Tallahassee Museum

The Tallahassee Museum is a 52-acre outdoor museum along Lake Bradford at 3945 Museum Drive in Tallahassee that combines historic North Florida buildings, live native animals, nature trails and an aerial adventure course.

The museum's About page states its mission as inspiring people to transform their lives, community and the world through an enhanced understanding of the region's natural and cultural environments, and names Russell Daws as the leader who has stewarded the Tallahassee Museum with its Board of Trustees. Its history page calls it one of the few museums in the nation that combines historical buildings with a living display of native animals, and says it received American Alliance of Museums accreditation in 1985, renewed in 1998, 2009 and 2022.

Beyond the farm, buildings and wildlife boardwalk, the grounds hold Jim Gary's Twentieth Century Dinosaurs and Tallahassee Tree-To-Tree Adventures, which the museum describes as part of its eclectic group of attractions. The phone number is (850) 575-8684.

A group of teachers, several civic groups and other residents founded the Tallahassee Junior Museum in 1957 to give schoolchildren experiences in science, art, history and world cultures.

The museum's history page says it moved in the 1960s to its present location on a chain of lakes, and its About page says the work of a few teachers took root on the current grounds in 1960. By 1980 the exhibits included a collection of restored historical buildings, and by 1990 the Wildlife Florida Trail featured Florida panthers and endangered red wolves. A 1989 capital campaign raised over one million dollars for a visitor center, improved parking, renovated exhibit spaces, a cafe and room for traveling exhibits. The museum dropped the Tallahassee Junior Museum name in 1992 and officially began doing business as the Tallahassee Museum in 2005.

Bellevue is the 19th century plantation house of Catherine Murat, widow of Napoleon's nephew Achille Murat, moved to the museum grounds in 1967 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 1969 state historical marker on the museum grounds identifies her as Catherine Daingerfield Willis, great-grandniece of George Washington and widow of Achille Murat, Prince of Naples and nephew of Napoleon, and says she lived in the house from 1854 until shortly before her death on August 6, 1867. The marker calls the house an excellent example of indigenous Southern architecture, moved in 1967 from its original location on the Jackson Bluff Road.

The National Register nomination, prepared by the Florida Department of State's Bureau of Historic Preservation, describes a one and a half story frame dwelling with a gable roof, a square columned porch across the front and three dormer windows. Before the move it sat on a hill two miles west of the center of Tallahassee on a 500-acre plantation that Murat acquired from her sister, Mrs. Samuel Duval, and named after a hotel in Belgium. The form says the house was moved to a site adjacent to the Tallahassee Junior Museum, or Big Bend Pioneer Farm, and was being restored by the Tallahassee Heritage Foundation.

The museum's Old Florida page adds that Murat owned twenty-five enslaved people, who worked in the cotton fields, provided skilled labor and cooked, and that visitors explore those contrasting communities at Bellevue's house, kitchen and slave cabin.

Besides Bellevue, the Tallahassee Museum's Old Florida exhibit includes Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church, the Concord Schoolhouse and a Seaboard Air Line caboose, and Big Bend Farm recreates rural life of the 1880s.

The museum's Old Florida page describes Bethlehem Missionary Baptist as established in 1851 and the first regularly organized Black church in Florida; the congregation rebuilt it in 1937 using many of the original hand hewn timbers, and it was moved to the museum and conserved as a Bicentennial project of Florida A&M University. The 2023 Father James Page marker from the Florida Department of State lists Bethlehem Baptist Church among the congregations Page established in and around Tallahassee.

The Concord School, the museum says, began in the late 1870s during Reconstruction, when communities assisted by the Freedmen's Bureau and churches set up schools for the children of former slaves; it stood near Miccosukee in Leon County and probably met in the Miccosukee A.M.E. church until its building went up in 1897. The 1920s caboose recalls the Seaboard railroad that moved cash crops across North Florida.

At Big Bend Farm, visitors walk among farm buildings typical of the region, a garden of corn, cotton, sugar cane and sweet potatoes, and animals that include a cow, chickens, mules, pigs, sheep, goats and geese. The farm demonstrates rural industries: turpentining in the B.O. Wood Turpentine Commissary, blacksmithing, syrup-making and milling.

The Wildlife Florida boardwalk shows native animals that live, or once lived, in the Big Bend region, all of which the museum says could not survive in the wild.

The museum's Wildlife Florida page explains that the Tallahassee Museum animals were either raised in captivity or have limited abilities as a result of injury. Its list includes the American alligator, red wolf, black bear, cougar, North American river otter, bobcat, white-tailed deer, gray fox and striped skunk; birds of prey such as the bald eagle, three owl species, the red-tailed hawk and the turkey vulture; wild turkeys and ducks; turtles including the gopher tortoise and alligator snapping turtle; and snakes from the eastern indigo to the eastern diamondback rattlesnake.

The Natural Florida trail is a half-mile loop through a live oak hammock, a longleaf pine area under restoration and along the cypress-edged shore of Lake Hiawatha, where the Tallahassee Museum points out seasonal wildflowers, birdlife, lizards, aquatic turtles, gopher tortoise burrows and sinkholes. The McGowan Butterfly Garden nearby provides food, water and shelter for butterflies at each stage of their life cycle.

Jim Gary's Twentieth Century Dinosaurs are large sculptures welded from discarded automobile parts, and the Tallahassee Museum has been their home since 2011.

The museum's exhibit page says the sculptures were first shown in 1979, traveled to museums, universities, auto shows and gardens, and made their southeastern U.S. debut at the Tallahassee Museum in 1993. After Gary died in 2006 at 66, the Jim Gary Foundation and the museum agreed in 2011 to make Lake Bradford the home of the largest restored collection of his dinosaur works. Today 23 pieces are on display, some as long as 43 feet and as heavy as 4,000 pounds.

The museum's collections page describes its holdings as the buildings, the animals and the artifacts, calls it the only museum in the area with a regional focus, and invites the public to explore more than 10,000 objects online. The history page says online collections access began in 2013, under an interpretive plan adopted in 2012 that also brought the Tallahassee Tree-to-Tree Adventures courses.

The Tallahassee Museum's visit page lists hours of 9 am to 5 pm Monday through Saturday and 11 am to 5 pm on Sunday, with closures on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Day.

The visit page lists free parking in the museum lot at 3945 Museum Drive, phone 850-575-8684, and field trips, special group programs and self-guided group tours. The Trail Break Cafe is closed October 16 through December 3, 2026, for cleaning and updates, and the museum says it reopens December 4. Because the museum is largely outdoors, it advises dressing for the season and wearing shoes suited to exploring the 52 acres; photography for commercial use requires a permit.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, using the Tallahassee Museum's about, history, visit and exhibit pages, the Bellevue National Register nomination and the Florida Department of State's Bellevue and Father James Page markers.