Imagine a secret door that takes you to another world. A mirrored wall turns out to be movable; through it, from a 19th-century home library – itself beautiful and worth exploring – one enters a land full of nature. The Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History packed big California outdoors inside three rooms now filled with an early learning space and exhibit called Wonder!
The first room has a study, old maps and a magnifying glass, one of many to be found in the exhibit that caters to young explorers, ages 4-8, and their families. It’s supposed to be Mary Norton’s office. Norton, current Executive Director Carla Bitter explains, was the first curator of the P.G. museum. The next rooms mimic the outdoors, with rocks and greenery and invisible birds singing the glory of hundreds of natural history objects.
“Every bell jar, every keyhole, every cubby is filled,” Bitter says about the small but packed space abundant in mammoth teeth, Aztec jars, fossilized halibut, snow goggles and taxidermied pigeons. Ninety percent of the objects have never been presented before, and many are local. Old Chinese fishing boats hang from the ceiling. Monterey cypress, kelp and poison oak are shown next to the banks of the Carmel River.
“Some people like it so much that within a week after we opened, they came back four times,” Bitter adds.
Of the museum’s permanent exhibits, Wonder! is the one created for children “to investigate the curiosities” of the museum, as the brochure reads, and “be inspired.”
The funding came from a $2 million capital campaign that launched in 2017. After a Covid closure, the museum presented some of its work in March 2022 when Nature Exchange opened as an exhibit of rocks and fossils dedicated to young conservationists. Wonder! is the second volume of the same effort.
Does it mean the facility is becoming more of a children’s museum? Young people and students are definitely the main customers. A preschool group meets each Saturday, and now Wonder! will be their meeting spot. There are junior naturalist excursions for ages 7-12, summer camps for grades K-5, plus middle school and high school science programs.
But no matter what age you are, Bitter promises, you will be mesmerized wandering through the young explorer’s imagination.
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