Museum Of Confederacy Weighs Options For Moving to New Site
By Deborah Fitts
December 2004

RICHMOND, Va. - The Museum of the Confederacy, a venerable Richmond institution for more than a century and the home of one of the most significant Civil War collections in the country, may be moving.

Executive Director S. Waite Rawls said in late October that the museum's 29-member board will decide this winter whether to stay put under increasingly adverse conditions, or find a new location.

The museum comprises two structures, a 1971 building that stores and displays the collection, and the White House of the Confederacy, built in 1818, that served as the home and office of Confederate President Jefferson Davis during the war.

The problem, according to Rawls, is significant drop-off in visitation due to crowding by the adjoining medical college campus of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). The museum's three-quarter-acre lot at 12th and Clay streets is nearly surrounded by the medical college's multi-story buildings.

And last spring, Rawls said, came the final straw: VCU announced that starting in 2005 they will build a new 14-story building immediately east of the museum on a lot now occupied by a defunct one-story steam plant. They also predicted that construction on other sites within two or three blocks would continue "for the next 15 or 20 years or so," Rawls said.

"There will be a doughnut of high-rise medical buildings and we will be the doughnut hole."

Rawls said that as recently as two decades ago the White House of the Confederacy "was the tallest structure for blocks." Now, he said, "If you were to bring Jeff Davis blindfolded to the front door of his house and take off the blindfold, he wouldn't know where he was."

The museum board is weighing three options: remain in place; move the museum, but leave the White House on its original site; or move both.

Rawls said the "least likely" scenario was to move the museum and not the White House. He cited "the financial and visitation consequences of running shuttle buses" between the two. "We fear that visitation would plummet." He also suggested that staying put is not a viable option. "It is problematic to stay," he stated.

Visitation topped 90,000 a year in the late 1980s and early '90s. But after VCU erected a 12-story building several years ago immediately south and west of the museum, and closed off 12th Street, visitors found it increasingly difficult to even locate the museum, and the appeal of its setting was severely compromised. Annual visitation "took a dive" to today's level of about 60,000, Rawls said.

He said the museum was "talking to various people" and "looking at other sites." He would not disclose where they were, but "not all" were in Richmond. Still, "We would like very much to keep it in the City of Richmond."

Rawls also said the museum was "in negotiations and discussions about what are the consequences of moving a national historic landmark," which is the designation conferred on the White House. A move off its original site would place the coveted landmark status "in doubt," he acknowledged.

Word of the museum's uncertain future came in early October, in an annual fundraising letter to the museum's 4,000 members from board chairman J.E.B. Stuart IV. Exploring the options means "extraordinary expenses," Rawls said, "because you've got to hire lawyers, engineers and architects to do feasibility studies."

Following the Civil War, the Davis home served for five years as Virginia headquarters for the federal occupying force, and then for 20 years as a schoolhouse. In 1890, when the city was on the verge of tearing it down, the Hollywood Memorial Association stepped in to save it. The museum was founded in the White House in 1896, the same year as the founding of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

Today the museum has an annual budget of about $2 million and a staff of 40.

Rawls was made executive director last January. He said that to his surprise, he found that fewer than 25 percent of the museum's visitors come from Virginia. Significant numbers come from regions as varied as California and Pennsylvania, he said, and "England is always in the top 10." Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited a couple of months ago.

Those interested in learning more about the Museum of the Confederacy or wishing to donate to the nonprofit may go to their Website at www.moc.org.