River Discovery Center Increases Industry Ties

When Lindsey Launius describes the last year at the River Discovery Center in Paducah, Ky., she uses one word repeatedly: momentum.

Launius, the river museum’s executive director, described new partnerships with businesses within the river industry and outside it, educational opportunities offered in conjunction with teachers, upgrades to a new exhibit and more visitors coming through the doors.

This past summer, more than 2,500 visitors stopped by the museum, and its summer camps for children increased by 340 percent.

“That’s what momentum looks like at the River Discovery Center right now,” Launius told the Paducah Propeller Club at its August 12 meeting.

She also tied the museum directly to the river industry’s future workforce needs, saying that with increasing competition, it’s more important than ever to expose children early on to the possibility of a career on the river.

Launius showed a short video of students using the museum’s “24 Hours on the River” exhibit, an interactive experience that allows visitors to control a time-lapse camera overlooking Paducah’s riverfront and see just how much river traffic passes by throughout the day and night. In the video, the students counted the towboats as they appeared, becoming more excited as the number climbed into the dozens.

“This is where I believe the River Discovery Center can make a real impact,” she said.

Over the past year, Launius and her staff have been updating the museum. With support from Pine Bluff Materials, the museum added the first new exhibit since 2008, an interactive sand table with virtual reality elements that allows students to see how water changes its flow as the terrain around it changes. Pine Bluff also recently donated a pilot’s chair for the museum’s simulator, its most popular exhibit.

Grants, donations and partnerships have also made it possible to raise $130,000 to upgrade the hardware and software needed to update the outdated simulator, and Kalleo Technologies is donating the labor necessary.

“Now we’re only a few weeks away,” Launius said.

Pine Bluff recently hosted Launius and another museum teammate on a visit to a dredge. Information gained from that visit will help the staff update its riverbottoms exhibit, Launius said.

“That’s what I mean when I talk about partnerships,” she said, noting that funding is necessary and valued, but so are donations of materials, help from volunteers and sharing of expertise.

Another of those new partnerships is with Viking, which has begun offering shore excursions to visit the museum when its cruises stop in Paducah. Additionally, the museum is partnering with We Work The Waterways, the Market House Theatre in Paducah and many Paducah-based river companies on an upcoming industry interaction day for students that will be hosted in and around the museum for the first time.

“All of downtown will be flooded with 150 students learning about the river workforce,” she said.

Launius and her team have also developed ideas for new, exclusive and more interactive experiences. One of those was a children’s camp where students made their own documentary about the river, then walked the red carpet for a premiere of it on the big screen at Paducah’s Maiden Alley Cinema. An upcoming fall break camp for students out of school for the week will take the form of a magical adventure, titled “Magizoologists of the Ohio River Valley.” The camp is designed to help campers discover connections between magical creatures they know from children’s stories and movies and real-life animals in the region. They will create crafts and projects while learning about the importance of rivers and waterways, exploring habitats and the creatures that call them home.

Working with educators, Launius is helping to align the lessons taught through the camps with state educational standards for each grade, making them more meaningful.

The museum is also going outside its walls in hopes of drawing more people in. One of those ways is by creating a program in which museum staff can go into a school and teach students about how buttons were once made from mussels on the banks of the Ohio River. Students will get to handle mussel shells with round holes where the buttons were cut out and to decorate them to make a Christmas ornament. The River Discovery Center also offers an adult version of the class. The western Kentucky chapter of Women in Maritime Operations recently enjoyed making their own mussel shell crafts and learning about the history of the industry between sips of wine, Launius said.

The River Discovery Center is also partnering with the McCracken County Library to display some of its steamboat paintings and drawings at the library, using that as an invitation to come see even more offerings in the museum’s collection.

New exhibits are also on the horizon, with ideas for teaching knot-tying and flag signaling as well as updating a pie chart about barge cargoes into an exhibit students can see and touch. With additional donations, the museum would like to update its exhibit on flooding, including information the 1937 Ohio River flood that devastated Paducah, and build a new, larger and more education-centered space for the always popular Annabelle the turtle.

“We want to be able to not just build and update but to modernize and replace,” Launius said of exhibits.

As the museum is also located in the oldest existing building in the city of Paducah, preserving the facility itself is also of prime importance, she said. Recently, the building received much needed roof repairs. Next on the list of priorities is new windows. There are also plans for an updated giftshop with items specific to Paducah and to the river industry.

While the museum’s resources are limited, “We are not waiting until we can build a new museum to build a better museum,” Launius said.

She stressed that help from the river industry is an important part of that.

“What do kids need to touch?” she asked the Propeller Club. “What do students need to see? What careers are out there that we don’t even know about? We don’t want to build a museum about the river industry without the help of the river industry.

For more information about the River Discovery Center or to make a donation, visit it at 117 S. Water St., in Paducah, or online at riverdiscoverycenter.com. If the museum can raise $5,000 or more in donations by August 31, it will be matched through the Peggy and Fred Paxton Challenge for Charities program.

Featured photo caption: Lindsey Launius shows off the pilot’s chair with the Pine Bluff Materials team. Pine Bluff donated the chair for the River Discovery Center’s boat simulator. (Photo courtesy of the River Discovery Center)