Renovations set to begin this month on Sequoyah Birthplace Museum
VONORE, Tenn. — After more than three decades, the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum is getting a long-awaited update, with work starting by the end of the month.
The main museum building will close Wednesday and remain closed while the interior is renovated with a new exhibit, officials said. Parts of the project will continue into 2018. In the first phase of work this fall, the museum gift shop
On July 26, the main building at Sequoyah Birthplace Museum will be closed for extended internal and external renovations.
and offices will move to a temporary trailer.
“During this time, many of the museum activities and features will still be available for visitors to experience,” museum spokesman Cal Davis said in a statement. “We will be removing our current exhibit and begin replacing it with an exciting new exhibit and delivery system.”
The new exhibit will focus on the Overhill Cherokee and Sequoyah — the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, Davis said.
“We will still continue to hold outdoor classes and events on-site, moving our Timberlake Exhibit to our log cabin, as well as keeping our blacksmith shop open,” he said.
The museum, a property of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, was opened in 1986 to promote understanding and appreciation of the history and culture of the Cherokee in East Tennessee. Exhibits tell the story of the Cherokee, their family life, customs and beliefs, as well as the 1830s Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee were evicted from their lands and forcemarched to Oklahoma. Sequoyah was born in 1776 in the village of Tuskeegee, less than a half mile from the museum grounds.
Max Ramsey, the museum’s first board chairman, is a founder of the Trail of Tears Association and an honorary member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. He said the new exhibit will use the latest technology to tell the story of Sequoyah and how he sought to give the Cherokee a written language.
Parts of the current exhibit will be kept for possible use in other displays, but most of what people will see will be new.
“We will be enhancing it through different types of illustrations and materials,” Ramsey said Friday.
Now, visitors learn from recorded video displayed on old television sets housed in kiosks around the museum. The new experience will be far more high-tech.
“This is all new stuff,” Ramsey said. Visitors will appear to descend from the clouds toward a log cabin where a man and woman stand holding a baby they would name Sequoyah.
A 3-D Sequoyah will tell about his own experiences in a way that challenges viewers to place themselves in the same position in time and culture, and then takes them back, Ramsey said.
The museum’s educational area will expand to hold up to 80 people for classes and special events.
Barring major setback, the grand opening could come in June or July of 2018, Ramsey said.
Meanwhile, a congressional bill, if passed, could add considerably to the museum’s ability to tell the story of the Cherokee in East Tennessee.
The bill to return 76 acres of tribal land near the museum and along the Little Tennessee River to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is languishing in a subcommittee.
HB 3599, also known as the Eastern Band Cherokee Historic Lands Reacquisition Act, was referred in September 2015 to the House Committee on Natural Resources, then in October 2015 to the subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs, congressional records show.
That subcommittee held hearings in April 2016 but the bill hasn’t moved since then.