The Delmarva Discovery Museum is set to reopen at the end of May after a flood of donations worth around $100,000. In our weekly series with the Bay Journal Delmarva Public Media's Don Rush talks with reporter Jeremy Cox about the facilities financial struggles. The full interview can be heard on this Friday's Delmarva Today at noon on WSDL and WESM.
RUSH: The Delmarva Discovery Museum in Pocomoke City will reopen on May 30th. This is Don Rush. On March 17th the facility had announced that it would close for good citing financial woes. Up with an influx of a hundred thousand dollars in donations, the museum saw its way to open up again for the summer tour season. In a weekly series with the Bay Journal, we talk with reporter Jeremy Cox about the prospects for the museum.
COX: If you're hearing my voice right now, chances are that you've been to the Delmarva Discovery Museum. [It] opened back in the late two thousands, and it's been really a mainstay of the school field trip circuit. If you have younger children, you've probably taken your kids there, but I wouldn't be surprised if you were kind of in the one and done variety. You visited once. You go, "that was cool. I don't need to go there again." And museum operators, they acknowledge that it's hard to get those return visits right? So the 16,000 square foot nature museum, as much as they've added things over the years, like the otter display, which is very popular, they really depend on local visits. And if locals aren't persuaded to come back again and again, then you're going to see your attendance fall off. And they depend heavily on attendance for revenue.
RUSH: So I understand that there was a major decline really beginning with COVID-19...[The museum saw] attendance drops, I think from 20,000 to 15,000. And it's not recovered. What's going on with that?
COX: Right, I mean, a lot of places, indoor places in particular, people stopped going places, and in some cases they never really recovered. And fortunately, the museum was in that latter group that people found other ways to commune with nature. A lot of us were going outside even. And so it just sort of fell off people's radar screen, I think, to make a day trip out of going down to Pocomoke. And I mean, this wasn't happening in a vacuum. I mean, downtown Pocomoke City is kind of small, not a tourist draw on its own. This was kind of the anchor of it. And so if people weren't coming for the museum, chances are they weren't going to be drawn in by something else, like one of the handful of restaurants or shops or things like that. So it's sort of a symptom of the overall lack of energy in that downtown space.
RUSH: I understand that there was about a hundred thousand dollars, I guess, in donations. Obviously that'll go only so far. What do we expect in terms of the museum continuing to being open and being able to raise more money?
COX: Well, I wanted to linger over that for a minute. I mean, just in the course of a few days after this announcement went on social media, Christy Gordon, who runs the museum set, I mean, it was just this outpouring of support from the community. Matching grants and individual donations, big and small, to where they were able to raise that hundred thousand dollars. That will only last so long. It will probably get them through the summer tourism season. And then the hope is that they can have a more sustainable plan going forward so this never happens again. So they set another goal to raise another a hundred thousand, and that will be used to bring the facility more up to date. That first a hundred thousand is really just patching and repairing and repurposing a little bit. But the hope is that with this second hundred thousand dollars that they can modernize the facility with the help of a pair of new advisory groups. A friends group, for example, providing not just ideas and brainstorming, but some volunteer elbow grease behind the scenes.
RUSH: Bay Journal reporter Jeremy Cox on the reopening of the Delmarva Discovery Museum in Pocomoke City. The full interview can be heard on this Friday's Delmarva Today at noon on WSDL and WESM. This is Don Rush for Delmarva Public Media.
