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Dozens of new exhibits are being placed at historic sites throughout Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. The displays are replacing cast-aluminum exhibits that date back decades.
Carl and Susan Brauer of Altamont, Ill., examine one of the new exhibits on Fredericksburg's Sunken Road yesterday.
Decades-old wood and cast-aluminum wayside exhibits will be replaced over the next three years by newer ones (center) with original art and soldiers' stories, like this sign on the Chancellorsville battlefield, throughout the park.
This panel, A new Fiberglas sign describes events near Chancellor Cemetery. |
By ELIZABETH PEZZULLO
An 1863 picture of dead Confederate soldiers slumped in a ditch beside Fredericksburg's Sunken Road is one of the most enduring images of the Civil War.
But for the past 50 years or so, visitors to Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park saw the picture perched near the Fredericksburg Battlefield Visitor Center parking lot, 100 yards from the place where it was taken.
Now, that's all changed.
Four years ago, the National Park Service began freshening up its woefully outdated "wayside exhibits."
The new signs "provide an added dimension for visitors to envision the historic themes," park Superintendent Russ Smith said. "They're a great enhancement."
About 80 percent of all visitors take self-guided tours, so the signs are sometimes the only information they receive about the battlefields' history.
About 40 new signs with rewritten text, original artwork and poignant excerpts from soldiers' letters and diaries have already been installed throughout the park.
"For most visitors, this is what they get when they go out on the field," said John Hennessy, the park's chief historian. "These exhibits are what distinguishes these fields from a million others across the country."
An even more critical detail is making sure the signs are site-specific, Hennessy said.
Today, with Sunken Road closed to traffic, the new signs create a gut-wrenching experience for the visitor.
Tourists can stand in front of the iconic photograph, glance to their left and stare at the very spot where a young soldier, his back arched and face covered in blood, released his last breath.
"One of the great things we can do is put the visitor within feet of the original location," Hennessy said. "That's very powerful."
When the project is complete in about three years, 110 new signs will have been installed, he said.
Costing about $2,500 each, the angled signs are much smaller than their predecessors.
They feature Fiberglas panels that make the artwork and text easy to change if updates are needed.
The new signs are being placed in areas that had a crucial impact during the war, and around cemeteries and other structures.
"We need to be able to put things back that are now gone and recall the events that are now forgotten," Hennessy said.
The exhibits' text was written by Hennessy and Park Historian Donald C. Pfanz.
The signs are in stark contrast to what dotted the park's landscape 50-plus years ago.
Back then, heavy, cast-aluminum signs with raised black letters were placed throughout the preserve.
The signs were tall, heavy on text, and couldn't be easily changed. They were also so outdated that many maps on the signs didn't include Interstate 95.
"They were gloriously written," Hennessy said. "But charming in their own way, they couldn't incorporate the graphics that we can today."
"They were also very hard to maintain, and had to be hand painted each year."
Some of the new signs, such as one near the Fairview home that once stood on the Chancellorsville battlefield, use original art to illustrate what happened there.
In this case, two renderings are placed side by side. One shows home life as it appeared prior to the war.
The other painting depicts the results of fighting that left 500 wounded Union soldiers stretched out across the fields surrounding the house.
Included on the new wayside exhibits are excerpts from soldiers' accounts.
The text accompanying the second Fairview sign says, in part:
"For more than a week, the helpless men lay in the yard around the house, receiving little medical care, exposed to the wind and the rain, lying in the mud. Wounds festered and became infected. Insects, attracted by piles of corpses nearby, inflicted painful bites. Dozens of soldiers died; many others prayed that they might be taken, too."
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