Fort Ticonderoga is beginning to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution with a new exhibition featuring the geographies of the war.
The Power of Place is the first of many exhibits that museum visitors can experience over the next four years that will explore the American Revolution.
Fort Ticonderoga President and CEO Beth Hill says this initial exhibition, which will feature many never-before-seen artifacts, was more than a decade in the making.
“It’s part of a larger exhibition plan for the next five years under Revolutonary Anthology where we look at core themes that surround our understanding of the defending of our nation. And more importantly beyond that date, July 4th 1776, but looking at it more broadly and understanding this was an eight-year bloody battle. And so, taking broader themes, such as power of place, and understanding the global perspective as well as the individual perspective and in many ways our objects can represent both,” said Hill.
Hill says the acquisition of the Robert Nittolo Collection added nearly 3,000 individual objects to the museum’s stock, many of which will be displayed over the next several years.
Hill explained some of the other themes this anthology will aim to tackle including Citizens and Service and Revolutionary Possibilities.
“Manufacturing Independence, kind of the technology and how the weapons of war and really the economy of the revolution how that was more broadly impacted. And then Shaping Nations and Forging Identities. And that really looks at not only the evolution of America that came to be as a result of this bloody conflict, but also other nations’ inspiration by the American story,” said Hill.
Curator Matt Keagle says the exhibit covers classic Revolutionary War scenes—Boston, Philadelphia, and the Champlain Valley—but,
“We also wanted to kind of pair these with places that we don't usually think about when we talk about the Revolutionary War, including the British Isles, where the British side of the war, at least, was led from. But was not immune from the experiences of the global revolution, to places like the Caribbean or the gulf coast, where there were active military campaigns, vastly different than those we think about as being fought in North America, but even here in North America, thinking about places like Iroquoia, the homeland of the Haudenosaunee League, which was rent apart by this conflict being equally as much a civil war for the Haudenosaunee people as it was for the Anglo Americans,” said Keagle.
Keagle says the 250th anniversary created an opportunity to challenge widely-held views of the Revolution while diving into a deep pool of artifacts to create a rich picture of the period.
“The past happened. History is how we interpret it and how we understand it, and that's constantly evolving. And I think, you know, in some ways, by approaching this from a global perspective, and thinking about the broad campaigns of the war, in some ways, we're both meeting the current needs and interests of history to explore richer and more diverse narratives of these experiences. In some ways, we're actually just going back to how the participants were thinking about this,” said Keagle.
Exhibit Designer and Fabricator T.J. Mullen says one of the challenges was narrowing down which artifacts would be included while creating a cohesive narrative.
“You can pick one object and it could tell one story standing by itself. Or you could pick two objects which might tell a completely different story, or sort of enrich that story and sort of bridge some gaps there,” said Mullen.
The Power of Place is open to the public through October 27th.