Fort Collins Museum of Discovery

If you had lived in Fort Collins in 1940, you would have noticed the bustle and excitement around the construction of a new building in Library Park. The Pioneer Museum, which would hold the collections of arrowheads and other artifacts accumulated by local residents, was finally being built! When the museum opened in April, 1941, residents spent hours exploring the shelves of treasures, forming life-long appreciation and passion for the cultural heritage of their community. Along with American Indian artifacts, objects from the former Camp Collins, early homesteaders, and town builders were on display.

As the years progressed, you would have seen that the exhibits weren’t the only things changing at the Pioneer Museum. As both the museum and the city’s Carnegie Library that shared the park outgrew their respective buildings, plans were made for a switch. In 1976 new library was built in a U-shape around the Pioneer Museum and the museum’s collections were moved across the park, into the old Carnegie Library building. By 1977, the original Pioneer Museum building was demolished and the museum’s name changed to The Fort Collins Museum to better reflect its broader community mission. Today the museum is transforming for a third time. Having joined in a partnership with Discovery Science Center, the new organization, The Fort Collins Museum & Discovery Science Center, will be building an exciting, innovative, and sustainable building on the banks of the Cache la Poudre River in north Old Town.

The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery is creating a place where meaningful opportunities for people of all ages to learn, reflect, and have fun through hands-on and collections-based explorations in science, culture, and history is a reality. The Museum strives to connect you to a deeper understanding of the world and your place in it, through objects, ideas, phenomenon, and events in the local community here and the global community beyond. Combining science and history to tell these stories offers experiences that are richer, deeper, and of greater community service than anything that has come before.

For more information, visit our website at fcmod.org

Building Community

The Fort Collins Museum of Discovery is in the process of building a new museum, scheduled to break ground in summer 2010. The goal is to design and build a museum that is a model of best practices in minimizing energy and environmental impact, while maximizing the building’s connections to the natural and cultural landscape it sits on. Located on the corner of College Avenue and Cherry Street, just east of Lee Martinez Park in Fort Collins, the 8-acre property extends down to the Cache La Poudre River and is bordered by railroad tracks, wetlands, community recreation spaces, and historic Old Town. Until the new facility is completed and the move from Library Park made, stop by the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery located at 200 Mathews Street, Fort Collins, and participate in the many programs, events, and exhibits taking place.

This will be the second museum built by citizen initiatives in Fort Collins. In 1939, The Hobby Club, supported by the Pioneer Association and the Daughters of Colorado Pioneers, proposed the idea of building a museum on the east side of Library Park. The majority of funding for new museum came from a Work Projects Administration allocation of $18,881, more than three-fourths of the $25,000 needed. By the time the museum opened, only $1,000 remained to be raised, and much of that had already been pledged. Along with the construction of the new museum, a citizen’s iniative moved the oldest residential structure between Bent’s Fort in southeastern Colorado and Fort Laramie in Wyoming—Antoine Janis and First Elk Woman’s cabin in Laporte—and reconstructed it on the museum’s property.