Cooper: Medal of Honor Heritage Center also a tribute to those who kept the flame for two decades

Staff Photo By Robin Rudd / The Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, after a long, circuitous history, opens today.
Staff Photo By Robin Rudd / The Charles H. Coolidge National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, after a long, circuitous history, opens today.

The Charles H. Coolidge Medal of Honor Heritage Center, in its various non de plumes, has been wandering in the wilderness for as long as the country's longest war.

Since December 2001, two months after the invasion of Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 attacks, the center has been looking for a permanent home.

Today, that permanent home becomes a reality with the opening of a 19,000-square-foot center on the Tennessee Aquarium plaza.

Unless one has kept very close tabs or been associated with the center, once known as the Medal of Honor Hall of Valor Museum of Military History, the wilderness wandering will be unknown to many who will enter the doors of the new facility today.

Behold:

* 1987: The museum incorporates, then leases space at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium.

* 1989: The city of Chattanooga and Hamilton County split the cost of $50,000 to fund a study for a proposed 200,000-square-foot, $50 million museum complex estimated to bring in 400,000 tourists a year.

* 1989-1991: East Ridge officials lobby to have the building built near Interstate 75; Georgia officials discuss a site including some 200 acres and a dedicated interstate exit.

* 1990: The museum rents space in the city-owned former Department of Employment Security building at the intersection of East Fourth Street and Georgia Avenue, but only 30% of its artifacts can be displayed.

* 1991: The proposed Medal of Honor museum home is scaled back to a 150,000-square-foot, three-story building costing $13 million.

* 1995: Museum supporters want to raise nearly $3 million to buy the then-Double Cola Co. headquarters on South Broad Street near the foot of Lookout Mountain.

* 1997: The city of Chattanooga agrees to deed the former St. Elmo Elementary School to the museum, but the museum abandons the idea of moving there in 1999.

* 2001: The museum considers renting space from the Tennessee Civil War Museum, then in St. Elmo, but the attraction closes before action can be taken.

* 2001: The museum exits its Fourth and Georgia location, which is scheduled to be torn down because of upcoming streetscaping. The museum rents the 104,000-square-foot former Combustion Engineering office complex at Main Street and Riverfront Parkway, which is owned jointly by the city and county, to store its artifacts. An architect's estimate says it will cost at least $3.1 million to renovate the site. It never opens to the public.

* 2001: The museum's board eyes 15.4 acres on Bonny Oaks Drive donated by the U.S. Army Reserve for a new location.

* 2003: A small number of artifacts from the museum are displayed in a 1,000-square-foot, temporary space at Northgate Mall.

* 2006: Artifacts not on display at the mall are moved to a collection-storage facility on the campus of Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum.

* 2007: A Medal of Honor Museum opens in Charleston, S.C., on the USS Yorktown. Eventually, the focus of the local center becomes the Tennessee, regional and city history of the medal.

* 2014: A plan is floated for a 2,000-square-foot space on the North Shore and an eight-year, long-range goal of a 10,000-square-foot facility.

* 2016: What is now called the Charles H. Coolidge Medal of Honor Heritage Center is proposed for a 6,800-square-foot building to be erected in Coolidge Park, but the public raises objections to using 2.28 acres of the public greenspace for the center and parking.

* 2017: The center agrees, based on meeting fundraising goals, to take a long-term lease on the two-story former Visitors Center on the aquarium plaza.

* Feb. 22, 2020: The center opens in its new home.

The new home is a testament not only to board members in recent years, who have spurred the overhaul of what a local center might represent and spearheaded the fundraising for such a facility, but also those who kept the fires burning for two decades.

It would have been easy for the dream of honoring the best and brightest of American military heroes in Chattanooga, where many of the earliest recipients of the award are buried in the National Cemetery, to die. But veterans and other volunteers who cared for a tiny space in the mall for nearly two decades persevered, and so did those who didn't let the various letdowns of moves to potential new locations throughout the years bother them.

Today is a tribute to them as much as it is to the brave men - and one woman - who received the nation's top military honor.

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