The Mariners’ Museum sits in an urban oasis – the 550-acre park is now home to the 167-acre Mariners’ Lake and the Noland Trail – a five-mile shoreline trail with 14 bridges. Within the Museum itself, you will find 90,000 square feet of exhibition galleries including the prestigious International Small Craft Center, and the award-winning USS Monitor Center. This state-of-the-art exhibition and conservation lab houses 210 tons of artifacts from the Civil War ironclad Monitor, which were recovered from NOAA’s Monitor National Marine Sanctuary.

The Mariners’ Museum Library and Archives is home to nearly 110,000 books; 800,000 photographs, films, and negatives; and over 1 million pieces of archival material, making it the largest maritime library in the Western Hemisphere.

Our mission is to connect people to the world’s waters, because through the waters—through our shared maritime heritage—we are connected to one another.