Montshire Museum of Science
Near Woodstock, Vermont
The Montshire Museum of Science opened in nineteen seventy-six as a community science center connected to Dartmouth College, originally housed in a former bowling alley building in Hanover, New Hampshire. Its name blends Vermont and New Hampshire, the two states it has always straddled. In nineteen eighty-nine it moved to a new building on the Connecticut River in Norwich, Vermont, designed to put science exhibits next to living ecosystems: the riverbank, the woods, and a series of outdoor trails where weather, water, and wildlife become the exhibit.
The museum has won a national reputation for hands-on science education, particularly for children, in a region that otherwise has few large cultural institutions. It is a reminder that rural New England has consistently punched above its weight in science and engineering, a tradition rooted in the same Connecticut River valley where precision manufacturing and Ivy League research grew up side by side.
