History
On December 12, 1981, the first children entered the original Children’s Museum in downtown Minneapolis. Known as “Minnesota’s AwareHouse”, the museum allowed children to experience the innovative idea of hands–on children’s museums. Children who visited the museum have found creative, colorful, educational, safe environments to explore and have discovered galleries and programs based on principles of learning. The museum founders, Marialice Harwood, Kate Donaldson and Suzanne Payne, built a museum based on the philosophy that there would be no “Do not touch” signs. During the first year, the museum had 65,000 visitors.
Over the next few years, attendance grew to 80,000 and the museum quickly outgrew the original space in downtown Minneapolis. In 1985, the museum moved to an old blacksmith’s shop in Bandana Square. Attendance in the first year at this location jumped to 200,000. By the early 1990s, the museum’s visitors and exhibits again outgrew the space in Bandana Square. The doors to Minnesota Children’s Museum in downtown St. Paul opened with 65,000 square feet (6,000 m2) of gallery and program space in September 1995. Today, more than five million children and their families have discovered the spark of learning through play.
Read more about this topic: Minnesota Children's Museum
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“He wrote in prison, not a History of the World, like Raleigh, but an American book which I think will live longer than that. I do not know of such words, uttered under such circumstances, and so copiously withal, in Roman or English or any history.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)