Next spring, workers will descend the wooded slope behind the Fernbank Museum of Natural History to drive poles into the ground and put cables in the air. When they’re done, the museum on Clifton Road in Atlanta will unveil an outdoor classroom — a walkway where kids play, adults seek serenity and everyone gets up-close to nature.
Museum President and CEO Susan Neugent earlier this week announced the 10-acre project, the culmination of two years of planning and more than a year of diligent fundraising. The work should last 12 months and cost about $13 million, all in private funds.
The museum also plans to reopen Fernbank Forest, closed for two years, when the project is complete.
In her office, Neugent shuffled through a stack of artists’ renderings of the project. In one, people explored a shallow pool hard against a large rock; in another, a youngster careened along a tree-lined path while others tried their balancing skills on a rope bridge. A third illustration depicted the project from above; the walkway resembled a strand of spaghetti, forming big curves and looping over itself.
Neugent looked out her window at the project site where hardwoods stood, their wind-blown leaves littering the ground in splashes of gold and crimson.
“The big show out here is the natural world,” she said.
Fernbank intends to cash in on that. The museum averages about 400,000 visitors annually. Neugent estimated that the new attraction should bump up that number by about 10 percent — a conservative estimate, she said — or 40,000 people.
The walkway is a chance for city dwellers to get in touch with Atlanta’s leafier qualities, said Chris Bean, the museum’s vice president of education.
“We want people to have an authentic experience here,” she said. “We hope this will help build a real relationship with nature.”
No other museum in the country, Neugent said, has anything like what Fernbank plans.
The path, which doesn’t have a formal name, will wind from the museum terrace to a creek about 200 feet away, occasionally touching the ground. Plans call for stops along the way — a play area for children, an educational structure where exhibits periodically change; a quiet spot where people can listen to the wind’s whisper.
The project, said Neugent, will not have an impact on Fernbank Forest, an old-growth forest that belongs to Fernbank Inc., the nonprofit organization that also operates the museum. Fernbank Inc. two years ago closed the forest to unguided tours so crews could remove English ivy, privet and other invasive plants from the woods.
Since its closing, Fernbank Forest has been the topic of community meetings, pickets and signs posted along Clifton Road urging that the locked gates be opened. More than 570 people also have signed an online petition urging the museum to remove the locks at the 65-acre forest.
Noemi Vega, who home-schools her sons, 10 and 7, has been a leading opponent of the closing. She suggested that the museum was ignoring the forest while concentrating on an expansion outside its back door.
“It is their property. They’re welcome to do their project there,” she conceded. “But they need to make sure that they have programming available in the forest.”
The 10-acre tract behind the museum is a patch of forest that’s provided a leafy backdrop to visitors roaming the museum. On a cloudy morning, Neugent gave a quick tour of the site. She stepped carefully across a wet carpet of fallen leaves. Below, a creek variously named Peavine or Fernbank (it depends on which map you consult) curled through the forest. Above, bare limbs wove a black web across a gray sky.
Neugent pointed at small splashes of red on the woodland floor — tiny flags, staking out the walkway’s path. They bypassed trees. A site survey shows the tract has about 500 trees, most hardwoods. Plans call for Fernbank to remove 16 — none, she said, a mature tree.
“Everything we do here will have an extraordinarily light touch,” she said.
Her steps brought Neugent to a stone wall, built a century earlier when the land belonged to someone else. Atop it was a concrete cross, erected decades ago when a nearby house was a monastery. The walkway, she said, will pass by it, too.
“People are drawn to this,” she said.
And, she hopes, people will feel that way about the museum expansion.
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