Silver Spring’s Rachel Carson museum aims to open its doors to guests in 2028. Until then, staff is bringing the museum to the community.

“It’s like we have a museum in a suitcase,” said Rebecca Henson, founder and executive director of Springsong Museum, which will be the first museum and first major permanent exhibit in the world dedicated to Carson’s environmental writing and advocacy.

Even many longtime Montgomery County residents don’t know that Carson, the author of the groundbreaking “Silent Spring,” wrote that book and several others when she lived in Silver Spring from the 1930s and until her death in 1964.

Prior to breaking ground, the Springsong team, led by Henson, is heralding the arrival of the museum with free community events in local schools, senior living communities and hikes around the future site of the museum.

The Springsong Museum will eventually open up at the site of a historical industrial building that has been vacant for six decades. The land sits between the two neighborhoods where Carson wrote her books: Woodmoore in Prince George’s County and Quaint Acres in Silver Spring, and directly connects to the Rachel Carson Greenway and Northwest Branch hiking, biking and equestrian trails.

“Our ultimate goal is that feeling of connectedness to the natural world for all of us, but really connected to local history as well,” Henson added. “That’s an ongoing goal that really goes beyond the museum itself.”

Next on Springsong’s calendar: An appearance at Takoma Park Earth Day on April 12 and an Earth Day celebration at the Glenstone museum on April 18 and 19. Future community engagements include a May 7 hike and a May 22 forest bathing walk, both along trails near the museum’s future location.

Carson, a marine biologist whose meticulous research showed the dangers of DDT and other chemicals widely used by government and industry, published “Silent Spring” in 1962 and testified about her findings before Congress the next year. The chemical industry launched a campaign to discredit her, but her research prevailed, sparking an environmental movement and a federal ban on DDT in 1972, six years after Carson’s death from cancer.

“We’re really excited for her to finally be realized as a Maryland hero,” Henson said. “This would be pretty consequential in terms of carrying on her legacy and making sure that people actually know about what she wrote and why she wrote it — and that she wrote these things right here in Montgomery County."

Building toward the future

Henson first began work on the future museum in 2021 before the team submitted concept and architectural plans to Montgomery Parks in 2022. The parks department approved them in 2024.

Hundreds of donors from Montgomery, Prince George’s and Baltimore Counties and beyond have contributed more than $5 million for Springsong. Henson projects the museum will need at least another $10 million to fully execute building plans.

The museum currently employs “one-and-a-half paid staff members” along with “countless volunteers” and a board of directors, Henson said. Several volunteers are recently retired Smithsonian employees who are experts in exhibit design, libraries and architecture.

They’ve also been working with Ziger|Snead Architects, the Baltimore-based firm behind a number of notable Maryland buildings, including the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall and the Josiah Henson Museum and Park in North Bethesda.

“They specialize in this adaptive reuse of historic properties that need to be given proper love and attention, but then also transformed into something that can be used by the public,” Henson said.

Last year, Springsong worked with the parks department to fully clear out the existing building. The team expects to spend the next several months in the preconstruction phase.

The museum’s staff and volunteers are also conducting research for future exhibits and programs, studying papers and artifacts at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the National Conservation Training Center Museum & Archive, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, where Carson worked as a biologist and editor.

Those and other locations and organizations, such as Carson’s old home in Silver Spring and the Rachel Carson Council, host her archives and continue her advocacy work.

But many of those sites can’t host a class trip or impromptu family outing.

Springsong will provide a cohesive, easily accessible education about Carson’s work in the place she called home, said Bob Musil, president and CEO of the Rachel Carson Council, an environmental advocacy group.

“Having a museum that has the whole of the ability to see, research, look, touch, understand what she did in a place like that is just absolutely essential to having people continue to understand her importance and her relevance for today,” Musil added.

“It’s been just great to watch it emerge.”