Ashland Museum: Remembering Virginia’s Past, Saving the Present, & Preparing for the Future

Casey Dossat spotlights the Ashland Museum and discusses keeping history alive and thriving in a small town.

It is noon in Ashland, Virginia. A Meet Me in St. Louis atmosphere envelops the small town. There is no singing and certainly no Judy Garland, but Ashland still has the feel of an old Hollywood musical movie. The train station stops the trains that chug through town, and the place is home to family-owned restaurants, stores, and a small, gray building that holds inside it the keys, locks, and doorknobs of Ashland’s past.

I was a little early for the interview, but that gave me time to look around as I walked into the Ashland Museum. I introduced myself, signed their sign-in-sheet, and sat in the back of the museum with three women: Rosanne Shalf, Betsy Hodges, and Kelly Merrill. Shalf is the eldest of the bunch, and has been involved since the museum’s inception in 2008. Hodges runs the museum directly now, as a pillar of the Ashland community. And Merrill is the newest addition to the crew, but she is already extremely knowledgeable about the impact the museum has on the community.

All of them were excited to talk to me, especially since the museum doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves, and small town history museums rarely join the ranks of the greatest museums in existence. It’s a popular tourist attraction, however, and residents love it.

“So,” I began, “the Ashland Museum Project. How was this committee conceived, and what were the main goals, besides forming the Ashland Museum?”

Shalf — a woman Hodges describes as having been at the museum, “Since the beginning” — answered faster than the others. She said the town of Ashland was finally crowned a township in 1858, though it had existed as a settlement before then in the late 1840s, and the 150th anniversary took place in 2008. According to Shalf, Carolyn Hampel of the Black Heritage Society wanted to commemorate the history of Ashland, and therefore, called upon numerous figures in the town at that time. The Hanover County Black Heritage Society has been in contact with the Ashland Museum for years. They’ve organized events together, such as Black History Month diversity talks and meet and greets. Some of the major players, Shalf recalled, were Betty Lacey, Greg Cope, and Nancy Cackley, prominent townspeople in Ashland at the time who had lived there for years and knew the area and its history well. When all of them came together, a plan was put in motion to capture the history of Ashland and its residents, in a town that hadn’t previously celebrated its history. In January of 2009, they were off to the races, hoping to preserve some of it.

It was no easy task, however. “First thing,” Shalf said, “[we] asked to be Virginia Provision Board Members.” A provision board, by simplest definition, is a group of people who make decisions about whether or not to provide something (in this case, the Ashland Museum) for someone or something else (in this case, Ashland). In order to do this, Shalf said, they had to “apply for non-profit status.” Applying for non-profit status was how they got their foot in the door. By applying, their chances of securing a building increased. After a lot of paperwork and determination, they were finally allowed to join the Virginia Provision Board and were able to start constructing their dream project.

The Ashland Museum started as a website. According to Shalf, it was Cackley who maintained it. The committee tried to get their website to become a physical building for many years, and they’d collected multitudes of support and artifacts from the community at the time. I looked at a few of the pieces, my particular favorite being an old dress propped on a stand in the back of the museum. It was black and ruffled with a white collar and looked similar to a Women’s Suffrage outfit. It was given to the museum by a resident who had found it in her attic and wanted to put it in the museum. Behind it, in the next room, there were exhibits on the Civil War and rural Ashland. With a few other attic-findings, the Ashland Museum had collected enough artifacts to start putting them into a building. Finally, Shalf said they were able to rent their current building from A. D. Whittaker, a man who owns a substantial chunk of Ashland and a construction company, “For seven-hundred [dollars] a month.”

Betsy Hodges jumped in, saying, “[The] Grand Opening [was in] October 2012.” Finally, the dream of creating a museum for Ashlanders — as residents of Ashland call themselves — was becoming a reality. There was still the matter of exhibition, however.

It’s not easy to get a museum up and running. After finding a place to host a museum, the next task is to fill it with exhibits that are not only relevant to history, but relevant to a nation’s culture, and even more relevant to the culture and history of the small hosting town. The Ashland Museum had to collect their exhibits, artifacts, and gift shop merchandise from the supportive community, and it took them three years to have enough to fill the space. Shalf remembers that the community supplied items from their families, and the team compiled the heirlooms they were given into exhibits, and divided the sections into chronological order.

Some of the relics are 20th-century dresses. A few books are promoted from that period, and there’s a play train section for children. If the little ones get bored playing with toy trains, they can head outside to walk through a large, red caboose [pictured above]. The caboose is beloved, especially on Ashland’s yearly Train Day, in which the town celebrates its history as a historic train town. Some artifacts have to be stored in cases, because temperature control is difficult to maintain. There’s also a nice waiting lobby at the front of the museum, where tired parents can rest while their children explore the exhibits geared toward youngsters.

“What exhibits are most popular?” I asked.

Hodges replied, “[The] Caboose, Civil War history, and Ashland’s participation in it.”

The Civil War is a major point of historical importance in the South. So, naturally, popular exhibits at the museum tend to focus on it. Inside, there are several large moveable walls featuring writing about different eras in Ashland’s history. One of them deals with Reconstruction, which in simplest terms is the period between 1865 and 1877, where Northerners helped rebuild the South. Another wall shows the timeline of events from the pre-Civil War days of Ashland, leading up through the end of the war. The Civil War in Ashland, specifically, focuses on the First Regiment of Virginia Volunteers, who were trained at Camp Ashland, which started off as Camp Robinson in 1858, and changed its name in 1861. There were many promising young soldiers who trained there, and the diaries of soldiers from Camp Ashland have been shared amongst residents’ families.

Hodges said, “People come in here and read [the big wall displays].” She gestured to the larger-than-life displays in the middle of the building: three large panels with pictures and writing about multiple time periods pertaining to the town. “My biggest concern when doing these displays,” she said, “is that they were a lot of reading and not a lot of artifacts.”

The major issue with these wall displays is their size. While they contain good information, it’s clear that they take up a lot of room. Even though they’re popular, the lack of space creates a capacity issue for the museum for new exhibits coming in.

When asked if they have any plans to expand their current exhibits or to add new ones in the future, Shalf assured, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to have to.”

If the museum is able to expand, the cultural and social history of Ashland would have a much bigger home with more relics. While they do have plans to expand, it’d be incredibly difficult to do in a town this size. There aren’t a lot of empty buildings.

I looked at the gray, brick building, and I could see it was busting at the seams with cultural significance. Though Ashland is a small town, it still requires an identity to which to trace its roots. If Ashland didn’t know its history, then there would be no identity whatsoever. A lot of the townfolk can trace their origins through visitation, and because Ashland residents find their museum a great identity marker, the small town’s lively personality seeps out of the museum’s windows and doors.

I asked, “Do you think Ashland would know a lot of its history without the Ashland Museum?”

“No,” said Shalf. “When children […] come see the historic signs [, …] it gives them a scaffolding on which to put a broader history.”

The more children visit the museum of their town, the more they connect their small history to a much bigger picture on a much grander scale, especially with the Civil War exhibit. The large wall panels show the history of Ashland, Virginia, and America, as a whole. When children see this in front of them, not on the internet, they receive an education that is based on facts and personal connections. Some information on the internet is false, and children can be easily swayed by it, so putting forth facts is important.

Merrill added, “My interest is connecting our current situations with history [. … Y]ou’re living it now.” That’s true; everyone is living history.

The museum is, furthermore, active within the community it’s in. The board members pay attention to the current events of Ashland, especially problems that are effecting the town as a whole. In Ashland, there was — and still is — a conundrum occurring. The Department of Rail and Public Transportation of Virginia wants to put a high-speed third rail through the little town. That, unfortunately, poses a big problem. According to the “No Third Rail” website run by a group of Ashland business owners, college officials, and average civilians, the addition of a third rail would be problematic because “the tracks are extremely close to homes and businesses on Center Street,” and “passenger and freight trains must slow down to 35 mph when moving through town.”

Most of the town vehemently opposes the third rail, not only for these reasons and recent crashes, but because it might disrupt history. While it is debatable that Ashland would benefit from the addition of this rail, Ashland’s historic section is in the way. Last year, the Ashland Museum stepped in and argued that there was no way a high-speed rail could go through Ashland without the possible disruption to history, because Ashland’s railroad station is a part of the town’s historical section.

Word got around that the third rail plans had been updated from dormant to moving ahead with the project, and the Ashland Museum gathered advocates to halt the construction.

Shalf said, “One of the things the museum […] did was work [with the government]. [The third rail company] thought they didn’t have to do a section 106 because they thought there was no historic section [of Ashland].” A section 106, in the simplest of terms, is a review where a group of surveyors check to see if what they’re building intersects with a historical property. There reportedly is a historic section of Ashland, however, and the museum brought the proof — which they’d found through research and digging through their collection of literary artifacts — to the head source, defeating the third rail prospects. If the Ashland Museum hadn’t stepped in, the situation might look very different today.

“All the contributions to history that your museum continues to make are incredible,” I said. “How does the community support benefit the retelling of history as a whole?”

The answer was brought back to 2008. Shalf said, “We had to do it then.” If they hadn’t, the community wouldn’t have been inspired to donate to the museum. In a big city, it’s easy to blend in. In a small town, however, everyone knows who everyone is, and it’s easier to share history with one another. This had created a small town culture, and the anniversary gave the town a lot of excitement and pride of being a part of where they lived. The town had officially been around for many decades, and despite that, remained unaware of the true history of itself. The residents, young and old, were all telling stories to each other. Everyone was learning another piece about himself and another piece about his neighbors because it was the first time any of them had really thought about the significance of where they grew up, enough to act on it in a physical culmination.

During the anniversary, many people shared their experiences of growing up in Ashland, and because of the closeness of the town, every small incident could be considered of major importance. The committee picked up on this and incorporated their residents’ stories into Ashland’s history. If the museum did not actively involve its community, the stories of many people would be lost, and the community would be less likely to support the establishment.

Today, however, Hodges pointed out, “We are hanging on to those stories.”

Those stories are what brought the Civil War to life for the children of Ashland. Without these stories, it could be argued that history wouldn’t be preserved. Sure, there is the internet, but the internet can’t make “real life situations [that] make the lessons more meaningful.” By experiencing the tour and reading the exhibits, a memory is created. The memories of seeing the gray, brick building, chatting with the tour guides, and exploring the red caboose outside create a much longer lasting experience than Googling the Civil War from your bedroom.

Merrill leaves us with the quote, “We are who we are because of our history.”

There’s something to be said about that. We wouldn’t be changed as a nation without war history, social history, political history, and cultural history. If museums like the Ashland Museum didn’t actively keep history alive, it would be lost.