Harry F. Hazlett
Deersville, Harrison County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
(1878–1966) was an explorer, author, and naturalist. She led expeditions in British Columbia and Africa, founded Camp Mystic for girls, married Carl Akeley, earned global honors, and contributed to the American Museum of Natural History.
Erected by Ohio History Connection
The Story
This marker honors a remarkable turn-of-the-century figure who made her name in an era when few women led scientific expeditions into the wild. Working alongside and later beyond her husband, the famed taxidermist and naturalist Carl Akeley, she trekked through the forests of British Columbia and across Africa, gathering specimens and observations that enriched the collections of the American Museum of Natural History. She also turned her adventures into books and, back home, founded a girls' camp to pass her love of the outdoors to the next generation. Her honors reached a global audience at a time when exploration was overwhelmingly a man's world.
Why it matters
Her life shows how American women helped shape the golden age of natural-history exploration and museum science, opening doors in fields long closed to them.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Step back to the turn of the twentieth century, when the map of the world still had blank spaces on it and filling them in was considered thrilling, dangerous, and — almost without exception — men's work. Great natural-history museums were racing to gather the animals, plants, and specimens of far-off places before the modern world reached them, and the people who did that gathering became public heroes, their expeditions followed like adventure serials.
This was the Progressive era, a time when American women were pushing into universities, professions, and public life in growing numbers, even as most doors were still politely held shut. The idea that a woman might lead her own expedition into a wilderness — choosing the route, keeping the notes, bringing back the trophies of science — ran against nearly everything her era expected of her.
That is the backdrop for the woman this marker honors, born in 1878 in the rolling farm country of eastern Ohio and living until 1966. Her long life spanned the whole golden age of exploration and museum-building, and she spent it not on the sidelines but in the field.
People & events
The story the marker tells is of a genuine explorer, author, and naturalist — a woman who led expeditions into the rugged backcountry of British Columbia and across the landscapes of Africa. In an age when such journeys meant weeks by pack train, boat, and foot, far from help, she organized them, endured them, and came home with observations and specimens worth preserving.
Her path crossed that of Carl Akeley, one of the most celebrated naturalists and taxidermists of the day, a man whose lifelike habitat displays changed how museums showed the natural world and who was devoted to the wildlife of Africa. She married him, and their names became linked — but the marker is careful to credit her own expeditions, her own books, and her own honors, not merely her place at a famous man's side.
Back home, she turned her love of the wild toward the next generation, founding Camp Mystic for girls so that young people could learn the outdoors firsthand. Her honors, the inscription tells us, reached a global audience — recognition earned in a field that rarely made room for women.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the great age of natural-history exploration as a gallery of bearded men in pith helmets. Markers like this one correct the picture. American women were there too — in the canoes and on the trails, cataloging specimens, writing the books, and helping to stock the display halls that taught millions of visitors what the world's wild places looked like.
The institution she contributed to, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, became one of the country's great engines of public science, and its collections were built by exactly this kind of patient, often unglamorous fieldwork. Every mounted animal and careful label in such a museum represents someone who went out and got it.
Her decision to pour that experience back into a girls' camp matters just as much. It is one thing to break into a closed field; it is another to hold the door for those coming behind you. In that gesture — adventure turned into education — you can see how a single determined life helped widen the horizon for American women in science and the outdoors.
If you visit
You've come to a quiet corner of Harrison County, Ohio, far from the wildernesses this explorer made her name in — and that contrast is the whole point. The great expeditions of a life often begin in the most ordinary of places, and this rural stretch of eastern Ohio is where one of them started.
Stand at the memorial and let the distance sink in: from these gentle hills to the mountains of British Columbia and the plains of Africa is a very long way, and she covered it in an era with none of the conveniences you took for granted getting here. The marker asks you to hold two images at once — a farm-country childhood and a globe-spanning career.
If you're building a road trip through this part of Ohio, treat this stop as a small monument to ambition and the outdoors. Bring the curiosity of the people it honors: the naturalists it remembers spent their lives paying close attention to the living world, and the countryside around you rewards exactly that kind of looking.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Carl Akeley
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