by illustr8r
Museum of the American Revolution Opening in 2015
6:00 am in Uncategorized by illustr8r
Well, that didn’t take too long. *head*desk*
from the DailyMail UK
Washington’s tent among stunning artifacts in first ever museum dedicated to American Revolution
A priceless collection of American Revolutionary war treasures has been waiting patiently for more than a century for a permanent place to call home.
Currently held in a secret, nondescript building in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the carefully kept collection will take up residence when the Museum of the American Revolution opens in the City of Brotherly Love’s historic district.
Like an American version of the U.K’s Royal Crown Jewels, the collection contains Founding Father George Washington’s original tent, which has been compared to an outdoor Oval Office.
General Washington’s original sleeping and office tent, parts of which appear in this early 20th century photograph, was carefully preserved by generations following the deaths of George and Martha WashingtonCarefully stacked on shelves, hanging on walls and spread out on tables in a large climate-controlled room are thousands of artifacts from the Revolutionary War.They will remain under wraps in their anonymous location until late 2015, when The Museum of the American Revolution opens in Philadelphia’s historic district.
‘We’re still finding things,’ curator R. Scott Stephenson said during a recent behind-the-scenes tour of the Colonial-era cache.He recently discovered, as one example, five law books among the hundreds of storage boxes inscribed with the owner’s name: Patrick Henry. More digging unearthed estate and auction records verifying the books belonged to the Founding Father known for his ‘give me liberty or give me death’ speech, and not someone with the same name.
‘It’s not just inventorying; some of it literally is you find a piece and 6 months later, a year later, you find something else,’ Stephenson said, ‘and you triangulate and boom – it’s one plus one equals seven.’The collection was started by the Rev. W. Herbert Burk, an Episcopal minister and George Washington enthusiast who founded the Valley Forge Historical Society in the early 1900s.
That group is the predecessor of the American Revolution Center, a nonprofit and non-partisan group working to raise $150 million to build the 110,000-square-foot museum.
Earlier this month the Oneida Indian Nation announced a $10 million gift to the museum in honor of Oneidas who fought alongside the Continental Army against British forces.
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