Paging Thru: Part 2 - The New Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center
By C. Peter Jørgensen

August 2008 Paging Thru column

The Gettysburg National Military Park superintentdent should have taken Mark Twain’s advice. Even in this digital age, ink still comes by the barrel—and we buy plenty of it.

There is too much in his accompanying letter to address in detail—and correct—except to say that his comments serve to underscore the validity of our description of the Park’s new visitor center as not falling under any ordinary definition of “museum.” It’s a show-and-tell presentation theater. They show you only what they think you should see. They tell you what they want you to think.

For example, he says, “The vast majority of professional reviewers seem to love the new facility.” Newspapers don’t have “professional” museum reviewers. They have travel writers and freelance contributors whose job it is to write enthusiastically about places to visit. Has anybody ever read a travel story that said, “Don’t go, that place is the pits?”

“The Washington Post called the new museum “…understated in a classic National Park Service way….a seamless part of the old Park Service brand.” That’s 17 of the 2,130 words the Washington Post reporter wrote about the changes at Gettysburg battlefield. Faint praise indeed.

“The Boston Globe said ‘The museum does an outstanding job of detailing the world-altering events that took place at Gettysburg and placing them in the context of the Civil War.’” The Boston Globe said no such thing; those words were written by a freelance travel writer from Austin, Texas.

The Baltimore Sun said that “Visitors win with new center at Gettysburg.” Ahhhh, not quite accurate. The Baltimore Sun didn’t say anything. Newspapers speak on their editorial page, the way this newspaper speaks now.

The Sun’s Architectural Critic, Edward Gunts, wrote that comment in a 919-word column devoted primarily to damning the design of architect Richard Neutra who was responsible for the existing Cyclorama Center put up in the 1960s. Hardly an expression of “love” for breadth and scope of the new visitor center’s display of historical artifacts.

The main thrust of our criticism last issue was that the National Park Service people either don’t know or don’t care what they have in the nation’s largest collection of historical artifacts of the Civil War.

The Superintendent confirms our assessment in his postscript comment regarding the oval belt plate we noted as being misidentified as a Union Militia plate and which appears in Steve Mullinax’s 1991 book Confederate Belt Buckles and Plates as Plate #299.

The Superintendent’s reply says, “P.S. For those who are interested . . . GETT 28220 is clearly a U.S. Militia plate. This reply just makes a flat out declaration. No sources cited, no provenance, no explanation.

Well, here is some real evidence to chew over. That oval waist belt buckle appears in the 1920 edition of Francis Bannerman’s 396-page Catalog of Military Goods. Bannerman’s of New York City was founded in 1865 as buyers and resellers of military surplus and remained in business until the 1960s.

The plate is described as “Confederate Civil War Belt Buckle used by Texas Regiments, in good and serviceable order. Valuable relic. Price $2.00.” It was still in the 1927, 1936 and 1940 catalogs at the same price of $2, but did not appear in Bannerman’s 1945 catalog, apparently having been sold out.

West Point graduate William G. Gavin started collecting Civil War belt buckles in the late 1950s and he ran a museum and shop at Harpers Ferry. In 1963 Will Gavin published a 348-page book entitled Accoutrement Plates North and South 1861-1865. A photograph of this same style raised star belt buckle appears on page 172 with the caution that no dug ones had been recovered as yet.

Later in the 1970s and 1980s, when high-tech metal detectors came out, enough of these plates were found for collector publications to conclude that some saw field use. Michael J. O’Donnell, is an expert on military buckles, but he is skeptical of the claims. “We know the state of Texas ordered buckles with a star from abroad and we know a blockade runner was captured with a shipment of war goods that included Texas buckles,” he said last month, “but we don’t know if it is the same buckle that Bannerman advertised for years.”

All Civil War vintage buckles with a star device are attributed to either Texas or Mississippi. This style oval plate has appeared in several publications and is occasionally traded at relic shows. The accompanying photo is of a plate the publisher once owned and the illustration is from Bannerman’s catalog.
In 1996, after eight years of research, O’Donnell and J. Duncan Campbell came out with a 620-page, hard cover, oversized book entitled American Military Belt Plates, showing 1,026 buckles from 1790 to 1910 with photos and detailed information.

There is no oval belt plate with a star device that’s identified as a Union militia plate. The only rectangular militia plate with a star is identified to Texas. (Texas was a Confederate state.)

The Gettysburg Superintendent and his staff have a duty as caretakers of historical artifacts owned by the United States to be accurate and forthright. If their information as to the origin of the oval star belt plate was once a military secret, it’s not anymore. He should tell all of us how he arrived at his flat declaration that “GETT 28220” is a Union Militia plate and which Union state’s militia issued these oval star belt plates to its troops.

Does the National Park Service care about historical accuracy, or is it a case of “We’ll tell you the story we want you to hear and we’ll never let the facts interfere with our storyline.”

Who cares about little things like buckles and bullets and muskets anyway?

Rusty carbines, pistols, tin cups, faded uniforms, and cloth haversacks are stacked up in our basement storage area. Whew, musty old stuff; it’s all just a pile of junk.

Nobody needs to see it. It reminds us of that stack of old 1930s-era leather valises and luggage cases piled up beside the old wooden railroad boxcar on the third floor of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. It’s all just a pile of junk.

Wait a minute, look, some of those bags have names written on the sides. They must have once belonged to real people.

But then, we’ve all seen plenty of old leather suitcases and valises . . . it’s all just junk from another era. Who needs a pile of suitcases and musty leather bags to illustrate a storyline anyway?