Over the years of 1892-1907, Barbour and Morrill's working partnership grew. Morrill created the Morrill Fund to aid the natural science departments as well as the museum. They began thinking about moving the growing museum's collections out of the cramped floors of Nebraska hall and into a building of their own. Nebraska Hall was condemned as a fire trap, and the fire marshall, in the words of Barbour, said "it will be useless to call the fire department should any fire ever get beyond the control of those occupying the building." Barbour was not  pleased with the accomodations, and soon afterwards was petitioning for a new home for the museum's collections. In a letter between Barbour and Morrill, Barbour decries the inadequate conditions of the building and the status of the collections.

The dream of both Morrill and Barbour was to build a great museum on campus that would be considered "the best between the coasts", to rival even the Chicago Field Museum. Morrill wrote a recommendation to get himself and Barbour on the building committee for the museum so that they could have more input on its design.

In 1908, "the Museum" was built. It was a boxy-looking structure, designed to be a small part of a much larger building. Due to financial constraints, the rest of the plan was never constructed, and so the University of Nebraska was left with an oddball building on 12th and S streets that housed the museum collections as well as the geography and geology departments. On March 6,1912 a fire of undetermined origins broke out in the stairway connecting the four floors and did extensive damage to the building, as well as some of the collections. Due to the fire, all the display cases had to be replaced, and all the collections had to be cleaned, preserved, and repaired.

Barbour and Morrill began collaborating on plans for a new and hopefully final resting place for the collections.