TOUR INFORMATION

What can you expect to see on the tour?

In addition to a wide selection of local stones and minerals, Keck Museum curator Garrett Barmore takes viewers downstairs to look at one of the Museum's more famous exhibits. The Mary Louise and John Mackay Silver Collection is a stunning set of unique silver service pieces all ornately designed. Can you guess where most of the silver used to make this set was originally mined?

The history of the 1250-piece sterling silver set

John W. Mackay (1831-1902) commissioned Tiffany and Company of New York to design and produce a silver service for his wife Marie-Louise. The result was a unique 1250 piece set of sterling silver dinner and dessert service for twenty-four completed in 1878. Charles Grosjean of Tiffany designed the service and Edward C. Moore supervised the project. Charles Carpenter in his volume Tiffany Silver notes that as the largest, the grandest, the most elegantly ornate and most famous set of its time, the Mackay service epitomized the sumptuous dining table of Victorian America.