Mariners' Museum
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| Established | 1930 |
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| Location | 100 Museum Drive Newport News, Virginia United States |
| Coordinates | 37°03′18″N 76°29′16″W / 37.0550°N 76.4878°W |
| Type | Maritime |
| Website | www |
The Mariners' Museum and Park is located in Newport News, Virginia, United States. Designated as America’s National Maritime Museum by Congress, it is one of the largest maritime museums in North America. The Mariners' Museum Library, contains the largest maritime history collection in the Western Hemisphere.
The museum was founded in 1930 by Archer Milton Huntington, son of Collis P. Huntington, a railroad builder who brought the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway to Warwick County, Virginia, and who founded the City of Newport News, its coal export facilities, and Newport News Shipbuilding in the late 19th century.
Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, acquired 800 acres (320 ha) of land that would come to hold 90,000 square feet (8,400 m2) of exhibition galleries, a research library, a 167-acre (68 ha) lake, a 5-mile (8.0 km) shoreline trail with fourteen bridges, and over 35,000 maritime artifacts from around the globe. After the land acquisition took place, the first two years were devoted to creating and improving a natural park and constructing a dam to create Lake Maury, named after the nineteenth-century Virginia oceanographer, Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury.
The museum’s collection totals approximately 32,000 artifacts, equally divided between works of art and three-dimensional objects. The scope of the collection is international and includes miniature ship models, scrimshaw, maritime paintings, decorative arts, carved figureheads, working steam engines, and the world's only known existing Kratz-built steam calliope. The museum holds important collections of paintings and drawings by marine artists James Bard and Antonio Jacobsen. The museum offers educational programs for all ages, a large research library and archives, as well as publications and Internet resources for teachers.
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