Olof O. Nylander is seated in a room provided by Caribou High School for his natural history work on April 24, 1936. For a period of time before the Nylander Museum was constructed in 1938, Nylander displayed some of his specimens and worked on his collections in a room provided by the school.

Nylander was a self-taught naturalist and geologist with an international reputation. Originally from Oremella, Sweden, Nylander emigrated to the U.S. in 1883, and worked in both the U.S. and Canada as a researcher, guide, and collector. The fossils and mineral specimens in his collections form the core of the collections of the Nylander Museum in Caribou.