Rutherford County Kids Have Watched the Mixers Roll Past for Years. Now There’s an Exhibit.
Ask a four-year-old in this county to name a truck and you will not get a fire engine. You will get a mixer — the barrel-backed kind that turns slowly at the light on Broad Street, that sits in a line outside a subdivision going up where a hayfield used to be, that is simply part of the landscape here in a way it is not everywhere.
On September 8, the Discovery Center cut a ribbon on an exhibit built out of exactly that observation.
What opened
The addition is called the SRM Concrete Mixing Zone, and it lives inside Tiny Town — the miniature streetscape that has been the Discovery Center's most reliably crowded room for as long as most local parents can remember. The new zone gives children concrete-themed tools and open-ended activities to work with, and the corner is finished off with a small mural.
That is a modest description for what it will actually be on a rainy Saturday, which is a knot of preschoolers negotiating over who gets to do the pouring.
The Tiny Town logic
Tiny Town has always worked on a simple principle: children make sense of the adult world by running a small version of it. The exhibit's storefronts and stations let a kid be the person on the other side of the counter — the one who stocks the shelves, drives the truck, fixes the thing.
What is nice about the newest addition is that it picks a job most children's museums skip. Bakeries and grocery stores and veterinary clinics show up in miniature everywhere in the country. A mixing zone is a specifically Middle Tennessee choice, and it reflects something true: in a county that has spent two decades turning farmland into rooftops, construction is not an abstraction to these kids. It is the sound outside the window.
The company behind the corner
The sponsor is a local answer too. SRM Concrete began in 1999 as Smyrna Ready Mix, a Rutherford County operation with Rutherford County trucks, and has since grown into a family-owned ready-mix supplier working across roughly two dozen states with a workforce in the thousands. Its corporate offices are in Murfreesboro.
So the mixer a child pretends to operate in Tiny Town is a reasonable likeness of the one their neighbor actually drives. That is a better kind of sponsorship than most — not a logo bolted onto an unrelated wall, but a company underwriting a small, accurate picture of what it does, in the town where it does it.
If you are going
The Discovery Center sits at 502 SE Broad Street, downtown, where the hands-on galleries share a campus with the Murfree Spring wetland and its boardwalk. It is one of the few places in town where a visit can reasonably include both a morning of pretend construction work and an afternoon of looking for turtles, which is a combination no other local attraction offers.
Current hours and admission are worth confirming before you load the car, since both shift seasonally. What is not in question is that there is something new in the best room in the building.
Related coverage: Things to do in Murfreesboro: a local's guide to the Square, Stones River, the Greenway and MTSU
