Plans, leadership shape up for revamped for Waco’s Taylor Museum

Formerly known as the Helen Marie Taylor Museum of Waco History, the center at 701 Jefferson Ave. will see a second life as the Taylor Museum of Waco and McLennan County History, although it may be another year or so before it fully reopens to the public.

The museum now has a full-time director, Helen Howell-Graves of Austin, as well as a collection manager and administrative assistant, plus a local board with at least five members.

Equally important, the museum has a long-range master plan created by museum consultant Calvin Smith, who headed Baylor University’s Strecker Museum and later Mayborn Museum before retiring from Baylor in 2003.

Officials with the Helen Marie Taylor Trust say it plans to spend several million dollars on the project. The trust last month moved ahead with selling 72 acres of prime land near Baylor University for development, with the museum as a beneficiary of the sale.

Helen Marie Taylor, a Waco native and ardent supporter of her hometown though a Virginia resident for much of her adult life, created and funded the museum in 1993. It closed five years later to all but occasional small group tours and school field trips. Taylor died in 2022 but endowed a trust to continue and support the museum.

Brandon Taylor, CEO and chief investment officer for Richmond, Virginia-based investment firm Taylor Hoffman, manages that trust and said that with staffing and a board in place, the next stage of the museum’s development begins.

“The trust has endorsed it and is backing it. The board’s mission is to follow that plan,” he said. “Personally, I think it looks amazing. I think the people of Waco will get behind it.”

Taylor, a distant relation of Helen Marie, declined to say how much the museum renovation and expansion would cost other than the trust would be providing several million dollars for the work, with partial funding of museum operations going forward.

Howell-Graves has spent more more than 25 years in museum work in Texas including directing the Museum of the Plains and the French Legation in Austin. She has worked with Smith in the past and found the offer to lead the Taylor Museum enticing enough to come out of retirement for the job. Her goal is to create a museum that tells an inclusive story of the history of the city and county.

“I think it will be really amazing,” she said.

The museum’s current board includes chair Lisa Lacy, Bettie Beard, Katherine Turner-Pearson and Randall Scott, with one or two more to be named later. Katherine Kiesling is the museum’s new collections manager, and Destiny Hallman is administrative assistant.

For Smith, president of Legacy Museum Consulting, a chance to return to Waco-area history and the Taylor Museum had been “the top of my bucket list” since he left Waco.

The plan he created in May for the board and Brandon Taylor envisions a broader, more cohesive scope for the museum, one that starts with the area’s prehistory and natural history and extends to the 21st century. Its focus will include McLennan County history as well as Waco’s and will incorporate the stories of the Native American, Black, Hispanic and other ethnic communities into the main narrative.

Rather than separate exhibits detailing the area’s Black and Hispanic communities, Smith envisions those smaller histories incorporated into a unified whole.

Helen Marie Taylor will be a small piece of that history, with an exhibit dedicated to her support of Waco, the work to create the museum and historic artifacts of special meaning to her.

The museum building was an elementary school originally built for Black students in 1918, but it was closed for several decades before being renovated as a museum in the 1990s.

The long-range plan calls for its expansion, including the enclosure of the concrete porch that fronts part of the building and construction of a large gallery that can house touring and temporary exhibits. The building will require asbestos and mold abatement work, improvement of its elevator and other changes to become ADA-compliant.

Several grassy areas outside the building will be converted into parking areas for about 100 vehicles, but the large trees surrounding the building will be preserved.

Smith estimated that it could be 18 months to two years before the renovated, finished museum reopens to the public.

Architect B.J. Greaves, a Waco native known for his work on the Dr Pepper Museum, is handling the preliminary comprehensive facility study. Houston-based Southwest Museum Services, a museum design and fabrication company, is charged with interior renovation and exhibit creation.

The facility study involves evaluating the building’s condition; its mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems; building code requirements; and landscaping. The two-story brick building is quite sound, Greaves said, and able to handle renovation and the expansion.

The first phase of renovation will focus on the museum’s adjoining properties, one of which will be prepared for storage collection before work on the main building can begin. Work on the storage space should begin sometime in the fall, Greaves said, followed by the main museum project as early as next spring.

The preliminary work also will include an archeological investigation of the properties, which once were residential areas in central Waco. That investigation also may turn up artifacts from the Waco tribe that lived on the land before Anglo settlers moved in in the 1830s, Greaves said.

“Everybody really wants this to become the kind of museum it always had the potential to be,” Greaves said.”We want this to tell the honest and complete history of Waco and the surrounding areas. It’s a dream project.”