For most of its sixty-year history, the Dallas Health Museum and its successor, The Science Place, shaped how generations of Dallasites first encountered science, anatomy, and the natural world. When the institutions merged, and later became the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in 2012, that history was effectively erased — exhibits dispersed, records scattered, and the public memory of one of the country's earliest public health museums quietly faded out of view. Our documentary sets out to reconstruct that story in full: the founding of the Dallas Health Museum in 1946, its complicated place within a segregated Fair Park, its transformation into The Science Place, and the long tail of objects, people, and exhibits that survived the institution itself.
The film is built around firsthand accounts. We have already completed several interviews with former staff — curators, exhibit designers, educators, and administrators whose work spanned the museum's most active decades. Their recollections are the closest thing that exists to a continuous institutional memory, and in many cases they are the only people who can identify a recovered artifact, explain how an exhibit actually functioned, or describe the day-to-day life of a museum that no longer has any official record-keeper. Additional interviews are scheduled as we continue to locate former personnel.
Alongside the interviews, the documentary follows our object recovery missions in real time. Over the past several years, the Foundation has tracked down former exhibits in storage units, private garages, defunct museum holdings, and — in one instance — a dirt-floor basement. Each recovery is its own small detective story, and we have filmed many of them as they unfolded, from the original paperwork search through the moment an artifact comes back into Foundation care. We have also assembled a substantial archive of historical footage: promotional reels, local news segments, exhibit walkthroughs, and home-video material contributed by former visitors and staff. Taken together, the recovered objects, the recorded interviews, and the historical footage give us the raw material to tell this story properly for the first time.
Support the Project
The documentary is being produced on a shoestring budget. Filming, travel, equipment, archival licensing, post-production, and the ongoing cost of digitizing recovered footage all add up quickly, and the Foundation operates without institutional backing. Our board members cover what they can out of their own pockets — and have done so for years — but we have reached the point where finishing the film well will require outside support. If you grew up with The Science Place, remember the Dallas Health Museum, or simply believe this history is worth preserving, please consider making a donation. Every contribution goes directly toward production, and every contributor helps ensure that the story of these museums is told before the people who lived it are no longer here to tell it.
Follow this link to our Donor Portal