Since 2006, one of the country’s largest public exhibits of Civil War memorabilia found its home in a faux southern manor in White Settlement, a few hundred feet off Loop 820.
Collin Jefferson stood by the gift shop of the Texas Civil War Museum late Thursday morning, as the first of its final visitors began to trickle in. The store had mostly been scraped clean, save for some T-shirts and containers of disfigured, 0.58 caliber bullet casings selling for $0.92 a piece.
“The mood has been kind of sad,” Jefferson said. The 31-year-old Plano native sported the blue overcoat and cap of a Union infantryman, rifle and flask slung over his shoulder. He began volunteering at the museum as a docent about five years ago, having participated in Civil War reenactments since he was 14 years old.
“We’ve gotten a lot of people to see the collection and give a thought to the history,” he said. “I think it’s pretty much fulfilled the mission.”
The pet project of Fort Worth oilman and part-time history buff Ray Richey announced its closure in late August. Financial and familial pressures compelled the family to shut down the exhibit after nearly 20 years in operation.
“When he went into a home three years ago, we had enough money in the account to keep it from closing for about three more years,” Marcus Richey, Richey’s son and the museum’s director, said. “It was my dad’s passion and joy. He just wanted to share it with everybody.”
Richey senior spent the better part of forty years amassing thousands of Civil War artifacts, now valued at upward of $10 million. His wife, Judy, pieced together her own collection of Victorian dresses showcased in an adjoining hall.
The museum rarely thrived during its lifetime, typically attracting around 20 visitors on any given day, by Marcus’ estimate. His father largely covered the museum’s expenses out of pocket, with little expectation of turning a profit. News of its shutdown stimulated a surge in attendees in recent months.
Richey designed the museum with the intent of balancing portrayals of Confederate and Union experiences during the war.
“The owner had so many artifacts that he set up each one of these cases to mirror image one another,” the museum’s sales director, Dennis Partrich, explained. He motioned toward three consecutive rooms of glass displays of rifles, knives, hats, flags, bone saws and cannons, the north-facing wall storing Union gear and its opposite housing Confederate apparel.
“I think it gives a really great juxtaposition of both sides, at least just in the military artifacts,” Jefferson said.
Controversy
Political currents and the scrutiny of historians challenged the museum’s bid for neutrality.
The museum’s collection makes next to no mention of slavery. The Star-Telegram documented at least two during its visit Thursday — both in a short film celebrating the valor and grittiness of Texan fighters in the “War Between the States” broadcast on repeat in the museum’s auditorium.
A snippet explaining how early Texas “became more southern by the day” showed a grainy photograph of a clapboard storefront where white patrons bought and sold Black slaves, never saying the word outright. One of the film’s closing scenes briefly described the emancipation of enslaved Texans at the war’s end.
Critics over the years have struggled to understand how an institution ostensibly committed to educating “future generations about the character and courage that all Americans demonstrated in helping to build this nation” could skirt around the conflict’s principal cause — and the suffering of its victims.
“It was the major part of the Civil War,” Marcus Richey told the Star-Telegram.
His father acknowledged as much, he added, but refrained from engaging with the topic.
“He’s like, ‘I didn’t want to spend money on such a sad part of history,” Richey explained of his dad’s thinking when curating exhibits. “‘I just want to stay away from all of that and just say: Here’s what they had, here’s what they fought with, here’s their uniforms, and that’s it.’”
The museum had also cultivated close ties with the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose Texas division manages displays of Confederate memorabilia in their own corner of the building. The museum’s former executive director, Cynthia Harriman, was a life-long member of the group.
Founded by the female relatives of Confederate fighters three decades after their surrender, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has the stated goal of “honoring the memory of its Confederate ancestors” and supporting its descendants.
Historians have long denounced the organization for peddling distorted narratives of the war in schools and public forums, lionizing the southern cause and sanitizing the white supremacy that underpinned it.
Much of the group’s advocacy took the form of erecting monuments honoring Confederate leaders and regiments. UDC patrons commissioned a granite obelisk commemorating “Our Heroes in Gray” on the museum’s front patio in 2012.
National debates surrounding the purpose and impact of these structures prompted many local governments to tear them down. Dallas hauled off an imposing metal effigy of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from a park bearing his name in Sept. 2017. The city considered shipping it to Richey’s museum before electing to sell it to a private buyer.
The Future of History
The United Daughters of the Confederacy will reclaim their portion of the collection once the museum shuts its doors. Richey’s paraphernalia is being appraised and sold off by a consignor in Pennsylvania.
Marcus, a youth pastor, plans to take up his father’s oil-and-gas business once the museum operation winds down.
Jefferson, an aerospace engineer by day, hopes to stay active in the reenactment scene, and maybe even start a live history exhibition of his own, if the pressures of work and fatherhood allow.
What kind of gap in Civil War discourse the museum will leave behind, and what, if anything, might fill it, neither could say for certain.
“A lot of people don’t really know much about the Civil War, because a lot of the Civil War is not taught for very long in school,” Richey said. “It’s such a touchy subject, I think people shy away from it.”
Social studies curricula in Texas public schools only began listing slavery as a central facet of the Civil War in the 2019-2020 school year. But as the country’s past crises become co-opted and distorted for political purposes, clarifying the historical record has taken on new urgency.
“Sometimes people come in with absolutely no understanding (of the Civil War), no basis whatsoever,” Jefferson said. “That makes it all the more important, because I think it’s being seriously misconstrued one way or the other.”
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