Visitors are surprised to recognize the many man-made items in the 'Flood Rubble Exhibit.' Sand, rocks and logs should be the only things found in rubble, but the exhibit contains "found" items typical of the river today -- including several types of plastic and glass. In an effort to educate the public about the remedies to this environmental hazard, the Nature Center includes a recycling box among the rubble to discourage litter and demonstrate items created from recycled materials -- including polar fleece, aluminum cans, plastic containers and paper.

Tour the historic Maymont House, including the new permanent exhibition 'In Service and Beyond: Domestic Work and Life in a Gilded Age Mansion.' Go to the basement for a self-guided tour of the belowstairs exhibit and to sign up for a guided tour of the upper floors. Guided tours on the hour and half-hour; last tour begins at 4:30pm.

This interactive exhibit will explain about the heart and lung systems, how blood is pumped through the body or where the air goes when we breathe.

This exhibition, organized by the Blue Ridge Institute of Ferrum College, is believed to be the largest exhibit ever mounted on moonshining in the United States. Covering more than a century of moonshining in the mountains of Virginia, it tells the story of illegal alcohol distilling in defiance of the federal government’s excise tax. Items on display include actual stills, a full-size diorama of a still operation, still makers’ tools, dozens of period photographs, video interviews with moonshiners and federal agents, documents, and additional memorabilia.

'Heads and Tales' presents portraits of five people with compelling personal stories—a woman who inspired the English poet Alexander Pope; a royal governor who was murdered by a mob; a Federalist politician struggling against the tide in Jeffersonian Virginia; a patron of the arts who made his fortune as a robber baron in the Gilded Age; and a Virginia suffragette, freethinker, and political radical. Their tales are told by analysis of components of their pictorially complex portraits.

One room of the Cemetery Center is a small museum of 19th- and 20th-century American mourning customs. Permanent exhibits interpret mourning attire, hairwork jewelry, the evolution of coffins and embalming, and funeral and mourning etiquette. The Mourning Museum is open for drop-in visits whenever the Cemetery Center is open. Tours of the Mourning Museum are free of charge.

Evelynton was originally part of William Byrd's expansive Westover Plantation. Named for Byrd's daughter, Evelyn, this site has been home to the Ruffin family since 1847. The family patriarch, Edmund Ruffin, fired the first shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. His later agricultural contributions--from scientific soil testing to the publication of The Farmer's Register--rescued l9th-century Virginia from a declining agricultural economy, and earned him the title "father of American agronomy." Evelynton was the site of fierce Civil War skirmishes in 1862, when General George McClellan waged his destructive Peninsula Campaign; J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson and John Pelham bravely led the Southern offensive in the Battle of Evelynton Heights.The original house and out-buildings were burned during that conflict, and the current residence was erected two generations later by Edmund Ruffin's great grandson, John Augustine Ruffin, Jr. and his wife Mary Ball Saunders. Architect W. Duncan Lee, who completed a brilliant restoration of Carters Grove in Williamsburg, designed the Georgian Revival manor house in 1937. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.