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Witte Memorial Museum opens
On this day in 1926, the Witte Memorial Museum opened in San Antonio.
The museum was largely the brainchild of Ellen D. Schulz Quillin, who
helped start the San Antonio Museum Association and raised $5,000 to
purchase Henry Philemon Attwater's collection of natural history
specimens. She initially stored the collection at Main Avenue High
School, where she was a science teacher, but successfully petitioned the
city for a site and funds for a museum to showcase the collection and
others like it. The building was constructed with public funds and a
$65,000 bequest to the city from local businessman Alfred G. Witte, who
stipulated that a museum be built in Brackenridge Park in memory of his
parents. The facility was known as the Witte Memorial Museum until 1984,
when the name was simplified to Witte Museum. The San Antonio Museum of
Art, which opened with much fanfare in 1981 in a former brewery, was
originally an outgrowth of the Witte.
- Links to Related Handbook of Texas Online Articles
- WITTE MUSEUM
- QUILLIN, ELLEN DOROTHY SCHULZ
- SAN ANTONIO MUSEUM ASSOCIATION
- SAN ANTONIO MUSEUM OF ART
- MUSEUMS
- Other Texas Day by Day Articles for This Date
- Liberty Gazette announces Shakespeare reading by Ada Bertha Théodore (1855)
- Filibusters captured at La Bahía (1821)
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