replica of a
Diplodocus, at the behest of Carnegie, is told by Holland in his 1913 travel book
To the River Plate and Back.
Holland was America's great popularizer of butterflies and moths in the first half of the twentieth is century. Holland's
The Butterfly Book (1898) and
The Moth Book (1903) are both still widely used. Holland donated his private collection exceeding 250,000 specimens to the Carnegie Museum . He supported active collectors worldwide, obtaining major collections from previously uncollected regions between 1890 and 1930 through the efforts of
William Doherty,
Herbert Huntingdon Smith, H.L. Weber, J. Steinbach, S.M. Klages and many others.
In 1879 Holland married Carrie T. Moorhead. They had two children. He died on
December 13,
1932.
The University of Pittsburgh's Holland Hall at 3990 Fifth Avenue is named in his honor. It is a student residence for 600 upperclass and first-year women students and is part of the Schenley Quadrangle complex. The University Book Center is on the ground floor of Holland Hall.