Gettysburg Cyclorama building to be demolished, site restored.

[NYCivilWar]

It's in the new visitors center run my the Gettysburg Foundation. You can see it for the low, low, price of $15, (I think), which also allows you to tour their PC, not for history buffs, but for tourists museum.

Wow, these type of comments never cease to amaze me. I think that with the tearing down of the old museums, they symbolically tore down outdated museum practices. Just putting 100 examples of pistols and 400 examples of this type of musket on the wall teaches ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the Civil War or the battle of Gettysburg. If anyone can tell me how the old museums explained how the war started, and eventually made it's way to south-central PA, then I'd be astounded. It didn't. Gettysburg receives over 1 million visitors per year, and I'd hazard a guess (as a former employee) that the overwhelming majority have never been to the battlefield or any Civil War site. So how do 100s of guns and buckets of relics help visitors to understand anything? You also can't just jump into 1863 without understanding what led these armies to Gettysburg, you must have context. And for all those people who cry that there isn't as much out on exhibit-- this actually behooves you as you can (free of charge) go an examine objects in the collection that are not on exhibit. And "buffs" are already interested in the Civil War, while as "tourists" have that potential if they understand where they are and what happened--which the new museum does.

Not trying to hyjack the thread...just my two cents...

[Wounded_Zouave]

Just putting 100 examples of pistols and 400 examples of this type of musket on the wall teaches ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the Civil War or the battle of Gettysburg.

On the contrary, such a display is visually powerful and implants a sense of the battle's physical magnitude in the mind of the visitor. There is a similar display of the Fuller Gun Collection at Chickamauga that is jaw-dropping when the first-time visitor walks into a climate-controlled room and sees bank after bank of rifles from all eras of American history behind glass. Why GETT could not have had a similar display is incomprehensible and frustrating to those who think the Rosensteel Collection was equally as powerful. Even as mere decoration it could have served one purpose - to signal to the visitor that men were willing to take up arms and die for what they believed in - men by the thousands.

The USS Monitor Center at the Mariner's Museum in Newport News, VA has a display that is remarkable in its objectivity about why the war was fought. It gives equal space to both sides and does in few words what the GETT museum fails to do in many. I suggest you visit it.

[LibertyHallVols]

So how do 100s of guns and buckets of relics help visitors to understand anything? You also can't just jump into 1863 without understanding what led these armies to Gettysburg, you must have context.

They impacted me greatly as a kid. That is exactly the power and beauty of the White Oak Museum. Those relics communicated the scale and magnatude of what happened right outside the museum walls. I disagree that museums should deliver a crafted semiotic message. I have been through too many museums that are designed to move tourist past displays like cattle through chuts from pen to slaughterhouse (Compare the Georgia Aquarium to Shedd Aquarium, if you'd like an apolitical, non-Civil War example of what I'm talking about).

When I am in a museum, I enjoy being able to stop, look, ponder, and imagine. So do my kids.

[/rant mode]

[Teekay]

They had 1/2 of the old round Cyclorama center down Saturday