The Witte Museum turns 100: a century of discoveries

The Witte Museum in Brackenridge Park has hit its centennial, and the way it got started is almost as interesting as what it shows. It was founded in 1926 by Ellen Schulz Quillin, a San Antonio schoolteacher and botanist who raised money with her students by selling wildflower seeds. With that, she bought the H.P. Attwater Collection of Natural History for $5,000 and formed the San Antonio Museum Association. Her students built dioramas of Attwater's bird specimens, which became the museum's first exhibits when it opened on October 8, 1926. Quillin ran the place as director until 1960. Today, Michelle Cuellar Everidge is president and CEO.

To mark 100 years, the museum has put together a centennial exhibition, "Witte Museum: 100 Years," which runs through January 9. It pulls from a collection of 400,000 specimens and mixes things you wouldn't expect to see in the same room: Texas wildlife dioramas, skeleton mounts, a kiwi, modern art, a Fiesta dress, a ceramic mask, indigenous rock art, mosasaur skeletons, and a juvenile mammoth. There's even a replica of the 49.73-carat diamond stolen during HemisFair '68 and never recovered. The museum has been a certified state and federal curatorial collection repository since 2021.

Walking in, you're greeted by Quetzy, a life-size model of Quetzalcoatlus northropi, a pterosaur with a wingspan over 30 feet that flew over Texas 72 million years ago and is the largest flying animal ever known. Beyond the centennial show, there's the Naylor Family Dinosaur Gallery, the Kittie West Nelson Ferguson People of the Pecos Gallery, the H-E-B Science Treehouse, the Robert J. & Helen C. Kleberg South Texas Heritage Center, the McLean Family Texas Wild Gallery, and the Susan Naylor Center. The "Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs" exhibition ran earlier this year in the Mays Family Center.

Part of what the Witte does happens far from Brackenridge Park. The museum manages the White Shaman Preserve near Del Rio, where the White Shaman Panel sits in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands. It's a prehistoric rock art mural about 26 feet long and 13 feet high, showing a human figure with a long white body and black center surrounded by 69 enigmatic figures and 42 anthropomorphs, made with local minerals and a fatty base. The Witte led the first scientific expeditions there in the 1930s and became its conservator in 2017. Guided tours run September through May, with reservations required and visitors 12 and up. For the rest of the year, the museum brings in about 60,000 schoolchildren, half of whom come on scholarships, and runs on an annual operating budget of $14 million, roughly half of which comes from donations, foundations, companies, and government support. It's consistently ranked as the city's top museum, which is a nice place to land a century after a teacher and her students started selling wildflower seeds.