Gettysburg Museum; Visitor Center Opens April 14
By Deborah Fitts

GETTYSBURG, Pa. — After nearly a dozen years in the planning and tens of millions of dollars raised and spent, the new museum and visitor center at Gettysburg National Military Park is slated to open at 8 a.m. on Monday, April 14.

The current visitor center, built in 1921 as a private museum of battlefield relics, will close its doors for the last time on the afternoon of Sunday, April 13.

“Our plan is to make as smooth a transition as possible,” said Katie Lawhon, spokesman for Gettysburg National Military Park. “The old visitor center will be open till 5 p.m. on Sunday, and at 8 a.m. on Monday our staff will be greeting visitors” at the new building.

The office staff will be “packed and ready to go” on Friday. “During the weekend we’re literally going to hire a moving company to move our stuff,” she said.

Compared to the present setup, the new facility will house more of the park staff in one building, including the superintendent and his deputy, the rangers, interpreters, historians and the public affairs office.

The new visitor center lies off Hunt Avenue, two-thirds of a mile distant from the current building. The “soft opening” on the 14th will be without fanfare. The park is planning a “grand opening” Sept. 26-28. The Cyclorama painting, undergoing an $11 million restoration, will be the only feature not open to visitors yet; it will open Sept. 26.

In the way of modern museums, the new site will feature an array of interactive and audio-visual presentations aimed at providing visitors a you-are-there feeling. The “storyline” threaded through the 12 exhibit galleries will also be all new, addressing the “causes and consequences” of the war as well as the battle itself.

The galleries comprise 24,000 square feet of space, compared to 21,000 square feet in the current building. The number of items on display will be drastically reduced, however. According to Lawhon the present museum has 6,633 items on exhibit, while the new displays will have 1,338.

 In fact, some of the items in the new museum will actually be on loan to the park, sought out to help “fill holes” for the storyline, Lawhon said. No items were purchased for the purpose, she added.

 The storyline was developed by a team that included some of the country’s best-known Civil War scholars and museum professionals, working with park staffers, notably historian Scott Hartwig.

Among the outside historians were James McPherson, Gary Gallagher, Nina Silber, Eric Foner, Harold Holzer and Gabor Boritt. Among the museum professionals were Olivia Mahoney of the Chicago Historical Society; Robin Reed, formerly of the Museum of the Confederacy and now with Colonial Williamsburg; and Gordon Jones of the Atlanta Historical Society.

The April 14 opening day will include a flag-raising ceremony at 11 a.m. as part of “Old Glory’s Journey of Remembrance.” In a six-month-long project organized by the White House, a flag flown over the USS Arizona Memorial on Dec. 7, 2007, is traveling to 25 patriotic and historic sites around the country.

Creating A Storyline
McPherson said of the current museum, “There is virtually no storyline. It’s an old-fashioned museum that has stuff. There’s no over-arching story as a modern museum tries to present.”

Further, although several galleries will be devoted to the battle itself, McPherson said the story would stretch well beyond that. “The idea is to place the battle in the larger context of the war and in the context of American history. And my guess is it will be the best in the country.”

McPherson expressed surprise, however, when told how many fewer relics will be on display. “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said. “My understanding was that there will be much more room to exhibit the wealth of artifacts that the park owns.”

Park Superintendent John Latschar attempted to explain the “numbers” issue.

“What we’ve got here right now is what is known as a collections museum,” Latschar said. “We’ve got rows and rows of rifles and pistols and cases full of battle debris, and zero story.

“What we’re creating is a storyline museum, where you use artifacts to illustrate the storyline. So we have no need for 40 varieties of rifle muskets. We’re trying to provide our visitors with a basic understanding of the battle of Gettysburg in the context of the war and in the context of America, so when they get out on the battlefield they know not only who shot what, but what they were shooting about. And we want to tell the story to all ages and all learning levels.

“We’re trying to do so much more than just showing endless rows of artifacts.”

Lawhon described the current museum as “more of a hodgepodge.” A display on the U.S. Colored Troops stands side-by-side with one on the war’s navies, and another on music in the war.

“The situation we have right now is a museum that we received lock, stock and barrel from the Rosensteel family” in 1971, Lawhon said. “We made some changes, but it was created literally a couple of generations ago, when the goal was to get as many artifacts out as possible.

“You can walk through that museum and it’s hard to learn about the battle. We want to get people out on the battlefield better prepared to learn what happened here.”

Lawhon noted that four large cases in the lobby area will hold additional artifacts, including long arms, pistols, artillery projectiles, belt buckles, buttons, insignia and the like.

“We wanted to get out objects from our collections that don’t fit the storyline, and many people are interested in these,” she explained. The lobby will also have 10 cannon tubes on display.

Lawhon said a Special Exhibits Gallery will use temporary and traveling exhibits to broaden the number of topics covered in the museum. Exhibits will include objects from the park's collection as well as loans from other institutions.

The first exhibit, opening April 14, will be Civil War soldiers’ letters from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History’s extensive collection. Objects from the Gettysburg NMP collection will be on display along with the letters.

Also, the gallery describing the action on the third day of battle, July 3, 1863, will have three large cases with “battle debris” from the Rosensteel collection. Lawhon said the cases of artillery shells, shell fragments, bullets and the like are intended to give visitors a sense of “literally the metal in the air” as Confederates moved forward in Pickett’s Charge.

‘High-Tech Feel’
Among other features at the new site will be a new 22-minute film, “A New Birth of Freedom,” highlighting the sights, sounds and emotions of the battle and its aftermath. It replaces a short film more than four decades old.

Two 150-seat theaters boasting 120-degree wrap-around screens will be available to show the film. “There will definitely be a high-definition, high-tech feel that will be comfortable for our visitors,” Lawhon said.

A refreshment “saloon” will offer typical “museum café food,” according to Lawhon, with some items prepared ahead of time and others requiring on-site preparation. There will also be some Civil War-era items, such as hardtack. The food provider Aramark has a contract for the service.

The museum bookstore will have “more items for sale,” including reproductions of relics and other memorabilia, and “more linear feet of books for sale” than the current bookstore, according to Lawhon.

The for-profit Event Network will operate the store, replacing the non-profit Eastern National that ran the current store. Lawhon said “many” Eastern National employees have accepted positions working for Event Network.

The new building will also offer classroom space for teacher workshops and student activities, and computer access to databases about the battle and the park collections.

“A New Birth of Freedom” will require tickets. Prices until Sept. 25 will be $8 for adults, $6.50 for ages 6 to 12, and children 5 and under free. After Sept. 25 the price will rise to $12 for adults and $10 for youths over 5, with the tickets providing access to both the film and the Cyclorama painting.

Engaging Private Sector
The notion of a new visitor center was first raised in 1995, when a local developer proposed building a facility to solve preservation problems with the Cyclorama painting. The National Park Service decided to go a step further and issued a request for proposals from the private sector for a whole new visitor center.

 Of six proposals, that of York developer Robert Kinsley was chosen as the best fit. Kinsley’s nonprofit group, the Gettysburg Foundation, will own and operate the new visitor center, in cooperation with the park, for 20 years and then hand it over to the park.

The cost of the project has climbed over the years. In 1999 the park estimated the cost at $39 million, not including exhibit fabrication. The final price tag is now $125 million, of which $103 million has gone into the new facility. At 139,000 square feet the new building dwarfs the present visitor and Cyclorama centers, which have a total of 85,320 square feet.

To date, the foundation has secured $105 million and is now actively fundraising at the grassroots level. Of the $125 million total, $10 million represents an endowment, while another $9.6 million will go to razing the present visitor center and Cyclorama buildings — scheduled for 2009 — and restoring the wartime appearance of that key part of the battlefield, comprising 44 acres.