On Mark Walhimer’s first day as a Southern Utah University faculty member, he asked four people where to find the Garth and Jerri Frehner Museum of Natural History. None of them could point him in the right direction. With twenty years of experience as a museum consultant, Walhimer’s top priority as the museum’s new manager is visibility.
The natural history museum is located on campus on the first floor of the L.S. & Aline W. Skaggs Center for Health & Molecular Sciences. Hidden down a long hallway, the door to the museum bears its name in small, white print. This unassuming door is the gateway to a haven of history.
Exhibits boast the archaeological, geological and paleontological origins of Cedar City’s natural world. Fossils, minerals and shells adorn rows of display cases. Their most famous piece in the collection is The Dancing Calves. The calves were born in Paragonah in 1949 with two heads and two bodies, but they were unfortunately conjoined at the chest and died at birth.
The dancing claves are the museums’ most famous exhibit.
Although their collection is impressive, Walhimer noted, “Nobody knows we’re here.” As his first week came to a close, he was filled with ideas for how to revolutionize the space. For instance, there is no dedicated parking for visitors who come specifically to see the museum. A lack of visible signage is another issue Walhimer hopes to solve.
The museum has been averaging around 20 visitors per month for some time, but Walhimer hopes to grow that number. In order to make these hopeful changes into a reality, the museum has partnered with the STEM Center for Teaching and Learning, an on-campus outreach program that teaches science, technology, engineering and mathematics to K-12 students in southern Utah.
Dylan Kirklin is the center’s director and an alumnus of SUU who is helping the museum through their transition now that Walhimer has taken charge. “Dean Heyborne at the College of Natural Sciences asked us to kind of oversee renovations and updates in the museum I guess, for lack of a better word, so that we can make it a better space for the community, more accessible for the community and a better research and learning tool for the university,” Kirklin said.
One of the STEM Center’s events, Wonder Wednesday, is hosted in local spaces like the Frehner Museum, the Cedar City Library, the Southern Utah Museum of Art and the Frontier Homestead State Park. STEM Center Assistant Director Lynn Hicken manages this monthly community activity. “We invite [community members] to come into the STEM Center and to do fun, hands-on activities for kids K-5,” Hicken said.
When students visit the museum, whether through Wonder Wednesday or on a field trip organized by the STEM Center, their activities teach them about natural history. “Last month they did a scavenger hunt, so they got to look for different things in the museum, and they did a rock painting activity as well,” Hicken said. She added that, in an upcoming Wonder Wednesday, students will learn how to identify the age of trees by counting their rings.
Shells and other artifacts of southern Utah’s natural history are displayed is cases and in drawers at the museum.
Also residing inside the museum is a group of dedicated staff and volunteer workers who are helping Walhimer prepare to move the museum into a new era.
History and anthropology student Tommy Humphrey is a museum assistant who is helping to create an exhibit of arrowheads and other rocks that were once part of Native American weaponry. “We have way more than just arrowheads in those cases. There are things like drillpoints, knives, spearpoints, so my display is kind of talking [about] how not every pointed rock you find on the ground is an arrowhead,” he said.
Emma Czarnecki, a museum volunteer and elementary education student, is excited to help guide tours for local school children, in line with her major. “I’m going to be helping out with cataloging. I’ll be helping [the chief museum assistant] with lesson planning and activity planning; I’m very excited about that,” she said.
Walhimer hopes to tailor the museum’s new direction to what SUU students like his staff want. There are lots of opportunities for students of all interests to become involved with the museum as staff members or volunteers. Walhimer even wants the input of students who just plan to visit the museum
“In my mind, the students are the exhibit developers. What would they be interested in?” Walhimer wondered. To make the changes he wants to see in the museum, he hopes that they can “promote the science happening at the university so that [it] becomes a showcase for that science, that [it] becomes a community resource.”
Getting university-level students involved with the education of future generations helps ensure that the Frehner Museum will be a force for good in the local community. This melding of local and college-level learners promotes discovery of southern Utah and encourages the next class of T-Birds to value and understand the world we live in and the history from which we came.
Author: Lily Brunson Photographer: Chloe Copeland and Lily Brunson Editor: Kale Nelson outdoors@suunews.net
This article was originally published in the March 2024 edition of the University Journal.
