Discovery Park of America is a crazy idea.
“When Mr. Kirkland decided he wanted to do this, he came to me. I was the first one who heard it,” says CEO Jim Rippy. “Still, to this day, I can’t believe it.”
Robert Kirkland, who passed away in 2015, was the Union City entrepreneur behind the Kirkland’s chain of home furnishing stores. His wife Jenny is a semi-retired philanthropist still living in the same small Obion County community — 120 miles straight up Highway 51 from downtown Memphis, just south of the Kentucky border — where Robert grew up. One day, almost a decade ago, Kirkland called up his old friend Rippy to run a notion by him.
“Basically, his idea was that he wanted to bring to West Tennessee what people would not get an opportunity to directly see somewhere else, like New York or Washington,” Rippy says. “He wanted to let people in this part of the world see things they would never get to see, to increase their knowledge of what the world really is like, not just what you are here. To travel without traveling, not have to go so far, and have it not be so expensive.”
Kirkland thought they could get it done for about $20 million. “He didn’t want to call it a museum,” explains Rippy. “We’re kind of a hybrid. Education first, entertainment second, and tourism third. So whatever we do, I don’t want it to be a stuffy place. I want it to be a place where people can touch it, get in it, feel it. I don’t want it to just be stuff on the wall.”
To ensure it would be a true community project, Kirkland and Libby called for volunteers to help flesh out the idea. To their surprise, more than 250 people attended the meeting. He said, “Think outside the box! Tell us anything you would like to see,” recalls Rippy.
Before the Discovery Park of America opened on November 1, 2013, the cost ballooned from $20 million to more than $80 million. Museum and theme park experts they consulted all cautioned against locating the attraction in Union City. “Rural West Tennessee is not that heavily populated,” says Rippy. “Neither is Arkansas or Kentucky. Everybody said we’d be lucky if we hit 100,000 [annual visitors].”
The experts were wrong. By the end of 2014, more than 270,000 people had visited Discovery Park. “We’ll hit a million before this November,” says Rippy.” I’ll be truthful. I don’t know how it ended up being so good. I know we had the best people, but we had no experience.”
WIDENING THE MIND
The Discovery Park of America sits on the outskirts of Union City. The 120-foot Observation Tower of the central Discovery Center is easily the most prominent structure in this town of 13,000. The Center was designed by Verner Johnson, Inc., an architecture firm based out of Boston, Massachusetts, that specializes in museums. The flowing structure boasts more than 70,000 square feet of exhibit space in nine galleries. “It’s very interactive, says marketing director Mary Nita Bondurant. “In every gallery, there’s something you can do that’s hands-on.”
Like the CEO, Bondurant has been with Discovery Park since the inception. “I was a volunteer chairman of the marketing committee,” she says. “I planned the original groundbreaking, when we turned over the first shovel of dirt.”
The nine permanent gallery exhibits inside the Center each had their own development committees. “We’re 10 miles from UT Martin. Where we didn’t have expertise, we borrowed professors. Mr. Kirkland sent people all over the place to get information and find out things for their gallery. My husband was on the natural history committee with two professors from UT Martin. We went out West to buy dinosaurs. Who gets to do that?” says Bondurant.
The thunder lizards occupy the largest open space inside the center, and form the backbone of the ground-floor Natural History gallery. A mastodon skeleton guards the entrance to the interactive exhibits, designed by New York museum designers Thinc. The Natural History gallery traces the entire history of the planet, with an extensive gems and minerals collection, and a giant interactive globe that can display maps of not only our planet, but all of the planets in the Solar System.
A wall-sized bookshelf with a “secret” door beacons towards the Enlightenment Gallery. A sign over the door reads, “Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit.” Inside are a variety of artifacts, including a reclining Thai Buddha statue and replicas of the Rosetta Stone and the Ark of the Covenant. “We call this our cabinet of curiosities,” says Bondurant. “Things that don’t really fit into the themes of any of our other galleries end up here.”
Beyond that is the Transportation Gallery, which tells the story of the evolution of the car with pristine artifacts from automotive history. “We wanted to give the history of cars, not just 10 Corvettes,” says Rippy.
Visitors are free to meander through the interconnected curving galleries at their own pace. “There are no halls; there are no straight lines. You just kind of migrate from one gallery to another,” says Rippy.
LOCAL STORY
The most significant events inthe history of northwestern Tennessee were the series of earthquakes that hit the area in 1811-1812. Peaking at 7.5 on the Richter scale, that earthquake swarm remains the most powerful seismic event to hit the eastern United States. Most famously, the final earthquake, which took place on February 7, 1812, blocked streams and subsided a large area, leading to the formation of Reelfoot Lake 20 miles west of Union City.
There weren’t very many people in the area two centuries ago — just tribes of native Americans and a handful of white farmers and traders — but one of the Discovery Center’s most popular attractions gives you an idea of what it was like. The Earthquake Simulator is a bone-rattling, 15-minute experience that provides thrills while teaching visitors about all the geophysics behind the shake, rattle, and roll.
A wooly mammoth skeleton guards the entrance to the Regional History gallery. An aquarium full of local species includes a tunnel to a glass dome, so visitors can get up close and personal with the fish without getting wet. Nearby is one of the crowns of the Discovery Center’s exhibits. “One of our biggest finds was the Native American collection,” says Rippy. “We have over 18,000 artifacts. We got really lucky. We found a guy who had been picking up that stuff for years and years. He was getting real old, and we bought the whole collection.”
The awe-inspiring array takes up an entire, curved wall. It includes several Clovis points, 13,000-year-old artifacts that archeologists say represent one of North America’s earliest native technological cultures. One cachet of ancient artifacts was found by a boy in Hickman County, Kentucky, only 16 miles away from the Discovery Center.
TALES OF VALOR
The Military Gallery usesartifacts to tell the history of America’s wars, from the American Revolution to the present. Civil War history is, of course, a major emphasis here on the border between the Confederacy and the Union, but the most impressive sights to be seen are in the soaring Lower Level gallery, stuffed with mechanized artifacts from the twentieth century. An early English tank, now a hundred years old, shows the beginnings of mechanized warfare. Its crude camouflage and wood-framed, barbed-wire crown are a far cry from the advanced armor of today. There are also jeeps from World War II and a Vietnam-era helicopter, all open to exploration. Next to the stairs squats a sinister pair of objects: Scale models of Little Boy and Fat Man, the first two atomic bombs developed by the United States and dropped on the Japanese in 1945.
Bondurant says the sheer size of the collection can be daunting. “People who are interested in reading, seeing, and learning from everything will often come up to the ticket counter asking to upgrade to a two-day pass. They’ll stay another night to get to see it all.”
THE BIG SLIDE
Half of the third floor isdevoted to the Science, Space, and Technology gallery. The development of information technology is well-represented, with an original Apple I circuit board and cameras from the expensive and rare to the everyday.
The Starship Theater is a hybrid planetarium show that takes guests on a light-speed tour of the deepest regions of space using Hubble Space Telescope images. The Energy Gallery explores the future of technologies that will power our children’s world, and right next door, the kids take interactivity to a new level with hands-on science experiments. The 45-minute show is directed by the guests, which means it’s different every time.
But the biggest attraction for the kids in this area is the jumping-off point for the three-story Human Slide. A vast metal sculpture of a jovial figure in a cap holding a globe forms the exterior support for the slide, which takes visitors back down to the lower level in a big hurry. The slide, which was fabricated in Germany and assembled in Chicago, was named number two in the world by the Rough Guides travel website. It sees near constant use by children of all ages.
ECLECTIC COLLECTION
If the interior of the Disco-very Center is filled with an eclectic assortment of exhibits and artifacts, that goes double for the 50-acre Discovery Park. In the shadow of the Space Age metal tower is a collection of pioneer-era log cabins saved from decay in the surrounding area. “We started out with two or three log cabins. They were picked up and moved here. We ended up with 14 log cabins given to us. But when you are given a log cabin, you need to get ready to spend some money,” says Rippy.
Extensive steps were taken to find and preserve all of the outdoor artifacts. “We had this theory: If we’re going to put it out there, we’re going to make it the best. If we’re not, we’re not going to do it,” says Rippy. “We don’t bring anything out that we don’t recondition.”
Beyond the cabins, a cavernous barn houses a collection of rare tractors, some dating back more than a century. All of them have been fully restored to running condition.
On the other side of the North Lake is an old grist mill that began its life in Virginia before being moved to Pigeon Forge before the Discovery Park staff found it. “We tore it down and brought it back. We had two old men actually rebuild the building from scratch. There are no nails in it. It took two years,” says Rippy.
On the other side of the Center is a geodesic dome filled with historic items from the Space Race, including a rare test model of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, which paved the way for the Apollo moon landings.
By the South Lake is an actual nineteenth-century church that was reconstructed on the property. Bondurant says the chapel is an example of Kirkland’s attention to detail. “He micromanaged all this. He got so particular that, when they put the chapel up, he changed the paint over a door with stained glass from one color white to another color white.”
One of the most impressive sights in the park is the extensive collection of restored trains that surround a recreated depot by the South Lake. In the middle of the last century, European travelers went in style in these now-restored passenger cars. “The trains were made in Sweden, and they were shipped to Maine,” says Rippy. “We bought them in Maine, and had to get them shipped here and restored. That was a big problem,” says Rippy.
“It cost more to get the trains from Maine to Discovery Park than it did to buy the trains,” says Bonderant. “But then we had them completely restored, and they’re beautiful. When you go out there, there are five full-sized cars that you can go through to experience what it was like to travel on train cars back in the day.”
GIVING BACK
Taken as a whole, the park is a look inside the minds, interests, and fascinations of an entire community, filtered through the coordinating influence of Kirkland. “I still go out and read stuff I have never seen before, and I’ve been here since Day One,” says Rippy.
Through good fortune and hard work, Kirkland was able to amass a fortune. But he still stayed true to his people and community, and Discovery Park of America is his way of giving back, says Bondurant. “He is a world traveller. But he knows people in Obion County aren’t. Kids stand there and stare at the escalator because they’ve never seen one. We’re in a very rural, not-wealthy area. He wanted people to get to see and experience some things he has been able to see and experience.”
Discovery Park of America
830 Everett Blvd.
Union City, TN 38261
731-885-5455
discoveryparkofamerica.com
