The Witte Museum: 100 Years

Teacher and botanist Ellen Schulz Quillin believed San Antonio should have a museum where people could learn by seeing and doing.

Her students collected nickels and dimes, raising funds to purchase the Attwater Collection of Natural History. In 1926, the Witte Museum opened with that collection, the first of many artifacts and specimens to come. The Witte Museum: 100 Years traces the Witte’s history from its earliest days to the present through more than 115 objects drawn from the museum’s collections and archives, revealing a century of curiosity, experimentation, and growth.

Explore how the Witte has interpreted and shared the story of Texas through natural history specimens, cultural artifacts, Texas art, and global collections. Discover how the Witte of the ’80s and ’90s transformed collections into traveling experiences that brought Texas stories to communities across the state and beyond. Then see how that work expanded in the 2000s through deep community engagement. Through prototype exhibitions and collaborative planning, new ideas emerged around Texas history, rivers and aquifers, and the concept of Texas Deep Time that defines the museum today.

Along the way, unexpected moments shaped the museum’s path—from a 1930s Reptile Garden that blended public spectacle with scientific research to the unsolved 1968 theft of the McFarlin Diamond. Hands-on experiences bring these stories into focus: test your reflexes against a rattlesnake strike, recreate the diamond’s disappearance, and tell us which memories of the Witte have been your favorite.
The Witte Museum may be 100 years old… but there is always something new to discover.