Revolution of ideas
A couple of new multimilliondollar museums prepare to fight for visitors
Opening less than a month apart, the debut of two nationally recognized, multimillion-dollar American Revolution museums raises the question: Who owns the story of the birth of our nation?
Did America spring from a Yorktown, Va., battlefield, ravaged by pickaxes, cannonballs and horse carcasses before British Gen. Charles Cornwallis surrendered his troops on Oct. 19, 1781? Or was our republic sealed in the first capital, Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were debated and adopted? The answer is both. “It’s like Jewelers’ Row. We’re all in the business of getting people hooked on diamonds,” explains R. Scott Stephenson, vice president of collections, exhibitions and programming for the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.
Opening Wednesday at Third and Chestnut streets, the threestory brick building is located steps from Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center. It’s not to be confused with the smaller (also brick) American Revolution Museum at Yorktown near the iconic battlefield, which kicked off a 13-day grand opening celebration in late March with patriotic salutes to individual colonies.
Leaders of both museums insist that the timing of their unveilings is coincidental. Both facilities were in development for more than a decade, both marked by fits and starts.
The American Revolution Museum at Yorktown, formerly the Yorktown Victory Center, had a soft opening in October. The Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, a state agency, operates the new $51 million museum, along with the Jamestown Settlement nearby.
Philadelphia’s $120 million museum, originally slated to occupy land within Valley Forge National Park, is run by a non-profit group supported by private and state funding. The project’s biggest donor is local media entrepreneur and philanthropist H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest.
“I don’t see them as competition at all,” Homer Lanker, the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation’s interpretive programs manager, said of the museum to the north. “I see both of us telling an amazing story.”
Surprisingly, top officials at each institution said they haven’t had time to check out what the other has to offer. Nor did they have time to consult with each other’s curatorial teams to avoid duplication.
There are some striking similarities in retelling a uniquely American story: Both museums feature lanterns hanging from a “Liberty Tree.” (Yorktown’s is wired for instant messages.) Both include images of members of the Revolutionary War generation who survived into the age of photography. Both rely on diverse, personal narratives to keep modern viewers engaged, and chronicle simmering rifts between the American colonists and the British Crown through the afterglow of independence and the messy work of a burgeoning democracy. Neither asks the viewer to memorize dates, battles or a teacup’s provenance.
Both institutions ponder such existential questions as “Are liberty and freedom synonymous?” without wading into the current political climate.
This isn’t the first time that Pennsylvania and Virginia have traded friendly fire over preserving wartime artifacts. National Civil War museums have sprouted in Harrisburg and Richmond.
Taking a comprehensive approach to the Revolutionary period, the new museums complement an array of historic sites preserved by the Daughters of the American Revolution, National Parks Service and regional organizations promoting their piece of the story, according to Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, who serves on the board of the American Alliance of Museums.
Helped by the Hamilton craze on Broadway, the “Revolutionary War is as current today as it was then,” added Catlin-Legutko, president and CEO of the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. “Philadelphia is part of the story. Yorktown is part of the story.”
Visitors to both museums will leave with an understanding that the revolution wasn’t a one-off rebellion, waged by an appendage of a remote political entity on the other side of the Atlantic. Rather, the struggle continues today (cue former presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders), because liberty remains fragile and an informed citizenry is by no means guaranteed.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” English-American writer and revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote at the close of 1776. “Yet we have this consolation with us ...”
“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
“The Revolutionary War is as current today as it was then. Philadelphia is part of the story. Yorktown is part of the story.” Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, the American Alliance of Museums