(May 2006) FREDERICK, Md. - A sign that it is truly coming of age, officials at Monocacy National Battlefield broke ground March 24 on the park's first stand-alone visitor center.

The two-story, 7,000-square-foot structure should open in a year, according to Cathy Beeler, the park's chief of resource education and visitor services. The park has $3.5 million in hand to pay for the center - thanks in part, Beeler said, to Maryland's U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D).

The new facility will allow the park to move the visitor center out of the Gambrill Mill, a 160-year-old structure that was chosen to host visitors when the park opened in 1991 because it was the only building with an adequate well and septic system. The mill is so small, Beeler said, "It's difficult to get more than 25 visitors here at any one time."

The new visitor center, to be built across Route 355 from the Best Farm, on the northern approach to the battlefield, will finally place Monocacy in the pantheon of important Civil War battlefield parks, according to Beeler.

"We've seen our park visitation increase little by little over the last 15 years, but we haven't had a visitor center large enough to accommodate everyone," she said. "People looked at us as not really a professional facility."

Joe Lawler, the National Park Service's director for the National Capital Region, noted that the recollections of an eye-witness to the battle, 6-year-old Glenn Worthington, would be among the exhibits. Worthington later wrote a book-length account of the battle.

"Glenn Worthington's vision for remembering the battle of Monocacy and what audiences it might reach helps us to become better public stewards of this, an important battle in the defense of our nation's capital during the height of the Civil War," Lawler said. "It reminds us that one person can make a difference."

The visitor center, Beeler said, "will take us out of the small site where people can't really study seriously, into having a significant battlefield that people can come to and study and take seriously."

The second floor of the new building will be dedicated to exhibits. The first floor will have interpretive offices, the park library, visitors' desk and museum shop. The park headquarters offices will remain upstairs at the mill.

Beeler said the new structure will resemble, "a little bit," a 1950s- era dairy barn. That's partly because the park originally planned to renovate an actual dairy barn on the Best Farm for its new visitor center. But concerned about having the facility "in the middle of a historic landscape," park officials decided to build the center across the road. Although originally also part of the Best Farm, Beeler said, the property saw "the least amount of actual fighting."

"We had to choose a location that was easily accessible, not in the middle of the heaviest fighting and not in the middle of the historic scene, and not in the flood plain" of the Monocacy River, Beeler explained.

Touted as the only Confederate victory on Union soil, the battle of Monocacy occurred July 9, 1864, when 18,000 Confederates under Gen. Jubal Early clashed with 5,800 Union troops under Gen. Lew Wallace. Early's hope of capturing Washington, D.C., 40 miles distant, was dashed when the battle caused Early a day's delay and allowed the Federals to bring sufficient reinforcements to protect the capital. So ended the last Southern campaign into the North.

Sen, Sarbanes, who attended the groundbreaking, said in a press release that the new building "sets the stage for people from all over the country and indeed all over the world to see first-hand one of the small but pivotal battles of the Civil War."

The battlefield park was authorized by Congress in 1934, but it took another 32 years before funds were appropriated to buy land. The park opened in 1991.

Today the park comprises 1,647 acres, located two miles south of Frederick. It has a staff of 14 and an annual budget of $1.1 million. Visitation last year totaled 18,145. The park is open daily from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. except for New Year's, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission is free.

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