The center was built in 1982 by the Lajitas Foundation as the Lajitas Museum Desert Gardens. It was purchased by the state in 1990 and renamed after Dr Barton Warnock, a botanist who specialized in the Big Bend region.
The center serves as the eastern entrance gateway to Big Bend Ranch State Park and interprets 570 million years of geological history, as well as the five biological landscapes of the Chihuahuan Desert, a region better known as the Big Bend.
