Hair to the Chief

PHILADELPHIA -- It might be the strangest way to spend Presidents Day.

For the first time, The Academy of Natural Sciences is displaying a scrapbook that has locks of hair from the first 12 U.S. presidents. It will be on view Feb. 16-18.

The presidential "hair album" was assembled by Peter Arvell Browne, a Philadelphia attorney and scholar of the natural sciences who collected thousands of samples of animal fur and human hair in the 1840s and 1850s and organized them in a dozen leather-bound volumes.

Browne also wrote to presidents still living during his lifetime - 1762-1860 - and to the families of those who had died. His letters and their responses are included in the book along with the strands of hair.

MiamiHerald.com