The Texas Memorial Museum is on the north side of the UT campus, a long flight of stairs up the hill from the landmark statue of galloping mustangs on San Jacinto Boulevard. It requires an intentionally symbolic climb toward knowledge that speaks of the time the museum was built, a time when “higher education” meant just that.
Texans preparing for the 1936 Texas Centennial Celebration realized that there was no state museum and no gathering place for fossils, rocks, minerals, and other specimens, as well as cultural history artifacts. TMM was chartered as a museum of natural and cultural history by the Legislature in 1935. With a little more than $500,000 in federal and state money and about another $100,000 raised through the sale of centennial coins and a student fund drive — an amount that would translate into more than $7 million in 2003 — ground was broken in June 1936. Campaigning President Franklin D. Roosevelt triggered the dynamite blast that got construction under way.
French architect Paul Cret designed the cleanly square building with heavy bronze doors, all in the popular art-deco style of the day. It is made from Texas limestone, with dark French-marble panels inside the main entrance hall. The building originally was intended to have two additional wings, but when the Legislature refused to approve their construction, Cret resigned from the project. The wings have never been built, and the money originally intended for their construction is now being used for current renovations to the first and fourth floors of the museum.
The building opened in January 1939, immediately becoming home to the university’s natural history collections. It also became home to various cultural history collections and artifacts, including the Swenson Collection of Ancient Coins and Historical Medallions, the first collection ever donated to the university. Symbolically, that same collection was the first to be transferred to the UT Center for American History when TMM decided to focus exclusively on natural history in August 2002.
Only 600 people visited the museum in 1939, but more than 3 million have visited since, including schoolchildren by the busload throughout the facility’s history.
The main hall with its 35-foot ceiling is home to the fossil of a Texas pterosaur, a flying dinosaur with a 40-foot wingspan discovered at Big Bend in 1972. Preserved specimens of Texas plant and animal life are displayed on the third floor along with rocks and minerals. The fourth floor, which traditionally has held cultural history displays, is being renovated into an interactive environmental/natural sciences area.
The museum and other UT programs are major lenders of materials for display at the Bob Bullock State History Museum, which has no collections of its own.
The Texas Memorial Museum remains open during renovations. Admission is free.
This article appears in February 21 • 2003.