The Discovery Center is a nature center and wetlands boardwalk near downtown Murfreesboro, Tennessee.
It began as the "Discovery House", a children's museum, in 1986. During its first year of operation it had 11,000 visitors.
In 1995 after it outgrew its old location the Discovery House staff, Congressman Bart Gordon and Murfreesboro Mayor Joe Jackson, with the help of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, began to study the possibility of reusing the vacated site of the old Murfreesboro Water & Sewer Plant. After several years it was decided that, for environmental reasons, the old structures should be demolished and new buildings built.
In 1996 the City of Murfreesboro leased 61⁄2 acres of city land to the Discovery House. The Board of Directors, with the help of local citizens, was able to procure a large amount of privately donated wetlands. They then began a grassroots funding campaign to raise the money needed for the 'Discovery Center". By 1999 $1.8 million had been raised and the construction of the 18,000 sq ft (1,700 m2) center began in 2001. Its grand opening was held August 3, 2002.
As well as its museum the Discovery Center includes 20 acres (81,000 m2) of wetland.
The Discovery Center and the cities Greenway trail system and parks have reversed decades of local environmental damage and preserved large areas of vanishing wetlands and natural areas which include rare native plants.
Today the Center receives over 110,000 visitors annually.
Famous quotes containing the words discovery, center and/or spring:
“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.”
—Warren Beatty (b. 1937)
“The only thing that could spoil a day was people.... People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)