Civil War Naval Museum sails into uncharted waters

— Of all the sounds at Columbus' National Civil War Naval Museum — cannon fire, recorded ocean waves and narration — the one retiring director Bruce Smith likes to talk about is the gasp.

It's the gasp of visitors seeing the enormity of the CSS Jackson. The burned hull is the museum's centerpiece; a metal frame outlines how big the ironclad used to be.

"One of the great, fun things that we have here is when people come in and they turn that corner, and they go 'Aah,'" Smith said, mimicking the gasp. "We can hear that drawing of breath as they walk in and see this giant thing, and that's a really fun response."

And one he won't be hearing come Dec. 31, his last day. As he retires to Florida, he leaves a museum facing an uncertain future as the city cuts its funding and it struggles to attract the visitors it needs to buoy its revenue.

Smith will be remembered as the man who took the museum from a concrete shed of rotting boat hulls to an attraction worth about $8.6 million. Its centerpiece remains the Jackson, the hull once called "a pile of sticks."

That's what Smith heard when he got here in 1998, having been hired to turn that pile of sticks into the focus of a new museum.

"After I got that 'pile of sticks' remark a few times, I became very concerned that we're going to have to live with this, and we'll put all of our effort over here in the other exhibits, and now it's turned out to be the crown jewel," he said.

Only the crown's base remains: Crews rushing to dredge the wreck from the muddy Chattahoochee River during the 1960s Civil War centennial blew an 11-foot hole in its middle, fearing they had to salvage what they could before their money ran out. Later they retrieved the rest.

What remains is 180 feet of hull from what bow to stern with guns and armor was a 225-foot-long gunboat built for river defense — not to defend the narrow river here in Columbus, where the boat was built in a navy yard occupying what today is the Chattahoochee Promenade on Front Avenue — but to battle Union vessels down around Chattahoochee, Fla., should they come up from the Gulf.

It was so big the Confederates dug out the riverbank and angled the boat downstream before launching it during a flood on Dec. 22, 1864, a day so cold grease froze on the skids.

It was two weeks from being outfitted when Union raiders set it ablaze and adrift April 16, 1865.

The recovered hull's first home, called the Confederate Naval Museum, was a concrete shed without walls, its floor about 8 feet below street level, just east of Golden Park. The only indoor space combined office, archives and exhibits.

There the big hull sat and rotted.

Bob Holcombe ran the museum then, and watched as iron pieces fell from the decaying wood. "I put out two fires in the Jackson from people thumping cigarettes down in it," Holcombe said.

Back then the total budget for the city-owned museum was about $70,000 a year.

When it rained, the museum flooded. Artifacts in storage mildewed.

That's how it operated for decades, and that's how Smith found it when he came to build a new one.

At year's end, Smith will move on, retiring to The Villages near Ocala, Fla., where he intends to take up golf and spend more time with his wife, Carole, whom he married in 2005.

Smith had planned to stay on until the city's 2012 fiscal year ends June 30. He's leaving now to save the museum money. With his departure, his position will be combined with that of Ken Johnston, who now handles programming. Johnston will do both jobs.

The switch is to whittle the museum's operating costs.

Columbus Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, in her first city budget after being elected in 2010, saw that city funds going to the naval museum were far beyond what had been planned.

Opening in March 2001, after the hull of the Jackson and a 30-foot stern section of the CSS Chattahoochee were moved into a new $7.3 million, 38,500-square-foot building, the renamed National Civil War Naval Museum never attracted the anticipated visitors.

Between 50,000 and 70,000 a year were expected. The number of paying visitors for 2011 likely will be about 25,000, Smith said.

Longtime board member and former board president Tom Gates said the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, hurt the brand-new museum's draw. People quit traveling. The sour economy of the past few years hasn't helped.

Tomlinson said that when she went to work on the budget, she saw the city was funding the museum at $300,000 annually, more than double the amount originally planned. She first proposed cutting that back to $78,000, sending the museum board into crisis mode. In the end they compromised.

The museum's total budget is about $650,000. The portion it gets from the city was cut $50,000 this fiscal year. Tomlinson wants to cut another $50,000 next year, and gradually wean the museum from the city.

The museum had received $300,000 for four years, after a budget shortfall in 2007, Smith said. Council voted the extra money to keep it afloat.

To make budget this year, the museum has cut a part-time curator and increased its admission price from $6.50 to $7.50, Smith said: "We've always sort of associated it with the cost of a movie, and it's still cheaper than a movie," he said.

To build its new facility, the museum got $5 million from the "Columbus Challenge," a 1990s fundraising campaign for various local causes. The museum board raised $2.3 million, Smith said.

The infrastructure and site preparation leaves the rest of the 9-acre city property ripe for adjacent development, he said.

He cites a lack of nearby development for the museum's limited visitation. Supporters in 2001 knew they would go it alone for a while: Museums near other attractions get carry-over traffic, but the museum at Lumpkin Boulevard and Victory Drive stands alone.

The idea that commercial development would spread along the Chattahoochee Riverwalk from downtown south never came to fruition. Attracting visitors from the National Infantry Museum on South Lumpkin Road proved difficult.

Gates said no single marketing source reaches families coming to see sons and daughters graduate from training courses. Individual commanders decide what families get. The naval museum now is working on a display for the Infantry Museum, Gates said.

Military tourism draws significant interest now, Tomlinson said. Having Fort Benning nearby, and having its own early American and Civil War history, Columbus could draw from that.

That's one challenge. Another is a political issue the museum has always faced, caught between rebels who want to champion the Confederacy and African-Americans who want nothing to do with it.

That's a conflict for which Smith, a native Westerner, was unprepared. Columbus is the first Deep South city he's lived in.

"What I found was when we got into this project, we actually received political flak from two quarters, and I was really surprised at this. One was people who believe the Confederacy should have won, and one was part of the black population who felt that anything that's Civil War is obviously related to the KKK and disadvantageous to black people. Of course I came in with no dog in this hunt."

When the museum took the word "Confederate" out of its name, some longtime supporters abandoned it, Gates said.

Said Smith: "We had to do a name change because we changed the mission. We're no longer talking about just the Confederate navy but the entire naval story, both North and South, international, whatever it might be."

To present an African-American perspective on the war, Smith included stories of black people in the museum's regular timeline of Civil War events.

Now he says he should have done that differently.

"Probably what I would do today is I would in fact pull those out and make a black history experience, a black experience in the Civil War naval story panel, because we get a lot of interest in it, and it would be a lot easier for me perhaps to make a case that we're inclusive here," he said.

Smith's career-long voyage to Columbus was practically cross-country.

The son of an Army man who joined as a private in 1940 and retired as a lieutenant colonel, he was born in Los Angeles in 1946. His dad transferred to Arizona, and that's where Smith grew up near Tucson. He graduated from high school in 1964, during Vietnam, and might have gone into the Army himself had he not ruined his knees playing high school sports.

He always had an interest in history, subscribing to the "Civil War Times" when he was just 13, but it didn't take hold until he was at the University of Arizona, where he commanded an ROTC drill team. One of its members was a re-enactor with a frontier cavalry unit, and Smith joined up.

He was struck by how people reacted to living history programs, like they were experiencing history, not just reading it.

His unit had trouble getting the needed gear, so Smith began to procure and manufacture it. Soon he was dealing in artifacts, too.

He did that for 10 years before moving in 1980 to Fredericksburg, Texas, a tourist town where he was in the old-timey photo business. He didn't get enough business to carry on, so he went to work for a newspaper, the Fredericksburg Standard Radio Post, and later bought a nearby weekly, the Harper Herald.

One of his assignments was covering the development of the National Museum of the Pacific War, housed in the old Nimitz hotel in Fredericksburg. When it advertised for a curator, he applied and got the job. When the director retired 18 months later, Smith took over.

For 14 years he worked there, but found an old hotel was not the best place for war relics. It had about 300 windows and 100 doors, "a curatorial nightmare in terms of security and sunlight," he said.

Part of what lured him to Columbus, when he saw the opening in a newsletter, was creating a museum in a building designed for that purpose — tightly climate-controlled, and blocking the ultraviolet light that so degrades textiles, photographs and documents, fading colors and fraying fabric.

Today Smith gets credit for expanding the museum's scope and turning a pile of sticks into a display that makes people gasp.

Still the museum has not found its place among other amenities.

"I think they've made a concerted effort to broaden their mission," Tomlinson said when asked whether Confederate symbols would always stigmatize it. With Columbus' military history, "this fits into a package," she said.

She hopes in five years the museum will need no more city funding, and she compliments Smith for staying engaged, and working to find solutions. "He has made this so easy," she said.

While taking up golf for the first time, Smith in his retirement intends to research the lives of Civil War sailors. "I'd like to be able to know more and tell more about what life in the navies was like," he said.

From a distance he'll see how the naval museum fares. Like others he hopes that when Columbus gets a whitewater course and an armor museum beside the infantry museum, the naval museum will get the visitors projected.

"We think that finally it appears the critical mass for Columbus becoming an attraction location is within sight, so we're just hanging on until then," he said.


  • Discuss
  • Print

Related Links

Comments » 0

Be the first to post a comment!
