HomeNews Saltville, Va., Museum Open Mammoth Expansion
Saltville, Va., Museum Open Mammoth Expansion
Sunday, Apr 06, 2008
SALTVILLE, Va. – One
constant has remained throughout the centuries of remarkable change in
this sleepy town. And it has lured both man and beast here throughout
time.
"The salt in this valley attracted the woolly mammoths
and the native people. It’s the salt that brought the soldiers in the
Civil War and the Olin Co. Salt is the unifying factor of this town’s
entire history," said Byrum Geisler, a volunteer who spoke during a
Saturday ceremony at the Museum of the Middle Appalachians in Saltville.
The event marked completion of Project Mammoth, a
four-year effort to expand the museum to double its original size,
enabling it to delve further into the area’s rich history, said Eleanor
Jones, a museum volunteer.
"This museum represents the whole region," she said. "It goes from the Ice Age, to Native Americans to the Civil War."
The expansion allowed the museum to add a number of
displays depicting scenes and artifacts collected in the region dating
from 14,000 years ago up to the 1970s, Jones said.
"A lot of people will probably have tears in their eyes
because this was a company town. The Olin Co., a chemical plant, closed
in 1973, and there is stuff on display from the good ol’ days," Jones
said.
G.R. Campbell, 86, has lived his entire life in
Saltville and worked 25 years as a welder for Olin. He watched as the
town plunged into crisis after the plant closed, and watched as it
rebuilt and reinvented itself in the years since. He was proud of what
the museum had accomplished, he said.
"As kids, we found a bunch of stuff like arrowheads,
but we didn’t think anything of it at the time," he said. "I remember a
while back when a man from the plant was digging and found a tusk. They
stuck it aside somewhere and it deteriorated."
Campbell said the museum is housed in a building that
used to be a theater years ago when the small town was booming. After
it closed, it was sold to a man who opened a rug store there. Campbell
said he used to stop by daily to chat.
In 1996, the building was once again transformed into the museum, said Jones.
"This is a celebration of an accomplishment," said
Janice Orr, another volunteer who spoke at the well-attended event. "It
has been a long road."
Scott Poore grew up in Saltville and came from Abingdon for the event.
With one sentence, he summed up the story of the town,
the theme that comes to mind when browsing the various museum
collections and the significance of the expansion itself.
