Qualla: Highlands Museum and Discovery Center

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. C. H. Parsons Department Store closed long ago. The brick building it occupied in downtown Ashland - the kind of multi-story commercial structure that defined small-city retail before shopping malls drained the trade out of Main Streets - sat for decades looking for a new purpose. In 1994 it found one. The Kentucky Highlands Museum, founded a decade earlier in the Mayo Mansion across town, needed more room. The old Parsons building had floors to spare. Today the renamed Highlands Museum and Discovery Center fills those floors with local history and a children's science center, and the foundation that runs it actually owns the building - a small but meaningful step taken in 2013 to secure its long-term survival.

Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: From Mansion to Department Store

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. The institution started in 1984 as the Kentucky Highlands Museum, housed in the Mayo Mansion - an Ashland landmark in its own right, built by the coal and timber baron John C. C. Mayo. The mansion was elegant but small, and by the early 1990s the museum had outgrown it. The C. H....

Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: The Coalfield Exhibits

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. The history exhibits focus on Ashland and the Eastern Mountain Coal Fields - the working name for the broad coal-producing region that runs from southern West Virginia through eastern Kentucky and into Tennessee. This is the geography that built Ashland. Coal moved through the Bi...

Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: Hands for the Kids

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mrherbalwarrior at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0. The discovery center half of the museum is built around interactive science exhibits aimed at children. Physics demonstrations, simple chemistry, biology displays - the standard children's-museum vocabulary, executed at the budget level of a small-city institution rather than a m...

Image: Mrherbalwarrior at English Wikipedia | CC BY 3.0

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: Owning the Building

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. In July 2013, the foundation that supported the museum decided it could no longer afford to maintain the building and listed it for sale. The decision was a near-death moment for the institution. Without the building, the museum could not continue in its current form. The communi...

Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Highlands Museum and Discovery Center: Downtown Anchor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J654567, CC BY-SA 3.0. The museum sits squarely in Ashland's Commercial Historic District, a stretch of brick storefronts and theater facades that survives from the city's early-twentieth-century peak. The Paramount Arts Center is nearby. The block reads architecturally as one of the more intact small-...

Image: J654567 | CC BY-SA 3.0