By Michelle Quigley
On Feb. 8, 1941, the Norton Gallery and School of Art opened its doors to the public in West Palm Beach. The museum was founded by Chicago industrialist Ralph Hubbard Norton and his wife, Elizabeth Calhoun Norton, pictured below.
Tags: museums, This Week in History
Before they dug up Suzie the mastodon’s bones, they broke ground for the Science Museum.
This 1960 photo shows (foreground, from left) Gary Myers (son of Wyckoff and Nancy Myers), and Ellen and Carolyn Downey (daughters of Dan and Doris Downey) digging for buried treasure.
As Nancy Myers explains: “I was president of the Junior Welfare League — which later was called the Junior League of the Palm Beaches — when we received our charter to establish ‘The Junior Museum’ in 1959. On Groundbreaking Day, we buried all kinds of small surprises over an acre of land on our property in Dreher Park in West Palm Beach. About 150 kids showed up carrying shovels, and we got lots of publicity. We eventually raised enough money to build the first section of the building, which opened in 1961. This was followed by the second section that housed the Spitz planetarium equipment. Many residents of Palm Beach County backed the project.”
This story and many others are included in the official Palm Beach County centennial book, Palm Beach County at 100. Order your copy now!
Tags: museums
Early 1970s photo of the fossilized mastodon skeleton found in 1969. Photo courtesy of South Florida Science Museum.
In 1969, a construction worker named Coot dug up some “brown stones” while digging a canal. Those stones were bones — part of what many consider Florida’s fossil discovery of the century. Today, you can visit some of those bones at the South Florida Science Museum.
What is Suzie the mastodon?
She’s the only complete mastodon skeleton standing in Florida, on display at the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach. Her bones were discovered in the spring of 1969, not far from the museum.
She was a juvenile mastodon, a type of prehistoric elephant that roamed Florida and much of North America during Earth’s most recent Ice Age. Mastodons and their northern cousins, woolly mammoths, went extinct about 10,000 years ago — far more recently than the dinosaurs that died about 65 million years ago.
How was she discovered?
A dragline operator, Coot Vernor, turned up some stones while digging a drainage canal south of Okeechobee Boulevard. A few days later, young Charlie Wilkins, a 13-year-old who lived on a farm nearby, found more “brown stones” and took them home. Charlie’s parents realized they were ancient bones.
Vernor turned up another pocket of well-preserved bones, and the owner of his company called Dr.Jess Moody, president of the newly organized Palm Beach Atlantic College, to ask whether they would be interested in “a bunch of old bones.”
Under the supervision of Howard Converse Jr., several local volunteer groups, including the Gem & Mineral Society of Palm Beach County, excavated this ancient riverbed site. As it turned out, that second pocket of bones was actually the rib cage and skull of an imperial mammoth. Also uncovered were the skeletons of bison, horses and land tortoises — all of which roamed the grassy savannas of Ice-Age Florida some 20,000 years ago.
Want to see Suzie? For admission and directions to the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach, go to sfsm.org or call (561) 832-1988.
A version of this story ran on page 1D of The Palm Beach Post on Monday, November 16, 2009.
Tags: museums
