About the Springfield Science Museum The origins of the
Springfield Science Museum go back to 1859, the same year that
Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. The Museum
was established as the Springfield Ethnological and Natural
History Museum, “a collection of specimens of natural history
and a repository of arts and curiosities, a Museum, in fact, of
curious or instructive objects.”The first collections were
housed in a room in City Hall, then in the City Library
building, and then in what is now the George Walter Vincent
Smith Art Museum. In 1899, a new Museum of Natural History
building opened. The museum's Seymour Planetarium opened in
1937, the oldest American–built planetarium in the world! The
museum's Seymour Planetarium opened in 1937, the oldest
American–built planetarium in the world. Its projected image of
the sky was so accurate and realistic that the planetarium was
used to train pilots in celestial navigation during World War
II. The name of the museum was changed to the Springfiel