Historical Museum of Southern Florida

Mission:

The Historical Museum of Southern Florida’s mission is to tell the stories of South Florida and the Caribbean. The museum promotes understanding of the past in order to inform the present and create a better quality of life.

History:

Research, education and collection began with the founding of the Historical Association of Southern Florida in 1940 and nonprofit incorporation in 1941. During the 1960s, the creation of permanent staff positions saw the development of collections policies and increased education, exhibition and outreach programs in line with its mission. The association opened the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in 1962, its first museum. Ten years later the Historical Museum moved to a larger facility and expanded its educational programs. In 1976, the Miami-Dade County Commission invited the museum to be a major tenant in the planned Miami­-Dade Cultural Center in downtown Miami, funded by a $40 million “Decade of Progress” Bond Issue.

In 1984, the Historical Museum of Southern Florida moved into its third home, an imposing, Spanish fortress-like structure, itself a reflection of the South Florida and Caribbean history it would hold. Designed by world-renowned architect Phillip Johnson, the then forty-year old organization, one of the oldest cultural institutions in Miami, occupied a third of the new Miami-Dade Cultural Center, and the remainder two-thirds housed the Miami-Dade Main Public Library and Miami Art Museum.

Contributions ranged from local school board funds to federal grants, including the National Endowment of the Arts, and from local arts philanthropist Mitchell Wolfson Jr., heir of Wometco Enterprises. Object donations also flooded in, including a complete double elephant folio edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America.

Earmarked as the official Miami-Dade archaeological depository, the museum houses material from numerous sites, including the 2,000-year-old Miami Circle believed to be built by Tequesta Indians. The Research Center, widely used by professionals and novices alike, includes 6,000 bound volumes, 1,900 maps and more than one and a half million photographic images, including collections from the Miami News, The Miami Herald, Claude C. Matlack and South Florida pioneer Ralph M. Munroe.

The Historical Museum’s 40,000 square foot facility provides temporary and permanent exhibition space, classrooms, a theater, Research Center, museum store, offices and controlled collections storage. It is home to more than 12,000 three-dimensional local artifacts, including a lighthouse lens, refugee rafts, a 1920s trolley car, gold and silver recovered from seventeenth and eighteenth century shipwrecks and artifacts from Pan American Airways. Much of the collection illustrates the main themes permeating South Florida history: environmental influences, immigration and migration, maritime industries, aviation, tourism, development and Miami as the crossroads of the Americas.

In 2004, the Building Better Communities general obligation bond was passed to build Museum Park. Voters agreed to $100 million for a new Miami Art Museum and $175 million for a new Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium, to include 25,000 square feet of exhibition and educational space for the Historical Museum.

Nearly half of the exhibition space will display a permanent gallery highlighting Miami’s status as a hemispheric city, 8,500 for temporary exhibitions on the history and cultural traditions of the Americas, 1,500 for exhibition processing and 5,000 for educational programming. The exhibitions will be designed with the latest in museum technologies, including recreated environments, graphics, multi-media and interactive elements.

Island Gardens, a luxurious waterfront development by Flagstone Property Group on Watson Island, will include 4,000 square feet of gallery space for a local maritime museum, managed by the Historical Museum. The permanent exhibition space will examine human interaction with the South Florida aquatic environment from prehistoric times to the present.