Tredegar National Civil War Center Plans Are Unveiled
By Deborah Fitts
April 2004 RICHMOND, Va.

The head of the Tredegar National Civil War Center hopes to break ground this year for a major new Civil War museum to be located at the heart of the Confederacy.

Planning for the project took a step forward Feb. 20, when designs were unveiled for the 21,000-square-foot building. The center will be located at the historic Tredegar Iron Works on the banks of the James River in the former Confederate capital.

Alexander Wise, who heads the nonprofit foundation overseeing the project, declined to put a price tag on the museum. In the past, however, he has cited a $38 million figure.

The new building will be located in what is now a parking lot near the Tredegar foundry building. Across the yard is the visitor center and museum of Richmond National Battlefield Park.

Wise said the new building will be "very arresting" in appearance. The design is by the Richmond architectural firm of Marcellus Wright & Cox.

"It works very well on this site," Wise said. "You'll be able to tell" that it's new. "It's not a fake historic building. The trick is not to look like you're trying to copy the old, but it gives it a nod."

The building will include 12,000 square feet of exhibit space. Designs for this were also unveiled Feb. 20. PRD (Planning, Research & Design) of Fairfax, Va., which has designed exhibits for Pamplin Park, the Atlanta History Center and the Virginia Historical Society, among others, is the design firm.

Wise had arranged to get the bulk of the Union artifacts for the museum on loan from the Civil War Library & Museum in Philadelphia. But legal action brought by Pennsylvania dashed that plan, and the objects will stay in Philadelphia.

Instead, he said he is "in discussions with 50 institutions" to obtain loans, and is relying on the museum's status as a Smithsonian affiliate to get items from that major collection in Washington. Tredegar already has the promise of the collection of 3,000 artifacts reflecting the black Civil War experience from Hartford, Conn., collector and insurance executive John Motley.

Wise said his foundation is more than halfway toward its fundraising goal. So far the museum has attracted $2.2 million in federal funding, $900,000 from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and $100,000 from Richmond, as well as donations from businesses and individuals.

"It's never easy, but we're rolling along and we've got the majority of the money we need," he said.

Visitors to the new museum will take an elevator to the top floor of the three-story building to begin their tour. Here the causes of the war will be illuminated, and the initial battles of Bull Run and Wilson's Creek. The middle floor "will be dedicated to what you might call the guts of the war," Wise said, from Shiloh and the spring of 1862 to Lincoln's reelection in 1864.

The bottom floor will feature an "object theater," consisting of artifacts highlighted by sound and lighting, that will interpret the end of the war and Reconstruction. There will be a major focus on the "legacies" of the war extending to today, Wise said.

"We're really scrupulously telling the three stories," he added: "Union, Confederate and African-American, and rooting them in the founding of the country. We feel the Civil War was the anvil on which modern America was formed. We're looking at the big picture."

Wise said construction should begin two years from groundbreaking. He said he hoped to open the museum by 2007, Virginia's 400th anniversary. The museum will also have use of the 7,000-square-foot Tredegar gun foundry building. Tredegar, which supplied more than a thousand cannons to the Confederacy, is owned today by Ethyl Corp.