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Gerard Eisterhold, whose firm was contracted to design the exhibits, will be joined by historians and professors affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, UNC Chapel Hill, and other universities.
Forums are scheduled at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Monday, Jan. 23 in the multipurpose room at Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, 1217 Murchison Road. The church is across the street from Fayetteville State University.
Additionally, panels depicting exhibit designs will be on display next Tuesday through Friday at Mount Sinai for the public to review and leave written comments. Hours will be 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Jan. 24-28.
In October, organizers held similar forums at Mount Sinai church and displayed panels at Highland Presbyterian Church on Hay Street.
Using feedback from those sessions, history center organizers revised their plans for the exhibits.
Feedback from next week’s forums “will be a continuation of that effort,” a news release said.
Eisterhold’s firm, Eisterhold and Associates, is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri.
His previous design work includes exhibits for the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; the International Civil Rights Center and Museum in Greensboro; the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir; and the Rosa Parks Museum and Children’s Annex in Montgomery, Alabama.
Gerard Eisterhold will lead the two presentations on Monday. He will be joined by a team of historians who are working on the Fayetteville history center.
Plans call for the N.C. History Center to be built on the grounds of the U.S. Arsenal at the Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex off Hay Street. It will use the site of the arsenal — which was destroyed by Union troops led by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in the closing days of the Civil War — as “a jumping-off point to examine the war as it affected all North Carolinians,” the release said.
Organizers say it will be a teaching museum and not a collecting’ museum.
“It will use existing scholarship from universities, coupled with first-hand accounts of North Carolina families, to examine, for the first time, what an entire state faced as the result of the Civil War,” the news release said. “It will communicate that knowledge in person and online so that schoolchildren — and all of us — may learn from it.”
The center is being built with funding from the state, Cumberland County and the city of Fayetteville.
Once completed, the N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction will be owned by the state of North Carolina and operated by the History Museums Division of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
The historians scheduled to participate in Monday’s forums include:
Spencer Crew, the first African American director at the Smithsonian Museum of American History; former interim director of the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of History and Culture; and professor at George Mason University.
Harry Watson, Atlanta Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is the former director of the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. His research interests include the antebellum South and the relationship between race and class under slavery.
Jeffrey Crow, former director of the N.C. Division of Archives and History and former deputy secretary of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. He has written about and lectured widely on North Carolina history as it relates to the Civil War and is the author of “A History of African Americans In North Carolina.”
Vernon Burton, professor of history at Clemson University and author of “The Age of Lincoln.” He is the co-author with civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner of
“Justice Deferred: Race and the Supreme Court,” a survey of race-related cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Burton also delivered the keynote address at the groundbreaking and ribbon-cutting of Phases 1 and 2 of the history center in June 2021.
Marcus S. Cox, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Fayetteville State University. Cox joined the FSU faculty last summer, coming from New Orleans. He was a fellow at the National World War II Museum and associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and founding director of the African American and Diaspora Studies Program, both at Xavier University. Cox specializes in African American civil and military history, the modern civil rights movement, African American history and U.S. history post-1945.