“We’re still trying to figure how exactly some of these items ended up here.” (The society still exists, but shifted away from collecting.) Scott Stephenson, the museum’s vice president of collections, exhibitions and programming, tells, describing the museum’s now decades-long effort to catalogue and curate the warehouse of hidden treasures the institutions inherited from the Valley Forge Historical Society in the early 2000s. “We’re something like a 100-year-old start-up,” R.
One of the exhibits will immerse visitors into the debate held by the Oneida nation about their role in the Revolution. Of the museum’s permanent collection, hundreds of artifacts haven’t been seen to the public in almost 80 years, if ever. The tent will live in a 300-square-foot object case, the second-largest in the country the largest contains the original Star-Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The tent will be the center of the permanent collection when the museum opens its doors next year on April 19. The heart and soul of the collection, as it was for the Continental Army, is Washington’s headquarters tent, the faded canvas that housed the founding father during the army’s difficult winter at Valley Forge. One of the more recent acquisitions to the collection is a small King James Bible carried at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 by Francis Merrifield, a Continental sergeant who inscribed plaudits to God between verses of the Old Testament after returning home from battle with famed Colonel Moses Little ‘all bespattered with blood.’ James Davenport, a Massachusetts native who lost two brothers in the fight for independence. A pair of red booties, made from the pilfered coat of a British footsoldier, belonged to Sgt. On one table rests a pair of faded leather epaulettes, the only set worn by an non-commissioned officer in the Continental Army known to exist and thought to have been presented by French General Lafayette to American soldiers under his command. The Museum of the American Revolution’s 3,000-piece collection of rarely seen artifacts and documents is in the process of traveling to a new facility in the heart of Philadelphia.
When I visit the preservation facility hidden in a bland office park one afternoon in May, history is virtually spilling off the shelves. In a nondescript warehouse mere miles from Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where George Washington hunkered down for the winter of 1777, long-forgotten pieces of the Revolutionary War are preparing to emerge from a decades-long slumber. An exterior rendering of the museum, set to open in April 2017.
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