Museums
Great places to allow your mind to expand
Bowers Museum
Terracota Warriors 2009 | Bowers Visit September 2010
The museum's name comes from Charles Bowers, a late 1800s Orange County land developer, who donated the land on which it stands to the City of Santa Ana. The building was constructed in 1931, after the death of Ada Bowers (Charles's wife) who left the property unoccupied. The new building remained empty for four years after because the Great Depression prevented the city from paying any operating funds.
The Charles W. Bowers Memorial Museum first opened the doors of its Mission Revival-style building in 1936 as a city-run museum devoted primarily to the history of Orange County. In 1987, the City of Santa Ana closed the museum after careful study and input from the community to reopen as a totally transformed building. In October 1992, the Bowers opened its 63,000-square-foot (5,900 m2) facility (some six times larger than the original museum) to a crowd of over 17,000 people.
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