The Ghost of Museums Past

The summer of 2021 marked the ten year anniversary of the closure of the Smithsonian Naturalist Center in Loudoun County, Virginia.  The Naturalist Center was a microcosm of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, containing minerals, rocks, fossils, preserved plants and animals, and even a few anthropological items.  Visitors got to not just look at the specimens, but touch and closely examine them, and go through drawers to see the Center’s full collections, something not possible at other museums.  

I used to volunteer there when I was young, or at least younger than I am now.  

The Naturalist Center came into existence in the Seventies (I think); it was housed in the Natural History Museum until late 1995, when it was moved out to make space for an IMAX theater.  An agreement was made with the government of Loudoun County under which the Center would be given a site in an office park by the Leesburg Airport to function as a resource for science education in the Loudoun County school system.  This arrangement was only supposed to last for a few years, but ultimately it continued until 2011.

I started volunteering at the Center to give myself something to do in the summer after I graduated from college, when the collections were being packed up for the move to Loudoun; I enjoyed it so much that I ended up driving out to the Loudoun location every week or two for the next fifteen years as my various work schedules would allow. 

I would work with the fossils and the preserved reptiles and amphibians, cataloging new specimens, repairing things that broke, putting together a few skeletons, and otherwise engaging with the collections.  And occasionally, some member of the public would bring in or send in something to be identified, and I would take a look at it.  (I posted about the absolute strangest such incident several years ago.) 

Ultimately, some powerful people in the Smithsonian decided that the Naturalist Center needed to move back into the Natural History Museum in Washington, DC.  Unfortunately, when the Center was returned to the District, most of the collections were dispersed for various reasons.  The new version that was eventually unveiled is known as Q?rius, which has a lot fewer specimens, and a lot more video screens.  And since working with the specimens was what I enjoyed, I don’t have much interest in Q?rius (nor can I even remember how to spell it without extensive research). 

Anyway, Naturalist Center was fun, as a few things in life are, and it is gone, as many things in life are. 

Here are some videos that I shot in the last year before the Naturalist Center closed, and posted on YouTube about five years ago for the enjoyment of former volunteers.