ASHEVILLE — For years, the Colburn Earth Science Museum has been cramped in the basement of Pack Place with only a small sign on Biltmore Avenue. Now the museum is stepping out downtown and moving to a more prominent space two blocks away.
Come next spring, the renamed Asheville Museum of Science will open its doors in the Wells Fargo Building on Patton Avenue, inviting visitors into a venue that doubles its current space. The museum could become a new magnet for families, whether local or visitors.
A new name and bigger space — 8,000 square feet vs. the 4,000 square feet in Pack Place — will allow for more displays and add to downtown’s vitality, said Anna Saylor, the interim executive director.
“We wanted to be part of Asheville’s new branding tag — Discovery Inside and Out,” she said. “We want to help revitalize that corridor along Patton Avenue that doesn’t have a lot of attractions.”
Last fiscal year, the Colburn welcomed 34,028 visitors with 23,000 Buncombe County residents and roughly 11,000 out-of-towners. School field trips made up a bulk of its business as 9,365 students from schools in 14 WNC counties came for hands-on instruction. Its fiscal budget for this year is $251,700.
In its new location, AMOS could see a 40 percent increase in visitors, Saylor said.
“A lot of couples come to Asheville for the restaurants and the craft beer, but they don’t always bring their families. Other than Splashville in the summer, there’s not a lot of kid-friendly attractions downtown,” said Jon Neumann, president of the Colburn board of directors.
The board started looking for a new home last year after its lease in Pack Place had been scheduled to expire this summer. Museum board members had planned on moving during the summer, but with an extended lease from the city of Asheville, which oversees Pack Place, they had more time to raise the necessary funds in a capital campaign.
Colburn officials have priced the move, new renovations and a few months of operation at just under $1.2 million.
The board didn’t want to follow the mistakes of a former Pack Place tenant and neighbor. The Health Adventure mounted an ambitious campaign in 2003 to build a new multi-million-dollar museum at the end of Broadway. After financing collapsed with the Great Recession, the children’s museum landed in the former Biltmore Square Mall but was closed in 2013.
“Comparisons are not really fair,” Neumann said. “This is a smaller-scale project, and we’re not trying to build a new building.”
Offering an expanded family-friendly attraction to visitors, the Colburn has applied for a $400,000 tourism product development grant from the Tourism Development Authority. The TDA board uses revenues from the county’s hotel tax to market the area and to fund projects with the potential to draw more visitors. Those grants are scheduled to be announced at the end of October.
The Colburn board has already reached out to corporate sponsors and the 400 museum members, securing $400,000 to match the potential TDA grant. “People are extremely excited about the potential of the move,” Saylor said. “We’re trying to provide a place to showcase the technology and innovation that is already here in Asheville.”
The Colburn has secured commitments or outright donations from Eaton Corp., AVL Technologies, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Hedrick Industries.
Rehab in the Wells Fargo space could start in November. The Colburn will keep its name and programming in place until the move early next year. AMOS could have a soft opening in March and a grand opening in April.
“The departure of the Health Adventure from downtown might have left a hole that the new Asheville Museum of Science has an opportunity to fill with its expansion,” said Marla Tambellini, deputy director of the Asheville Convention and Visitors Bureau. “Having a street-side entrance with prominent signage will make the attraction more visible to families and others.”
With the move down the street, the museum is getting even closer with a potential partner in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Center for Environmental Information in the Federal Building. The climatologists at work in Asheville could find new audiences for their work tracing potential changes in the Earth’s atmosphere and weather patterns.
More than minerals
The new name, AMOS, expands the museum’s scope well beyond the geology that was the institution’s genesis. The original collection came from Burnham Colburn, an Asheville bank president who built one of the first homes in Biltmore Forest around 1920.
An avid rockhound, Colburn scoured the mountains, mining for rare emeralds near Hiddenite and blood red rubies from Cowee. The Asheville bank president gathered perhaps the world’s largest private collection of rocks, minerals and Indian artifacts.
After donating much of his collection to the University of South Carolina, Colburn left about 300 of his finest specimens for a local museum at his death in 1959.
From its first home on Coxe Avenue, the gem collection moved to the basement of the Asheville Civic Center in 1976 and then to Pack Place.
AMOS will keep its connection to the past, exhibiting the Colburn Hall of Minerals inside the museum.
With more visitors, the museum plans to expand its current staff of five full-time employees, perhaps up to 15 to handle the added duties, Saylor said.
Vicky Ballard, the longtime director, recently retired and will serve as an adviser. Saylor, a financial consultant with the Colburn for the past year, was asked to step in. “My job is to get them down the road,” she smiled.
The new name, which was Saylor’s suggestion, reflects the broader sweep of sciences that educators and families can expect at the museum, with particular attention on the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math or STEM curriculum in North Carolina public schools.
AMOS will open with a new exhibit, “Magic Planet.” A 6-foot globe with internal projectors will display the changing climate and conditions of Earth, and can switch identities to other planetary neighbors in the solar system.
With the recent discovery of water on Mars and the fly-by of a spacecraft snapping shots of the junior planet Pluto, the Magic Planet can project those previously unknown images to audiences, young and old.
John Hankla will also return with his popular dinosaur exhibit, easily the Colburn’s most popular attraction in recent years, Saylor said.
The Colburn Earth Science Museum long ago dusted off any stereotypes as a static display of rocks in glass boxes. “It’s so much more than a rock museum. We educated 10,000 kids last year. I walk down there and see all these kids learning about earth science, that really hooks you,” Neumann said.
With 8,000 square feet of display space on the first floor of the Wells Fargo, the staff will be able to rotate exhibits on a more frequent basis. Saylor would like to see “Night at the Museum,” where couples could drop off their kids for science experiments while they go on a date night downtown.
“When I meet families with kids, if they don’t know anything about the Colburn, I tell them to pay admission and go see for themselves,” Neumann said. “It’s a hidden gem in the heart of downtown. As Asheville grows, we can grow.”
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