January 10, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Jack Rouse and Associates Inc.
At the McKenna Children’s Museum, in New Braunfels, Tex., young visitors can tend a garden, pretend to be a doctor, nurse, or ambulance driver, or shop at a grocery store. The market, with its metal shopping carts, is especially popular with youngsters, says Peggy Maxwell, the museum’s executive director. “It’s a chance for them to be independent,” she says. “They get to be adults, pretend adults, and get to buy the food that they want and check out, and we have little checkout stations. And they like using the scanners and the carts.”
The institution was founded in 1986 by a group of local parents. After visiting children’s museums in Houston, they wanted to duplicate those experiences closer to their hometown, which is in the middle of the state’s southern Hill Country.
At first, the museum featured only temporary exhibits at a local shopping center. In 2003, McKenna Memorial Hospital, also in New Braunfels, took the museum under its wing, setting it up in the hospital’s community-outreach center. The following year, a building purchased by the hospital was designated as the museum’s new home. A capital campaign by the McKenna Healthcare Foundation, the hospital’s fund-raising entity, has earned approximately $2.9-million to renovate the museum’s new space and support its exhibits.
The museum, which attracted 73,000 visitors in 2007, operated last year on an annual budget of $610,000. Admission and membership fees generate nearly three-quarters of its revenue, says Ms. Maxwell; about 11 percent of the museum’s funds come from government grants, while the remainder are given by corporations, foundations, and individuals.
The museum’s charm, says Ms. Maxwell, is the way it evokes simpler times: “I’ve been to children’s museums all over the country and everybody has fun things that they can do. Ours is really hands-on. We didn’t want a lot of technology. We wanted a [place] where the kids can kind of go back in time and just play and pretend.”
Here, visitors explore the Under the Comal River exhibit, which is decorated with 500 papier-mâché fish made by art students at high schools in New Braunfels.
