Although most museums thrive in urban areas, Exploration Station was planted and cultivated–and has even become overgrown–in the midst of a farming community about two hours south of downtown Chicago.
Although it isn’t advertised much outside its Bradley environs, this children’s museum drew 42,000 visitors last year, a jump of 90 percent from the year before, according to museum director and founder Marilyn O’Flaherty of Bourbonnais. Included in that count were more than 11,200 students on field trips from Chicago and suburban schools, she said.
That boom has squeezed the museum’s space to its limits and driven its owner, the Bourbonnais Township Park District, to look for relief in expansion. In the fall, construction of a new building across the street from its current home will be complete, and patrons will be able to play and interact with many more exhibits in a facility four times as large.
But even in Exploration Station’s current cramped quarters (2,300 square feet, 1,800 of which are dedicated to exhibits), patrons can touch an elephant’s ear, pet the skins of exotic African animals, hold a real dinosaur bone, invite a furry-legged tarantula to crawl up their arms and wiggle through the nooks and crannies and tunnels of a kid-sized medieval castle.
Replicas of a 17th Century ship, space shuttle cockpit, post office mail room and a veterinary clinic as well as a magnet testing area are some of the other stations that hold children’s interest.
The idea of a children’s museum came to O’Flaherty in the late 1970s, but the business of teaching, raising a family and helping her husband, Gerald, through school put such plans on hold. Even so, she began to research children’s museums and their educational value.
“I’ve probably been to at least 25 children’s museums in the country,” said O’Flaherty, who taught art for 25 years in Bradley elementary schools. “I really got excited about hands-on teaching.”
In 1987, O’Flaherty took her vision to a public meeting of the Bourbonnais Township Park District. The newly formed district, in the midst of developing plans for farmland it was acquiring, picked up on it and asked her to develop the plans on a volunteer basis. The first steps were baby steps, O’Flaherty said: “I wanted to make sure there was an audience for the concept I had.”
So while she was still teaching, O’Flaherty began accumulating donated materials that could become child-friendly exhibits, such as a soap bubble table, magnets, rocks and animal skins and bones. Their appeal was road-tested via a 17-foot cargo trailer that O’Flaherty accompanied to local schools and festivals.
The traveling exhibits were a hit, she said, and pulled in not only patrons but also donations of more artifacts. Some people turned over treasures they found while cleaning out their attics, and local businesses contributed scrap items such as magnets that could be of use at the museum. A man who dabbled in taxidermy showed up with stuffed raccoons and foxes (still on display), and a woman’s extra yarn found its way to the art table.
With public approval secured, the collection found a temporary home in leased commercial space on Kennedy Drive in Bradley, and O’Flaherty was hired as director. It opened on July 28, 1990, and on its first weekend, attracted by free admission, 1,400 people visited.
“The only exhibit we had was the castle,” O’Flaherty said. “We did have display tables too. We had no air conditioning and it was 90 degrees out.”
(Current admission fees are $1 per person for groups and $1.50 for general admission, a fee that will likely rise, although museum officials have yet to determine the increase.)
Since that time, the district and O’Flaherty have been marking time until plans and funds came together for the museum’s dream home. The new Exploration Station, under construction on the district’s 180-acre historic Perry farm, will be joined by a living history farm (its centerpiece a house that came with the land) and walking trails that meander through natural prairies.
In the new museum’s 9,700 square feet, the feature most popular in its old quarters will be expanded thanks to a $57,000 grant from Ronald McDonald Charities. Among the more upscale features in the new medieval castle will be a throne room, drawbridge, moat, spiral staircases, dungeon and lookout tower.
Other additions will include one-sixteenth-scale models of NASA’s Apollo lunar spacecrafts, donated by the James M. Hunt Foundation. The six models acquired by the late Jim Hunt, a Bourbonnais businessman who died recently, had started out at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. They became the property of a museum in southern Illinois, which sold them to Hunt.
O’Flaherty has acquired many of the latest attractions by soliciting hand-me-downs or short-lived temporary exhibits from other museums. A recently acquired Water Wise display was first seen at the Shedd Aquarium, and art and science tables that were phased out by the Kaleidoscope science activity center in Kansas City, Mo., also have made their way to Bradley. Of the latter, O’Flaherty said, “Some of it needs a little repair, but the whole collection was probably worth $30,000 to $40,000.”
The park district issued $600,000 in bonds to cover half the cost of the new structure, said park district director Steven Cherveny, and fundraising efforts have contributed about $280,000 toward the other half.
“The goal is to get to be fully self-supporting,” Cherveny said. “We now serve mostly local people, but we consider it a regional benefit. We’re planning to add exhibits for older children and junior high students to serve a larger target audience.”
According to O’Flaherty, the museum’s annual budget for 1996 was $135,000, supplemented by volunteer help, without which “we couldn’t survive.”
Park district board president Brian Gadbois said, “There’s really nothing like this, short of the Chicago Children’s Museum (at Navy Pier), in a 60-mile radius. This is going to have a big impact on the community.”
And like all children’s museums, that impact is measured in their educational value, say many of the teachers who bring their classes to the museum.
Eloise Ryan is a teacher in the Ready, Set, Grow program at Lincoln Elementary School in Calumet City, which serves children from birth to age 4. “(Exploration Station) provides so many multisensory experiences for our children,” Ryan said.
“It enhances everything we do,” said Kathy Graham, a 1st-grade teacher at Willow School in Homewood. “The children need to be touching things.”
“Some children do not learn by sitting in a classroom,” said Lisa Pastoor, a 2nd-grade teacher at Christ’s Academy in Manhattan. “Hands-on activities are the best way to learn.”
Those expert opinions are echoed, in a simpler form, by those for whom the museum was created.
“I like the castle the best,” said 5-year-old Ryan Fitzpatrick of Bourbonnais. “I like dressing up as a knight. There are a lot of things to do.”
And 10-year-old Jacob Doxtater of Valparaiso, Ind., gave his review of Exploration Station while hammering nails at a workbench station. “I like things with wood,” he said. “The African exhibit and the skins are really cool.”
That’s just what O’Flaherty had in mind.
“I’m a teacher, and I love to see children learn. We provide them with opportunity,” she said. “We allow them to touch anything. . . . How many places can you go to touch a real elephant ear?”
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Exploration Station is at 396 N. Kennedy Dr., Bradley. Call 815-935-5665.
