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Tom Ferrick Jr. | Pieces of the past given new future
By Tom Ferrick Jr.
Inquirer Columnist

This story has a happy ending but, as is often the case, it begins unhappily.

A few years ago, historian James Roebuck picked up the newspaper to discover that Philadelphia's Civil War Library and Museum was about to ship most of its collection out of state.

Not just out of state, but to Richmond, Va., in a deal struck with a Civil War museum planned for that city, which was the capital of the Confederacy.

As we say in the news biz, Roebuck was shocked and appalled. He viewed Philadelphia's collection as a city treasure, one of the best assemblages of Civil War documents and artifacts outside the Smithsonian Institution.

Why would the board running the little, overcrowded museum at 1805 Pine St. want to give it up?

As it turned out, lots of people began asking the same question, including members of MOLLUS, whose ancestors had founded the museum.

MOLLUS stands for Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. It was a blue-ribbon veterans group founded after the Civil War by Union officers. MOLLUS members or their agents had assembled most of the collection. In the 1920s, they bought the building on Pine Street to house the collection and even raised an endowment of $500,000, the equivalent of $5 million in today's dollars.

The museum percolated along quietly until the 1990s, when members of MOLLUS were ousted from the board and the museum went into a period of mismanagement or simply no management, depending on whom you talk to.

The fight begins

Here is where our story takes a turn.

After Roebuck concluded that the directors of the museum were determined to "loan" their collection and refused to discuss alternatives, he decided to get feisty. He remembers thinking: "We can't let this happen."

Did I mention? Roebuck is also a state legislator who represents portions of West Philadelphia. He went to State Sen. Vincent Fumo, whose district includes the museum.

Roebuck and Fumo did the political equivalent of banging on pots. They came out publicly against the Richmond deal. They got Attorney General Mike Fisher to oppose it in court. They roused MOLLUS and the region's corps of Civil War buffs.

The fight got people thinking. The Civil War Museum may be a treasure, but it was a hidden one. Few people visited. No serious conservation work had been done. Other museums - notably the Grand Army of the Republic Museum in Frankford - had valuable Civil War artifacts, often as forgotten and neglected. As Roebuck put it, the region's Civil War collections consisted of "boxes and boxes of the stuff, that no one ever sees."

Settlement reached

Blame it on the Founding Fathers.

They went and wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution here, making the city a premier Revolutionary War site.

The fact that it was preeminent in the Northern effort during the Civil War gets lost in the shuffle. During the Civil War, Philadelphia really did become "Workshop of the World." It contributed a large share of the Union's civil and military leadership.

In the end, Roebuck, Fumo and friends prevailed. The deal with Richmond was canceled. The museum got itself a new, expanded board that includes historians, representatives from MOLLUS, and appointees named by the two legislators.

The settlement was filed last week in Orphan's Court and awaits the approval of the judge overseeing the case.

The question now is what to do with the collection. The consensus is that the Pine Street site is too small and rundown. The dream is to create a new Civil War museum that would attract researchers and tourists.

Some hoped that new home would be Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park. But the Please Touch Museum was in line first for that building.

The new board, headed by lawyer Harris Baum, has three years to find a site and a goal of raising $5 million for the project. A possible merger with other museums is being discussed. The challenge is great, but the prospects exciting.

So this is not the end of the story, after all. It is the beginning.

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