Is a Rachel Carson Museum on the Way?

Rebecca Henson remembers the moment she had the idea for a Rachel Carson museum in Silver Spring. It was a year into a global pandemic and a few months after the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “Dark times,” Henson recalls. Driving past Burnt Mills East Park on Colesville Road, she glanced at the historic building that stands on its grounds and had a vision of it as a museum. “I could just see the sign out front,” she says. “I thought, ‘Why not create something beautiful and positive for the community?’ ”

A month later, Henson—a climate-risk researcher and Silver Spring resident—founded a nonprofit organization with the mission of establishing the first museum dedicated to Carson, the so-called mother of the modern environmental movement. Carson wrote the landmark book Silent Spring at her home two miles up the Anacostia River from Burnt Mills East. While her house is a National Historic Landmark, there isn’t currently a place where the public can directly engage with her ideas and life story.

In February, Springsong (the name of both the nonprofit and the proposed museum) released the first architectural sketches of its vision. The building that would house it is a 1936 water-­pumping station that was built to look like a Colonial home. It has mostly been unused since 1962.