Thursday, July 22, 2021- Petersburg, again

      Today ended up being what we had originally thought Monday was going to be.  We went back to Petersburg because many of the museums we wanted to see again would now be open.

      We found our way back to the John Tyler Highway, aka Route 5, and took the scenic route back to Petersburg.  Our first stop was Blandford Church.  We hoped that we might be the only ones on the tour so that Julie and Abby would be able to take it too, but Abby fell asleep shortly before we got there.  Julie stayed in the car with her until she woke up and then sat in the air conditioning of the reception center until Scott came back.  Meanwhile, Scott was delighted to see that one of the people working today was someone he remembered well from when he worked there.  Twenty-five years ago, Gene was a little older than Scott is now.  Now he is 84, and still giving tours.  Scott didn't actually recognize him until he spoke and he recognized his voice.  Then he read his name tag and realized who he was talking to.  

     Even when he was working here, Scott thought the Blandford Church was in a problematic position.  It is a Confederate memorial in a city that overwhelmingly African American.  It is a church with Tiffany windows with religious motifs, but is owned by the city government.  Its status always seemed a bit precarious.  Julie got a bit of the scoop about the city's tourism while Scott was at the church.  When the city had financial troubles a few years ago, they closed all of the museums [and apparently sold off Trapezium House].  A preservation society worked to reopen them, but they are staffed on an all-volunteer basis now, which means that docents are a lot harder to get and the museum hours are greatly reduced.  Centre Hill Mansion isn't open until the weekends.

     At the church, Scott went up with the other guide, but didn't really need the tour.  He was able to identify all of the apostles in the windows on his own.  (He tried to do it from memory without looking on the way down, but had misremembered the locations of a few of them.  Once he was looking at them it was easy, though which state went with each window was a lot trickier..)   Scott was also thrilled that they didn't mind if he took pictures inside.  He tried taking some with his camera, but of course, the Tiffany stained glass never looks like it does in real life.  In spite of its Confederate connections, Scott was excited to see the windows again.  Before he got to town he wondered if the tour had been updated at all to better interpret the "Lost Cause Movement" which created both the church and much of how the Confederacy has been portrayed in the years after the war.  He didn't really get the regular tour, but he doubts much has changed. 

     The reception center for the church looked almost exactly like it did when Scott was the full-time manager there.  He said something to Gene about how we had toured the model apartment where we used to live and that it looked just like the apartment that we used to live in.  His response was "This is Petersburg.  Nothing changes."  This week, we've seen many ways that this statement is both true and false.

     It was time for lunch.  We went down Crater Road to King's Barbecue.  We used to go to a location out towards the Dinwiddie County side of Petersburg, but that one is now a Mexican restaurant and we didn't even recognize the building until we knew that.  The location on Crater Road is the last that is left of an original three locations.  We recognized the outside right away, but we didn't recognize the inside at all.  We're not sure why we used to go to the other one instead.  We knew exactly what we wanted to order- pulled pork sandwiches to eat there and a gallon jug of the barbecue sauce to go.  We had a gallon shipped to us last year shortly after COVID started and there's only a little bit of it left in our refrigerator at home.   We were glad to resupply while we were in town.

     Scott stopped again at Blandford Church to buy a set of their annual Christmas ornaments.  There are four right now, with plans for more each year, and they are pretty little depictions of the Tiffany windows in the church.  

     We then went to Old Town where Scott wanted to stop at the former Siege Museum.  We had been told that there really wasn't a museum there currently because it was being renovated.  There was only a visitor center in the building [The Old Town visitor center where Scott used to work has been closed down and apparently sold.]   So, Scott told Julie it would only be a ten minute stop.  It was a lot longer than that.  Once Scott told the people there who he was and everyone got to talking, we found that even though we didn't know each other, we had a lot in common and knew a lot of the same people.  One woman had been a special education teacher at A.P. Hill Elementary and an administrator in the Petersburg Schools when Julie had been there.  One woman had been hired by the city tourism department just after Scott left there, apparently, and hired by Pamplin Park shortly after that.  And one man had been involved in the city of Petersburg and Staunton and even though Scott had never met him before, Scott knew of him.  Scott remembered him because you don't meet a lot of people with the first name Sergei.

     We ended up being taken upstairs to the museum area.  Nearly all of the old Siege Museum exhibits were taken down and were being redone to expand the scope of the museum.  When it reopens, the new museum will look at the entirety of Petersburg history instead of just the nine months of the Civil War siege.  We were shown into the big rotunda area of the building, which is now going by the name of the Exchange Building.  There's still a lot of work that will need to be done on the exhibits, but there was one memorable thing that caught our eye- the statue of Justice from the courthouse roof.  She is quite large in person- maybe ten feet tall or so- and quite impressive.  We were told that she probably wasn't the original statue from the courthouse, and was maybe the third one that had been used, but she had stood for a long time on top of the tall clock tower on the courthouse.  We've passed through town before when she wasn't there and declared, "There is no Justice in Petersburg!"  We were glad to see that she was ok, both here in the Exchange Building and her replacement on the courthouse.

     We were running a little late.  We had missed the opening 10:00 tour at Blandford Church, and Scott had basically been on the 11:00 one.  We had also spent a while talking to the people at the former Siege Museum.  As a result, it was much later in the afternoon than we had expected to be.  Still, we didn't want to leave town without checking out Pamplin Park to see what it had morphed into.  When Scott was there twenty-five years ago, there was only himself and two other employees besides the director.  The park consisted of the building with the large gray wall, a nearby home called Tudor Hall, and the trails through the Confederate earthworks where the Union army broke through on April 2, 1865 to finish the siege of Petersburg.  When Scott worked there, it seemed like whole days could go by without any visitors and yet an enormous amount of money was pouring into the place.

     Today, Pamplin Historical Park is much bigger.  The part that Scott knew is basically tucked into the back of a much larger complex.  We have no idea how many employees work there now, but there didn't seem to be many more visitors.  Pamplin Park had never seemed to be very welcoming.  When Scott worked here, the big gray wall was the first thing that visitors saw and there was nothing about it that seemed welcoming.  Added to that were a series of signs that said "No parking.  No frisbee playing," and stuff like that.  It wasn't unusual to see a car pull in and pull out again, probably thinking that they were in the wrong place.  Today's park looks more welcoming but Julie put it best when she said it seemed "sterile."  People are given audio guides as they enter the museum area and are expected to use them throughout the grounds.  They might contain good information, but we wouldn't know.  We turned ours in because it was too hard to negotiate with them and an energetic toddler too.  But the net result of them was that other people move silently through the museum and the grounds and there is very little talking.

     The main building is referred to as "The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier."  It's a pretty big building with a rotunda over the reception area.   The left side of the building is the part with the exhibits, and it tries to tell the story of the typical Civil War soldier.  The exhibits go through enlistment, camp life, the experience of battle and how soldiers survived.  The exhibits are surprisingly generic, since they are meant to cover all soldiers, both sides, North and South.  The audio guide is set up to have you follow one particular soldier out of maybe a dozen to see what he experienced, but as we said, we didn't really use the audio guide.  The exhibits themselves were quite well done, and tried to give you a feeling like you were there, with tents and huts for you to enter.  Perhaps the best example of this technique was the "Trial By Fire" gallery that was supposed to have you experience battle.  First you passed through some "woods" where the "people" around you were sensing your nervousness but pushing you forward,.  Then you face video of re-enactors shooting at you while the floor shakes and "bullets" whistle by you.  You exit through the devastation left in the battle's wake,   Julie said that this aspect of the museum reminded her of the simulated environments in the exhibits at the World War II museum in New Orleans, although the path through this museum is much shorter.  Scott was most interested in the fact that he had actually held many of the guns and swords and much of the equipment before it was put behind glass here.  While he was working here, the park had just acquired a large collection of artifacts and they were to become the core of what is now the collection of this museum.  He was supposed to inventory these items for the park.  Even then he was surprised that the artifacts were being held in a damp storage room in the original building and that he, with very little experience, would be asked to handle and inventory this enormous and valuable collection.  Today, Scott was only able to positively identify a few swords that he was sure he had held before, since it was so long ago, but he knew that many of those other items had once been in his hands.

     From here we followed the pathway out past the house known as Tudor Hall and through the tunnel that passes under Duncan Road to the area that was Pamplin Park back then.  There is a large earthwork fortification example that has been built where the parking lot and grass used to be.  ( We expect that it was created from the dirt that was taken out to make the tunnel under Duncan Road.)  The building's jagged shape is hard to recognize now because there is a large tree growing in front of it.  That seems to hide the fact that the unusual jagged line of it's façade was supposed to be a map of the Confederate earthworks.   Some of the inside looks the same as when Scott was here, but big parts of the floor plan have changed.  Where it used to be exhibit space is now theater and where it used to be theater is now exhibit space.  We started to watch a movie there called, "War So Terrible."  The film itself was both depressing and again, surprisingly generic.  But we were the only ones in the theater so "Bingo" could run around and do whatever she wanted.  At one point, she saw a line of Union soldiers and said "Dada, dada" looking back and forth between the soldiers on screen and Scott.  It wasn't actually Scott, but she's was quite smart to recognize the uniforms from the recent parades Scott has been in.  The movie itself was a little slow moving a little predictable and seemed quite long.  We didn't stay for the whole 50 minutes.

     Scott went out onto the trails to see the earthworks where the breakthrough took place.  There's a few more trails now than there were when he was here, and they were more than just the simple dirt paths that he used to rake.  He followed the paved and gravel paths to identify the ones that he remembered, and then went around again with the GoPro to have a video for his treadmill.  Meanwhile, Julie and Abby made their way back to the entrance.  They saw wild turkeys on their way back, but the birds wouldn't stay still long enough for Julie to photograph them.  Julie was a little surprised at how long Scott was on the trail, and he was actually there so long that the museum and grounds were starting to close.  He didn't get to see the inside of Tudor Hall or the other farm areas, nor was he able to look in the gift shop at all.  Abby had been in the gift shop and bought two "cannonballs"- actually black colored stress-relief balls with a Pamplin Park logo on them.  

     When Scott did make his way to the car, we packed up and headed out.  After a drive-through at Burger King, we headed north through Richmond to Gettysburg, with the idea that we would avoid having to face Washington DC and Northern Virginia traffic tomorrow.  We got a hotel on the York Road in Gettysburg and are here now for the night.