Red Mountain Museum

The Red Mountain Museum was a museum dedicated to the geology of Red Mountain in addition to the paleontology, biology and engineering of the area. The facility was located at 2230 Arlington Crescent South.

The museum had its beginnings in 1971 as a place to catalog and exhibit fossils discovered during the creation of the Red Mountain cut.

Property at the intersection of Arlington Crescent and 22nd Street South was donated to the city by the Linn-Henley Charitable Trust for use as a museum or park. The building itself, which opened in 1977, was an angular, modern composition, sheathed in wooden boards and perched at the side of the cut.

Visitors could view collections and interpretive displays inside the museum and also walk along a portion of the side of the cut above Red Mountain Expressway. Signs were erected to point out the history and geologic features of the mountain. Additional programs and exhibits focused on geology and paleontology, but also covered astronomy, physics, meteorology and other science topics. A mososaur skeleton was prominently displayed inside.

In 1991 the museum merged with the Discovery Place, a children's museum which had opened just down the street. Together they formed Discovery 2000, which raised funds for a new science center, which opened in July 1998 as the McWane Center in downtown Birmingham. Previously the Red Mountain Museum had planned an independent expansion, and some considered the merger and move to be part of a "hostile takeover" engineered by Mayor Richard Arrington, Jr^1.

After McWane's opening, some of the exhibits from the Red Mountain Museum were relocated there along with the museum's extensive fossil collection. In 2007 the City of Birmingham reached an agreement with the Dominican Sisters of St Cecilia Congregation to sell half of the museum property to St Rose Academy for $606,632.76. The sale was approved by the Linn-Henley Trust with the assurance that the funds would go toward displaying the museum's fossil collections to the public at the McWane Center. An "Alabama Sea Monsters" exhibit featuring the mososaur as well as a local Plesiosaur and a 15 1/2-foot-long sea turtle is scheduled to open on October 5, 2007. Remaining fossils will be used in future exhibits.

The former museum building was demolished beginning July 2, 2007. Plans call for the site to be used for parking in accordance with the school's master plan. The city retains the small neighborhood park adjacent to the former museum, as well as the locked access to the Red Mountain cut walkway. Discussions regarding the possibility of re-opening the interpretive cut have not moved forward.

Notes

1. James Lamb, quoted in Folse-2007

References

• Coman, Victoria L. (July 30, 2003) "Redmont Park OKs razing old Red Mountain Museum site". Birmingham News.
• Coman, Victoria L. (May 15, 2007) "Vote on selling museum site to St. Cecilia nuns expected." Birmingham News.
• Folse, Molly (August 16, 2007) "Leveled: The sad demise of the Red Mountain Museum." Birmingham Weekly.

External links

• Red Mountain Museum Records collection description at the Birmingham Public Library Archives.
• Alabama Collections Center page at the McWane Science Center