Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals facts for kids
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| Established | 1996 |
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| Location | Hillsboro, Oregon, U.S. |
| Type | Earth sciences |
| Visitors | approx. 25,000 (2009) |
The Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals is a super cool museum in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA. It's located near Portland, Oregon, and teaches all about earth science. The museum opened in 1997, but its amazing collections of rocks and minerals started way back in the 1930s! The museum is actually inside a special house built to show off these collections. This house is so important that it's listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2015, the museum even became a Smithsonian Affiliate, which means it's connected to the famous Smithsonian museums!
The museum sits on 23 acres of beautiful wooded land. The main building is pretty big, with lots of space to explore. You can see all sorts of cool things here, like petrified wood (wood that turned into rock!), glowing fluorescent minerals, meteorites (rocks from space!), and tons of other minerals. With over 20,000 different items, it's the biggest museum of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. About 25,000 people visit the museum every year!
Contents
Discovering the Museum's History
The story of the museum began with Richard and Helen Rice. They got married in 1932 and started collecting rocks in 1938 after finding pretty agates along the Oregon Coast. In 1952, the Rices built a new home north of Hillsboro on 30 acres of land. This home would later become the museum!
The Rices started a small museum in 1953 to show off their growing collections. Their amazing rocks won them a special award called the Woodruff Trophy twice! Helen Rice was even the president of a big group called the American Federation of Mineralogical Societies from 1959 to 1960.
In 1996, the Rices officially created the non-profit museum. Richard and Helen Rice passed away in 1997, and their home became the museum, just as they wished. The Rice Northwest Museum of Rocks and Minerals officially opened its doors in 1997.
Over the years, the museum kept growing!
- In 2000, 94 pieces of amazing crystallized gold were added.
- In 2001, a new exhibit opened to show off lapidary arts, which is the art of cutting and polishing stones.
- By 2001, the museum had over 4,000 items!
- In 2003, a new gallery opened just for petrified wood.
- In 2004, the museum borrowed 52 meteorites from Portland State University for a special exhibit.
- By 2004, about 15,000 people were visiting each year.
In 2005, scientists found the fossilized bones of a thalattosuchian crocodile from the Jurassic period in Central Oregon. The museum plans to display these cool fossils after they are studied. Also in 2005, a new Northwest Minerals Gallery opened, showing off even more amazing rocks. By 2007, the museum was welcoming 25,000 visitors every year, with many coming from school groups on field trips.
Exploring the Museum's Collections
The Rice Northwest Museum is the largest of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, with more than 20,000 items! These amazing specimens come from all over the world. Many were even found by the Rices themselves. One expert, Bill Dameron, said the museum has the best mineral specimens in the Pacific Northwest.
The collections include:
- Gemstones: Like sparkling rubies, diamonds, rhodochrosite, opal, emerald, and amethyst.
- Fossils: You can see shark teeth, coprolites (yes, fossilized animal poop!), petrified wood, dinosaur eggs, trilobites, and even a baby dinosaur fossil from the Psittacosaurus family.
- Meteorites: Rocks that have fallen to Earth from space!
- Minerals: A huge variety of different minerals.
Did you know? About 1,000 of the items at the museum are so tiny you can only see them clearly with a microscope!
Special Galleries and Exhibits
One super cool part of the museum is the Rainbow Gallery. This gallery is designed to show off rocks and minerals that glow in the dark! They have special elements that make them phosphorescent or fluorescent. An automatic system uses ultraviolet lights to make these rocks light up. It's like magic!
A big part of the museum's petrified wood collection comes from Dennis and Mary Murphy. Their collection has over 450 items, including a huge log of white oak that weighs 1,200 pounds! This log is from Eastern Oregon and is thought to be more than 25 million years old. The petrified wood comes from Oregon, Washington, and even as far away as Argentina and Australia. You can also see fossils of ancient plants like cycads, palms, and ferns.
A star of the museum is the "Alma Rose" rhodochrosite from the Sweet Home Mine in Colorado. This beautiful piece has crystals up to 9.5 centimeters long! The Rices once owned another famous rhodochrosite called the "Alma King" from the same mine.
The museum also has a collection of 107 gold pieces from the F. John Barlow collection. These include a 42-ounce gold leaf and pieces from the Ace of Diamonds mine in Liberty, Washington. One of the museum's pieces, a sperrylite from Russia, is considered one of the best in the world!
Amazing Individual Items
Some individual items on display are truly incredible:
- A coprolite (fossilized poop) from Mongolia.
- A 500-pound piece of lightweight volcanic rock called pumice.
- Cool obsidian and basalt rocks.
- A 30-centimeter wide plate with clear quartz crystals and other minerals from Alaska's Prince of Wales Island.
- A cycad fossil from the Jurassic era that weighs 500 pounds!
- The Gibeon meteorite, which weighs 210 pounds and came from Namibia in Africa.
- The world's largest known opal-filled thunderegg, weighing 1.75 tons! The thunderegg is even Oregon's state rock.
You can also see azurite, Oregon sunstone, amber, copper crystals, zeolites, morganite, and agate, among many others.
Museum Programs and Activities
The Rice Museum offers lots of fun programs for the public. They used to have a yearly summer festival with activities like thunderegg cutting and gold panning demonstrations. The museum has also hosted the Northwest Fossil Fest. They offer special tours for school groups and other community groups. These events will start up again when the museum has more staff and funding.
Museum Facilities and Historic House
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Richard and Helen Rice House
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Front of the home in 2010
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| Built | 1952 |
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| Architect | William F. Wayman |
| Architectural style | Ranch |
| NRHP reference No. | 06001096 |
| Added to NRHP | November 29, 2006 |
The museum is located just west of Portland, Oregon, near the Sunset Highway. It sits on 23 acres of mostly forested land. The museum is inside the historic Richard and Helen Rice House, which was built as a family home. Finished in 1952, the house was made with beautiful Arizona flagstone on the outside and wood from Oregon, like curly maple and myrtlewood.
William F. Wayman designed the house, and Victor Batchelar built it. Charles F. Walters designed the outdoor areas. Richard Rice himself was a logging contractor, so he cut down and milled all the wood for the house! The home was designed so that its basement could be used as a museum for the Rices' collections.
The house has three sandstone fireplaces, and the kitchen counters have pretty hand-painted tiles from Mexico. Myrtlewood is used for the trim and doors inside. The bedrooms even have built-in drawers, shelves, and ironing boards! The two-level building also has cool features like dumbwaiters (small elevators for food or objects) and a sewing room. The outside of the house has a low-pitched roof and tan, rose, and blue sandstone.
The 7,500-square-foot house, with a 3,300-square-foot basement, cost $185,000 to build. In 2021, the museum's flooring was replaced after a flood. Luckily, the original blue linoleum in the basement, which has the museum's logo of a shovel and a pick, was saved! This ranch style home was the first ranch home in Oregon to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Besides the main house, the museum also uses a separate building as a gallery. This building, called the Northwest Gallery, used to be a storage area. It looks similar to the Rice House. This gallery focuses on items found in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, including collections of agates, thundereggs, zeolites, and placer gold. Before the museum opened to the public in 1997, an elevator was added to the house.
The museum has many different rooms and areas to explore:
- A Community Room
- A Resource Library
- The Fossil Gallery
- The Rainbow Gallery (where rocks glow!)
- Special Exhibits
- An Education Room
- The Petrified Wood Gallery
- The Main Gallery
- The Pacific Northwest Gallery
There's also a gift shop where you can find souvenirs. Outside, you can walk along a path that features sandstone, basalt columns, a 1,200-pound pumice rock, and a "Rock Pile" activity where visitors can even take a rock home!
Images for kids
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Front of the home in 2010
