“When Mr. Kirkland decided he wanted to do this [open Discovery Park of America], 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, Tennessee, 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 Rippy 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. And by the end of last year, more than one million discovered this museum tucked away in Northwest Tennessee. “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,” says Rippy.
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 toward 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.
THE BIG SLIDE
The biggest attraction for the kids is the jumping-off point for the three-story Human Slide located on the top floor of the museum. 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.
GIVING BACK
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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
731-885-455
discoveryparkofamerica.com