Nonprofit hopes to rediscover beloved Science Place exhibits

There is no shortage of great museums to visit in DFW but a nonprofit wants to revisit one from the past. During the early months of the COVID pandemic, Aven Stewart and a group of friends began reminiscing about the old Science Place Museum at Fair Park, the site of many field trips for North Texas school children. “We were sitting around talking about The Science Place and going through old memories and realized it was difficult to find memories that the Science Place even existed,” Stewart said.

The museum started as the Dallas Health Museum way back in 1946 and changed identity a couple of times before becoming The Science Place in 1986, a name and legacy that lasted until 2007 when it merged with the Dallas Children’s Museum and Dallas Museum of Natural History, a combination that eventually became the Perot Museum in 2012. For Stewart and friends, The Science Place was a source of inspiration in their youth and now again as adults. “The Science Place Foundation started as a project between four friends and three of us are engineers because we grew up at The Science Place,” Stewart said. The foundation’s mission is to track down, preserve and document the history of the beloved museum by finding as many of its old exhibits and attractions as they can. Doing so requires a fair share of sleuth work. “It is like discovering a lost artifact,” Stewart said. “There is a treasure hunt aspect to it and when you get closer and closer, you can feel it.”