Science Mill

Johnson City's science museum is built inside a mill that has changed trades several times since 1880. James Polk Johnson, who had founded the town the year before, built it as a steam grist mill and cotton gin. It became a flour mill in 1901 and a feed mill in the 1930s, and after it closed in the 1980s it was a restaurant for some years before it stood empty. The microbiologist Bonnie Baskin and her husband, the neuroscientist Robert Elde, who had moved to Johnson City in 2010, bought the derelict building in 2012, and it opened as the Science Mill in February 2015. The old grain silos were kept and turned into exhibit rooms, so a good part of the museum is visited from inside the cylinders that once held feed.

Baskin came to it from business rather than from museums. She had founded and sold two laboratory companies, ViroMed and AppTec, the first for about forty million dollars and the second for one hundred and sixty three million, by Fortune's account. The museum was built for children, and its exhibits are made to be handled: a robotic hand that stands more than twenty five feet tall, the Fractalarium, a grain silo filled with crystals shaped like Romanesco broccoli, and Mindball, a game in which two players move a ball across a table by relaxing, measured through headbands that read their brain waves.

It counted twenty three thousand visitors in its first eight months and close to two hundred thousand by 2020, in a town of about sixteen hundred people. Its builder, James Polk Johnson, was a nephew of the president's grandfather, and laid out Johnson City around his mill and gin.