Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 6, 1990 TAG: 9005040558
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Tracie Fellers Staff Writer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It opened in 1985 under the direction of founder Noel Boaz, an anthropologist and Martinsville native. On opening day, the main attraction was seven mechanical prehistoric animals, on loan to the museum for a month. There were activities for kids in the museum parking lot, bluegrass music, break dancing and an array of plans for the museum future.
Five years later, those connected with the museum are still making plans for its future. It is still housed in the old Joseph Martin school on Martinsville's Douglas Avenue. But the Virginia Museum of Natural History has come a long way from the days of the $10 lease.
It has gained $8.8 million in the current two-year state budget, influential friends and strong support in the state legislature, natural history collections from donors across Virginia and a 35-person staff.
Perseverance and politics both have had a role in the museum's rise from a bargain-basement lease to a multimillion-dollar budget. Boaz and early museum staffers worked diligently to build the museum into a place that would attract notice. And they earned the attention of influential people - notably House Speaker A.L. Philpott, D-Bassett, who became a staunch museum supporter.
The museum now offers visitors a much wider selection of things to see than it did in 1985.
The museum's exhibit rooms contain specimens of animals found in Virginia and a collection of shells from the state's coastal plain. There are rocks and minerals from the University of Virginia's collection and an exhibit of stone tools from Zaire, which are estimated to be 2.3 million years old.
A mechanical dinosaur created by Dinamation is one of the museum's most popular exhibits. With the touch of a button, the creature moves its head, eyes and feet and lets out a prehistoric roar - much to the delight of the museum's young visitors.
And one of the museum's newest and most exciting exhibits is a collection of fossilized dinosaur tracks, found in a stone quarry near Stevensburg. The tracks, thought to be about 210 million years old, are considered one of the state's most important paleontological finds. They now are on display at the museum's Virginia Tech branch, which opened April 21.
Though collections have grown at a fairly steady rate, the museum's mission is broader than simply preserving specimens of Virginia's natural history, museum director Michael Hager said.
"We must become a museum without walls," he said. "We want to serve the people in Roanoke, Arlington, Virginia Beach, Richmond and others."
A different view
Some of the museum's walls are literally coming down. A $4.4 million, two-part renovation of the museum building will begin late this summer. The first phase of the project is expected to take about a year.
Built in the 1920s, the former school with a distinctive red tin roof "is in great need of renovation," Hager said.
Substantially increased exhibit space will be one of the project's benefits. A wall just beyond the museum's lobby will be removed, creating one large, open room for exhibits instead of two smaller ones. An outdoor courtyard will be roofed over to create another large exhibit space.
The museum's auditorium, formerly the school gym, will be divided: Half will serve as an auditorium, the other half as an exhibit hall.
"We want to have a space that can hold three separate exhibits or one large exhibit," Hager said. Having that kind of space will allow the museum to house more traveling shows and major exhibits, which it cannot accommodate now.
The renovation also will create room for new science labs, improved storage areas for the museum's collections, and a new workshop for designing and building museum exhibits.
"We are not currently planning a new facility. We are beefing up labs, collection storage and the branch museums," which are located at Virginia Tech and UVa, Hager said. "But I think it's quite reasonable that five to 10 years out we'll be looking at [building] a new facility."
The museum will close during the first part of its renovation. Plans for the renovation's second phase have not been completed, said Gail Gregory, the museum's marketing director.
Hager is confident the renovation project will remedy another museum shortcoming - its attendance.
From July 1988 to June 1989, 9,154 children and adults visited the museum. From July 1989 to March of this year, the museum has seen only 6,574 visitors - just 30 more than the 6,544 that visited from July 1988 to March 1989. Museum officials estimate a total of 10,000 people will visit the facility before the fiscal year ends June 30.
Hager admits attendance figures are low, but says increasing the number of visitors hasn't been a priority for the museum since he was named director last February.
"Our emphasis has not been on attracting people to the facility. Our emphasis has been on attracting people to this organization. We had to put together a team first," he said.
The museum has gone from a staff of five to 35 employees since it opened. Many of those hires have been made in the last two years, Hager said.
After it has been renovated, the museum will have much more to offer, he added. Right now, "our biggest impact is in the schools" and educational programs. And learning about the state's natural history is important for Virginians of all ages, he said.
"I think it's critical to take knowledge full circle. It needs to be investigated by scientists. It needs to be collected, preserved and interpreted in a museum. And then it needs to be delivered back to the people - kids from 2 to 92," he said.
"Virginia has got a tremendous pride in its cultural heritage, its history. [Virginians] love to point to their Blue Ridge, their Appalachians, their Chesapeake Bay," Hager added. But most don't think about the eons and geologic cataclysms that produced those resources.
"When I stand at the crest of the Blue Ridge, I see a different view than average people," he said. "Those mountains were all shoved up when Africa smashed into the east coast of North America. Then those continents separated and drifted into their current positions, something that's happening today with India and Asia with the Himalayas."
The Blue Ridge Mountains were once 20,000 feet tall, "these huge mountains that were folded on top of themselves," Hager added. "That's amazing stuff."
Reaching across Virginia
In the years when Virginia did not have a natural history museum, "collections from Virginia not only went to the Smithsonian, but to the West Virginia Museum of Natural History, the North Carolina Museum of Natural History, and even the British Museum of Natural History" in London, said marketing director Gregory.
"Kids grow up reading about dinosaurs in the West in their textbooks," and don't realize that dinosaurs also lived in Virginia during prehistoric times, Hager said. "My hope is that we can instill the same kind of pride in our natural resources as people have in their cultural resources."
Since last July, the museum has given 459 school programs, involving 21,546 children and 67 schools in a seven-county region. It has two full-time educators who take museum programs to schools in surrounding counties, including Henry, Patrick, Pittsylvania and Franklin.
This school year, the museum started a pilot program in Albemarle County schools. A part-time educator presents museum-related programs in the schools, and the educator's salary is paid by both the museum and the school system.
The museum has received an additional $200,000 in state money to fund such outreach programs. Plans are to use much of the money for curriculum materials and training, so that teachers and volunteers statewide can work with museum programs, Hager said.
To reach more Virginians, the museum has long-range plans to establish affiliate natural history museums in the state - smaller facilities that would institute some of the Martinsville museum's programs.
Such museums would be modeled on the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts' affiliate program. "They have a fine outreach program," he said.
Creating statewide in-school programs similar to the Albemarle model is another long-range goal. Individual counties would select volunteers to participate, and the museum would provide training workshops and curriculum materials.
Movies to mammals
The museum's branches, connected with two of Virginia's major universities, are other avenues for outreach.
A Virginia Tech branch of the museum opened in a former theater in downtown Blacksburg last month. The facility houses collections of birds, mammals and insects - one-third of Tech's total natural history collections.
The second branch, at the University of Virginia, is in the school's Clark Hall. Many of its collections are on permanent loan to the Martinsville facility, but gems and minerals are still displayed there.
UVa is involved in a large-scale research project on Virginia's barrier islands, and some museum interns are working with that research. "It's a delicate environment, in great need of understanding and protection," Hager said.
As part of the cooperative effort, the museum has plans to build a traveling barrier islands exhibit within the next two to three years. "What we can offer that program is outreach, so that John Q. Citizen can know something about barrier islands," he said.
The branch museum arrangements benefit both the universities and the museum, Hager added. "We have collections expertise, financial support, cabinets, computers. They have a research staff. Together we will have exhibits and educational programs."
Hager also envisions the museum reaching people across the state with its own traveling exhibits and publications - ranging from scientific journals to children's books.
"There's a tremendous interest" in educating Virginians about the state's natural history, "but not enough coordinated effort. We just hope we can help to get some of that," he said.
Starting from scratch
Encouraging interest in Virginia's natural history has been a priority for the museum since its inception.
Martinsville native Boaz started planning the museum in 1980 with colleague Frank Spencer, an associate professor of anthropology at Queens College in New York. Boaz - who earned degrees in anthropology from UVa and the University of California at Berkeley - returned to Martinsville in 1984 after teaching at New York University. He also had done field work in Africa.
He returned with the intention of starting a museum in his hometown. Beginning in a small city would be much less expensive than starting a museum in a major urban center, he reasoned. And with his hometown connections, he thought he could generate the necessary support.
So Boaz went to the Martinsville City Council with a proposal: He wanted to lease the city's old Martin School building, renovate it and convert the facility into a natural history museum.
In September 1984, the city council voted to give Boaz a two-year lease on the school building for $10. The Virginia Museum of Natural History was chartered as a private foundation and opened in June 1985.
During its early years, it attracted state and sometimes national attention. Boaz's expeditions to and discoveries in Zaire, fossil finds here in Virginia, plans for a branch museum at Virginia Tech and fund-raising efforts put the museum in the public eye.
In January 1988, the city council agreed to deed four acres of land and two buildings - the school and an annex - to the museum. The hope was that the facility would become the state's official natural history museum. Three months later, the General Assembly passed a bill making the museum an official state agency.
The museum now falls under the Virginia Department of Natural Resources. Its staff of 35 employees includes eight curators. It has seen an astronomical increase in its share of state funds since its early years, when it was receiving $20,000 annually.
And the museum has made friends in powerful places - most importantly Philpott, a conservative Henry County Democrat who has used his considerable clout to get legislative backing for the museum.
Philpott was a member of a joint House-Senate subcommittee that studied the museum's long-range goals and recommended that it become the state's official natural history museum.
After the study of the Martinsville facility, Philpott "decided to become an enthusiastic supporter of the museum," he said. He and other subcommittee members discovered that interest and research in Virginia's natural history could be traced to the state's earliest times.SUNDAYEXTRA12
In 1878, a natural history museum called the Brooks Museum opened at UVa, with thousands of specimens and samples. It closed after World War II, victim of the university's need for teaching and research space.
The idea of a state natural history museum didn't resurface until Boaz and others started developing the Martinsville facility, Philpott said.
"We found out that VPI is loaded with artifacts and natural history articles that ought to be on display and that weren't on display - same with the University of Virginia. There was lots of material available, but a lot of it was in basements and was of no use to the people of the commonwealth."
The fact that such extensive natural history collections - including thousands of insect and animal specimens - couldn't be viewed by the public was "ridiculous," he said.
Philpott's presence
Philpott downplays his part in the museum's development. "I was more or less a conduit to get it started in the legislature," he said. And in fact, state funding for the museum never really received any political opposition.
In 1988, Del. George Allen, R-Charlottesville, led Republicans in an effort to strip money for the proposed Explore Park - to be constructed along the Roanoke River - and the Virginia Air and Space Center in Hampton. Allen thought the $11 million the two projects were due to receive would be better spent on education.
But Allen raised no opposition to $5 million in funding for the Martinsville museum. Allen jokes that he already had "spears" coming at him from two powerful legislators - Del. Richard Cranwell, D-Vinton, who was fighting for Explore, and State Sen. Hunter Andrews, finance committee chairman and backer of the air and space center. He wasn't prepared to handle a third spear from Philpott, he quipped.
But in all seriousness, Allen said, "it is the normal and usual and accepted practice for the commonwealth to fund state museums, and that wasn't anything extraordinary or unusual . . . unlike the other two" projects.
Hager readily acknowledges that Philpott has played more than an auxiliary role in attracting legislative attention and dollars to the museum. "This museum - the Virginia Museum of Natural History - its time would not have come if it had not been for A.L. Philpott," Hager said.
Boaz's vision
Hager also credits Boaz, now the museum's curator of biological anthropology, with much of the facility's progress. "I think that Noel Boaz, Gail Gregory and [development director] Connie Gendron did a lot to attract the attention . . . . Noel had a vision that Noel, Connie and Gail went out and sold," Hager said.
Now, responsibility for the museum's vision belongs to Hager, 47, who started his career in museums 25 years ago. Before he accepted the Martinsville post, he was director of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont. - a museum that experienced tremendous growth during his 10 1/2 years there.
He was appointed after a national search and will receive a salary of $73,217 for the 1990-91 fiscal year. Hager's salary, allotted in the state budget by the General Assembly each year, is comparable to that of other Virginia state museum directors.
The Science Museum of Virginia's director will receive a salary of $73,229 for the 1990-91 fiscal year, while the director of Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will get $79,095.
In comparison, the salary of Chris Pendleton, executive director of Roanoke's Science Museum of Western Virginia, is considerably lower. Pendleton will receive a salary of $50,000 this fiscal year, which ends June 30.
But unlike the Martinsville museum, the Science Museum of Western Virginia is not a state agency. It receives about 20 percent of its budget from the state and raises the remainder itself, said Joesph Wright, president of the science museum's board of trustees.
Salaries for other Virginia Museum of Natural History employees follow a pay scale set by the state's department of personnel and training, said museum personnel officer Carolyn McDaniel.
Museum deputy director Kit Matthew receives a salary of $45,636. The museum's eight curators, each hired after an international search, earn salaries ranging from $38,195 to $52,162, depending on the experience they bring to the job. As one of the senior curators, Boaz's salary is at the top of that scale.
Now the museum's curator of biological anthropology, Boaz is no longer a part of the museum's administration. As rapid as the museum's growth might seem to an outsider, Boaz admits that things haven't gone as quickly as he would have liked.
But that doesn't mean the goals are out of reach.
"I would like to see the administration succeed in all its plans," the founder said. "I have hope that even though there have been some setbacks, we will get there. I'm very confident we will get there."
Boaz sees his role as helping to get the museum's message out, partly by concentrating on what he calls "cutting-edge research."
"If I can accomplish that, I think that will accomplish the greater aims of the museum as well."
by CNB