"Museum Of The Confederacy Plan To Move Meets Resistance"
By Deborah Fitts
- December 2005, RICHMOND, Va, — Officials at the Museum of the Confederacy have made up their minds to move — but so far the public isn’t buying it.
The board of trustees of the century-old museum concluded early in the fall that the museum building and the adjacent White House of the Confederacy had to move or risk failure. With visitor numbers falling and the museum’s deficit growing, the board pinned its hopes on finding a more accessible and more appropriate location.
But Executive Director S. Waite Rawls said support from the state was crucial, and legislators aren’t about to move forward on relocation plans until and unless their constituents sign onto the idea.
“There’s a strong sentiment not to move the White House,” Rawls acknowledged. “We’re going to need money from the state, and other help, but right now we don’t have enough of a public consensus about moving the White House for the state to support it.”
Rawls points to falling visitor numbers — projected to drop from 54,000 annually, to 30,000 by 2009 — and a growing annual deficit that totals about $400,000 now and could reach three-quarters of a million dollars in four years. He blames the aggressive growth of their neighbor, the medical college campus of Virginia Commonwealth University.
The museum’s location at highly urbanized 12th and Clay streets has made the 1818 White House, Jefferson Davis’s home, a hopeless anomaly, museum officials say. And visitors have a hard time finding the museum, tucked away amid soaring high-rises.
Rawls is lobbying for a move two miles to the west on Broad Street, where a sizable campus is home to the Science Museum of Virginia and the Richmond Children’s Museum. The state-owned land is especially appropriate for the Museum of the Confederacy, he asserted, because before and during the Civil War it was the site of Camp Lee, named for Robert E. Lee’s father Lighthorse Harry Lee. A total of 50,000 Confederate infantry trained there early in the war, and the site was used as a hospital and for prisoner exchange.
“It’s probably the most important military site in Civil War Richmond,” said Rawls. “It’s clearly the birthplace of the Army of Northern Virginia, and it’s where we want to move.”
But the opposition is considerable. In September the Executive Council of the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) announced a resolution citing its “deepest objections” to moving the White House, “which stands as a monument to the history and legacy of our people.” Relocation would be “a shameful and repugnant act in direct confrontation with our belief in monument preservation.”
The council said the museum and the state should expend their efforts instead on “exposing the underlying causes” of the museum’s decline, engage in fundraising, and halt new construction around the museum.
Meanwhile, both the National Park Service and the state Department of Historic Resources oppose the relocation, citing the fact that the White House will promptly lose its designation as a national and Virginia historic landmark.
“Many history- and preservation-loving people are opposed to moving the White House,” Rawls acknowledged. “That’s the correct feeling. But they have to go the further step and say, what do you do?”
Rawls argued that “all sorts of” historic structures have been moved, and some successfully re-apply for landmark status. “If you move for crass commercial reasons, you’d never get designated,” he said. “But if you move for historically sensitive reasons, you could.”
For several months a subcommittee of Virginia’s General Assembly has been holding hearings on the museum. and studying the possible move. A report by the subcommittee when the General Assembly goes into session in January will include “strong statements that the Museum of the Confederacy is a national treasure and one of Richmond’s great assets,” Rawls predicted, “and it will say the state, by allowing the hospital to expand, has irreparably harmed the museum.”
The report will conclude that “the state needs to help,” Rawls said, “although the nature of that help is still uncertain.”
Rawls is hoping the legislature will agree temporarily to offset the museum’s deficit, pending a permanent resolution. He said the museum was “almost but not quite in debt,” but would go into the red “probably next year.”
The museum has 22 full-time employees and an equal number of part-timers The staff was reduced 30 percent three years ago, “so we’re at kind of a bare minimum.”
Rawls said he hopes that as time passes, those opposed to the relocation will agree that there’s no alternative.
“You have to face the stark reality of the consequences that people won’t come if you don’t move it,” he said. “We wouldn’t consider this unless it was our last resort.”
