The Whale Museum's mission is to promote stewardship of whales and the Salish Sea ecosystem through education and research. The Whale Museum is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our tax id is 91-1007501. In 1976, The Whale Museum* was founded to study the Southern Resident orcas. During the process, it was decided to create a museum to share research results with the general public. The first step was to find a building: space was rented on the second floor of the historic Odd Fellows Hall (built in 1892) in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island (Washington state), for a mere $75 a month. Decades later, the museum is still in the same location, but now occupies the entire building. For the next several months hundreds of volunteers worked miracles to refurbish the building and create exhibits for a grand opening during the summer of 1979. Ambitious museum workers and volunteers kept busy, and the early days of The Whale Museum fostered a series of projects and studies, including: A Minke whale study in the Salish Sea by the late Eleanor Dorsey of the New York Zoological Society. An acoustics study of whale sounds. A college-accredited course on Cetology called Whale School. *The Whale Museum was founded in 1976 as the Moclips Cetological Society. In 1992, the name was officially changed to The Whale Museum and registered with the Washington's Secretary of State. At that time, Moclips Cetological Society ceased to exist as an organization. In 2014, the old name was registered by a new group. The Whale Museum has no affiliation with the current/new Moclips Cetological Society.
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