The Middlesex County Museum and Historical Society is hosting an open house on Sunday afternoon, September the 27th, at 3:00 pm for the new Discovery Center. The invitation is open to the general public to see our new collection and hope families and children, students, teachers, and homeschoolers will all come.
The museum has spent the past 15 years pulling together historical maps that include Middlesex County in their depictions. We use them in our educational outreach to the schools that visit the museum, but all are also available to the general public. Through a variety of grants, we have developed hands-on learning materials that meet the SOL history curriculum requirements for the state of Virginia. These materials were created to enhance the viewing and interaction of students with our exhibits: puzzles, scavenger hunts, word searches, worksheets, and games.
Dominion Energy awarded the Museum a generous grant in the spring of 2026 to develop our mapping collection and worksheet collection into an educational materials station placed in the floor plan of the museum. We have named it the Middlesex Discovery Center.
Our large collection of historical maps that include Middlesex County from the 1500s through the 1900s, will now be housed in a five-drawer map case. Two free standing cases of multiple slots for worksheet materials will be divided into time frames that correlate to the divisions within the museum itself. This will allow visitors to quickly find materials by theme, say for WWI verses Native Americans. Two tables with ample seating will allow the maps to be spread out for group work with magnifying glasses and scavenger hunt materials.
Educational materials will be available for young attendees during the event!
Light refreshments will be available.
