Attendance down at Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History in Kennesaw

http://www.ajc.com/search/content/auto/epaper/editions/tuesday/living_44cffe9871f7525700c2.html

A couple things come to mind:

1. The choir is already in the church. Buying ads in RR and War Against State's Rights fan mags isn't going to get anybody's attention that wouldn't be prone to visit anyhow. Getting other audiences to want to visit makes some sense.

2. The concept of this museum (which houses what was actually not lost by municipal neglect of the Glover stuff) was originally a living history museum wherein actual machinery would be built using tools and tehniques from the works just as it had been done since the reconstruction era. That was altered to reflect a "looking at stuff and reading the book on the wall" museum, with a video on the Andrews Raid to watch if you were so inclined. I think they opted for boredom as a result.

3. The presentation is sterile and devoid of context. You couldn't take one step at Glovers and not trip over some interesting stuff that had been piled up since 1942, yet you could perform surgery in the machine shop display in the museum. Artificiality is a hard sell if you are a preservation organization marketed as such. The GENERAL occupies the old Frye Gin, without adequate space to even take a decent photo. This frustrates visitors.

I am left with the gut feeling that a committee is making a camel with an elephants trunk and a giraffes legs in an effort to broaden the appeal of the horse they really needed to design. Too bad - it could have been a narrower but much better southeastern version of the Knight Foundry, but better located and with public sector support. I wish them well but hope they work on reinventing themselves as something more attractive, not just looking for marketing schemes for marginal short term gains.

dave

I would be interested in seeing more information about how their interpretive mission and strategy has changed over time - and what the drivers were behind this decision making. Such information would be tremendously beneficial to preservation. It would be a great topic for an article here - but I would be more than happy to see it in one of the several other publications that deal with such issues (such as the Journal of Technology and Culture) too.

Of particular interest is the that their curator, George Deeming, was previously at the Railroad Musuem of Pennsylvania. From my (distant) perspective what dave describes seems very similar to the direction that RMPA took in the 1990s - perhaps at the expense of expanding their capacity to house a larger collection or bypassing other opporunities.

Tom Cornillie

Hi Tom - the decisions were probably reached before construction started. Comparing early plan architectural renderings with what was built would provide you with a lot of the information you ask about. The original idea was a smaller reconstruction of the Glover erecting shop, complete with a brick smokestack with GLOVER spelled out in buff brick, that would have been wonderful.

I think George's tenure there began well after those decisions were made, so drawing any direct line of influence between him, RMPa and Kennesaw is unlikely.

The late Joe Mack Wilson of Marietta was a politician who knew how to get things done. I had the honor of getting to know him a bit while working for him on the original Glover locomotive restoration, and he confided in me that he thought in retrospect one of his greatest mistakes was landlocking GENERAL in that small building in downtown Kennesaw. He would rather have had it in the park itself, perhaps with a rail connection to allow it to be run now and again.

The Frye family, I am told, have a clause in the agreement to allow the museum to use their property such that should GENERAL be removed from the building, it would revert. Given the value of downtown Kennesaw property, I wouldn't be surprised that a Frye or two was just waiting for an opportunity. This pretty well limits that situation to remaining as it is indefinitely, provided I have not been misinformed.

A very ambitious young turk of a curator / manager left the museum in frustration during the endless planning / replanning/ fighting over resources part of the process. I don't know what the exact issues were, but he did speak of his decision to move on in these broad terms to me. Make of that what you will.

Collections weren't gathered until the Glover works was being demolished. I worked with Hillman in an ice storm one January trying to triage the huge quantity of stuff left in the buildings, most of which had the roofs removed at the time. The archives of the company were dumped and went to the landfill, apart from the strictly locomotive files which Hillman personally saved. Without his efforts, there would have been much less to interpret than the minimal bit there is now.

None of this gave me the impression that there was serious support for the museum in high enough places to make it a reality, until it became critical if it was going to happen at all, and then only after compromising with a lot of different agendas to broaden support while watering down the focus from that originally intended. I do know that seed money - about $250K if memory serves - had been set aside to acquire and store the collection, but that money wasn't used until very late -years after it was available, and a lot was lost in the bungle. If a quarter of it had been used immediately, things would have been much different collections-wise.

There may be some lessons to be learned about museum evolution, small town politics in a municipality reaching big city status, "better" being the enemy of "good", anything being better than nothing, the dangers of trying to stretch capital too thin - i truly don't know just what to make of it all. Too close in some respects, out of the loop in others. If we could ROSHAMON this bit of history and compare the different impressions of a lot of involved people it would certainly be interesting.

Again, my sense is that of a lot of very good people pushing what they each considered the most important agenda, succeeded in compromising with all their agendas to get anything done until a pale shadow of something of them all was built - which isn't an easy sell. I may be ignorant of some factors that would change that impression, I'd be pleased to know better.

dave