The planetarium in Navarro College's Cook Education Center in Corsicana has a dome sixty feet across, which the college describes as the largest planetarium dome in Texas, a size matched by the planetarium the University of Texas at Arlington opened in 2006. It seats about two hundred under a dome tilted at twelve degrees, and it opened in 1997, according to the international planetarium database. A 2025 college tribute credits Leland and Sue Cook, with their son Byron and his wife Kay, with bringing the building to life. The college runs the dome as a classroom, a field trip destination and a theatre for public shows. The same building holds the Pearce Collections museum, which began in 1991 when Charles S. Pearce Jr. bought his wife, Peggy, a single Civil War document as a gift: a letter Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain wrote from Antietam to his wife, Fanny.
The couple placed their growing collection of Civil War documents with Navarro College in 1996, and about thirty Western paintings and bronzes in 1998. On the grounds of the Cook Education Center stands The Invocation, a thirteen-foot bronze of a mounted American Indian raising an animal skull toward the sky, by the Arizona sculptor Buck McCain. McCain has said the image came to him in a dream, and this is one of seven monumental casts.
Getting there
32.0774, -96.4966
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
