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 early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am the center of the world, but the control panel seems to be somewhere else.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“We must not suppose that, because a man is a rational animal, he will, therefore, always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and consequentially in pursuit of it. No, we are complicated machines; and though we have one main spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometime stop that motion.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)