When the National Park Service exhibits at Chancellorsville were new, John F. Kennedy was president of the United States and Sandy Koufax had just won Major League Baseball’s Cy Young Award. Fifty years later, they’re overdue for refreshing. That’s the thought behind a major project underway at the battlefield’s visitor center, where a platoon of curators, historians and technicians recently waged an all-out, two-day campaign to carefully remove dozens of Civil War artifacts from their display cases and gently place them in climate-controlled storage. Between now and next May, just in time for the 150th anniversary of the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House, Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and its contractors will create and install displays reflecting current research and scholarship. During the same period, the park plans a similar overhaul of exhibits at its Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center. “After most of a lifetime, 50 years, it’s time to take these spaces and put them to a little higher use, to use more modern media that tells a bigger story and recognizes the Civil War’s impact on people of every stripe—every color, every economic status, North and South,” John Hennessy, the park’s chief historian, said in an interview. “We’re going to begin to tell their stories as part of this.” ...
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 21:20:51 +0000
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