Northeast Texas Children's Museum

The Northeast Texas Children's Museum exists because a local pastor refused to accept that kids in a small, rural community should have fewer chances to learn through play than kids anywhere else. David Gibson, minister at the Commerce Church of Christ and president of the Commerce Rotary Club, looked at Commerce and the small towns around it and saw a real gap: few affordable, hands-on places where children could learn simply by playing. Alongside a small group of neighbors, he spent years working toward a solution, and in 2002, that vision became real inside a vacant grocery store in Commerce, Texas, built on a simple conviction: that children learn best through play.

That conviction quickly outgrew its first home. In 2006, East Texas A&M University welcomed the museum onto its campus, and for the next thirteen years, a converted cafeteria building became a gathering place for tens of thousands of Northeast Texas families. In 2019, with the support of the Commerce Economic Development Corporation, we found our permanent home: a 26,500-square-foot building on nearly eight acres, finally large enough to hold everything we had dreamed of building.

Walk through our doors today and you'll find Main Street, a hand-built row of local businesses brought to child-sized life, and Amazing Airways, an internationally recognized pneumatic air exhibit found in only fifty-five museums nationwide. Our newest addition, the Teri Taylor Room, opened in 2024 as a 3,100-square-foot tribute to a beloved local teacher, adding much-needed space for a community that keeps showing up.

And show up they do. In 2025, we welcomed 47,318 guests; by mid-August of this year, we have already logged 33,339 — with almost five months still to go. Families have traveled in from 240 different communities, some from as far as Chicago, Denver, and Birmingham, and a few from London and South Africa. Ninety-one percent of our field-trip students are Pre-K through first grade, precisely the age when hands-on exploration shapes how a child arrives at school ready to learn — and the science backs that up. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children given a toy with no instructions discover roughly three times as many creative ways to use it as children who are told exactly how to play with it. Play doesn't just entertain a growing brain — it stretches it. That's the idea behind every exhibit we build.

We're also proud to be a Blue Star Museum, offering free summer admission to military families, and this summer we piloted a Sensory-Friendly Mornings series for children with sensory needs. From a small community's conviction that rural kids deserved better, to a large-scale museum welcoming families from around the world, our story has always come back to the same thing: giving every child room to explore, imagine, and grow.