ATLANTA (AP) – This much everyone can agree on: A small Civil War museum, nestled in an old farmhouse at the site of a purported battlefield, has closed its doors and boxed up its Confederate and Union artifacts.
The leaders of a volunteer group that runs the Nash Farm Battlefield Museum said they preferred to close rather than fight a county commissioner’s request to remove all Confederate flags from the museum. But the commissioner says she never made such a request.
Whomever you believe, the closure has rankled residents as cities across the South – most recently New Orleans – wrestle with whether to remove Confederate symbols seen by some as vestiges of racism and others as icons of heritage. The issue has been especially sensitive since Dylann Roof, an avowed white supremacist who posed in photos with the Confederate flag, gunned down nine people at a South Carolina church in 2015.
The museum sat on a 204-acre, county-owned park that’s about 30 miles south of Atlanta in Hampton and is a popular spot for weddings and other events. The curator gave the final tour May 18, and nearly every artifact – most of them loaned by private owners – had been removed by Thursday.
“It was a wonderful museum and a great educational facility,” Henry County historian Gene Morris said. “It’s really a sad thing to see it gone.”