Sloan Museum of Discovery in Flint
and General Motors today announced
a partnership to will honor the legacy
of General Motors founder William
“Billy” C. Durant while supporting
the museum’s STEM exhibits and
programs.
Through a donation of $500,000
from GM, Sloan Museum’s new vehicle
gallery will be named The Durant
Gallery when it opens in July. Flint
is the birthplace of The Durant-Dort
Carriage Company, which paved the
way for the automobile industry and
GM. This donation is in addition to
a $1,000,000 grant that was provided
in 2018 to support STEM educational
programs in the gallery.
“Billy Durant was a fearless visionary
who boldly seized opportunity
wherever he found it, and who changed
the auto business forever,” said Mark
Reuss, General Motors president. “His
spirit has remained an inspiration to
GM for more than a century, and lives
on as we lead the global automotive
industry to an exciting new era powered
by electricity.”
Sloan Museum has 105 rare and
vintage vehicles among its collections
of nearly 48,000 artifacts, including
Durant’s first carriage model — a white
ash, two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy.
The new vehicle gallery will be 11,000
square feet (over 1,000 square meters)
and will feature rotating vehicles
showcasing the history and future of
the automobile.
“Naming the gallery after Billy
Durant came out of a series of conversations
we had with General Motors
about the early history of the company
and how Sloan preserves this history.
We have many pieces of early GM
history in our artifact collections, including
one of the first road carts built
by Durant,” said Todd Slisher, the executive
director of Sloan Museum and
CEO of Flint Institute of Science and
History, the nonprofit organization that
oversees the museum.
“It is an extraordinary way to memorialize
the man who made Flint ‘the
Vehicle City,’ helped found brands like
Buick and Chevrolet and bring them
under the GM umbrella.
The generous donation from GM
will allow us to build upon our existing
STEM exhibits and programs that go
into the experiences in
the new Sloan Museum
of Discovery,” Slisher
added.
General Motors has
made substantial capital
investments in the community
where the corporation
was founded
more than a century
ago. This includes significant
upgrades at
its Flint Assembly and
Flint Engine operations
and the Durant-Dort
Factory One restoration
along with more than 37 grants to local
nonprofits totaling more than $5.2 million
over the past five years.
Billy Durant formed the Flint Road
Cart Company in 1886 after purchasing
a twowheeled buggy company and
its new patented spring suspension for
$1,500. Durant and his partner, J. Dallas
Dort, turned the carriage company into
the Durant-Dort Carriage
Company, which
eventually paved the
way for one of the largest
vehicle manufacturers
in the world, General
Motors.
After nearly five years
of planning and construction,
the new Sloan
Museum of Discovery
will open to the public
Saturday, July 16. In
addition to the Durant
Gallery, it will include an
early childhood learning
gallery called Hagerman Street, Discovery
Hall, a hands-on science gallery,
a community history gallery, learning
labs and much more.
The $30 million expansion and renovation
of the museum was reimagined
as an inclusive center for the entire
community. To learn more, visit Sloan-
Longway.org/Sloan.