Michael Neary  The News Leader  Posted May 30, 2014

“We have the beautiful natural resources,” said Myers on Wednesday, “but we don’t have a brick-and-mortar building to visit.”

She mentioned the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

“It would be cool to have just a little snippet of something like that in Waynesboro,” she said.

Myers’s son Andrew, 14, considered the possible Waynesboro museum’s allure in the context of education.

“Classes teach you what you need to be taught,” he said, “and (in a museum) you can go and learn different things that you don’t always need to be taught.”

The Myers family, along with others who came to the market on Wednesday, experienced a sampling of the sorts of ideas and objects they might find at a new natural history satellite museum.

“I think there’s a certain quality in natural history that will spread farther than other topics,” Keiper said. “When you get into the natural world, especially when you’re in the shadow of a great national park, I think people get jazzed up very quickly about it.”

Keiper was displaying a variety of artifacts at the market, such as a preserved hawk moth first collected in Nelson County in 1897. He also had artifacts that reached back hundreds of millions of years, including a rock from Culpeper with a three-pronged footprint.

“This is actually the footprint of a small dinosaur that walked on two feet,” he said, noting that the dinosaur was doing that walking about 180 million years ago.

As for the Waynesboro project, Keiper said he expects work on the possible satellite museum’s master plan to begin this summer and last about six months. He said the plan would give community members a sound sense of the museum’s scope and may also single out a spot, in Waynesboro, where the museum would be located.

People seeking more information can go to http://tinyurl.com/q8edz3g.