Ed. Note: Tomorrow (Wed.) Dr. Charles F. Bryan, Jr., will receive a commendation from the General Assembly. Plus there will be a little to-do with light refreshments at the Virginia Historical Society afterward. More information on these events is at the end of this post.

In January of 2004 FiftyPlus published a feature on Dr. Bryan I penned for it. The text of the feature on Bryan, who will retire later this year, follows.

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Bryan of Battle Abbey
By F.T. Rea

For about half of the twentieth century, Battle Abbey, the building at 428 North Boulevard that the Virginia Historical Society called home, stood as a visible symbol of Richmond’s reverence for its past. The look of the place never changed. Quiet Battle Abbey was a stately building with a big back yard where the neighborhood’s boys gathered to play football.

When Charles F. Bryan arrived on the scene fifteen years ago, the 173-year-old Historical Society had a staff of 35; it had no volunteers; and it was accustomed to receiving about 5,000 visitors a year. By the end of 2003 there were 101 employees on the payroll, plus some 150 volunteers. The number of annual visitors had swelled to 80,000.

“We’re in the business of helping people understand the past,” said Bryan, the Society’s president and CEO. “[At] the new VHS, we have something to share with you.”

In pursuit of that mission, Bryan has skillfully guided VHS’s growth from a low-profile private institution to a multifaceted museum of Virginia history with an outward reaching educational arm. To make that possible he has overseen fundraising campaigns to the tune of $75 million that expanded both the institution’s space - tripling the size of the headquarters building on The Boulevard - and its scope.

The Society uses its expanded gallery areas to present changing exhibitions ranging from the scholarly to the popular. Its collections include more than seven million manuscripts and 140,000 volumes. The new VHS also runs an outreaching educational program aimed at both teachers and students.

Reexamining the Civil War
Perhaps most significantly, at the VHS the page has turned for good on presenting the story of the American Civil War primarily through from the point of view of the Southerners who suffered from the bloody war and its bitter aftermath. Thus, at the VHS today, it’s the Civil War, not the War Between the States.

To a great extent, these changes have taken place on Bryan’s watch. Readers familiar with Richmond’s tendency to distrust change know that it took more than a little bit of optimism and diplomacy to have pulled them off.

So how has this remarkable transformation been accomplished?

“I guess the key to our success has been our willingness to look forthrightly at all aspects of Virginia, the good, the bad, and the ugly, alike,” said Bryan. “In February, we will open a major exhibition on the civil rights movement in Virginia, which may not please some people. On the other hand, we’re planning a major exhibition in 2007 on Robert E. Lee to mark the 200th anniversary of his birth, which may not please other people.

“Both exhibitions, however, will be factually accurate and based on absolutely solid scholarship. The VHS does not seek to glorify or vilify any aspect of history, but it does try to tell the story of the past as accurately and in as balanced a way as possible.”

VMI Grad
Of course, Bryan’s soft Tennessee accent, his scholarly yet approachable demeanor, and his Virginia Military Institute connection (class of ‘69) haven’t hurt in his endeavors.

Born and raised in McMinnville, Tennessee, a small town in the center of the state, Bryan was a liberal arts major at VMI, went on to the University of Georgia for his Master’s Degree, and to the University of Tennessee for his Ph.D. in history. He also served two years on active duty in the U.S. Army (1971-73).

Beginning in 1981 Bryan served for five years as the first executive director of the East Tennessee Historical Society. In 1986 he became executive director of the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association, which specializes in the history of the development of the American West. Also, before coming to Richmond, Bryan was on the adjunct faculty as associate professor of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and the University of Tennessee.

Currently, Bryan is president of the American Association for State and Local History and he serves on the board of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Bryan, who is called Charlie, and his wife, Cammy, have lived in the Short Pump area for fifteen years. They have two grown children: their daughter, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, works at the University of North Carolina, publishing a magazine for the School of Dentistry; their son, also a VMI graduate, is a computer scientist for the U.S. Navy.

1980s Transition
When he was originally contacted by the VHS in 1988 about the job he now seems to love, Bryan had little interest in coming to Richmond. Back then, the Society was still basically an inward-looking institution. It had gone through a rapid succession of directors and was looking at large problems that needed immediate attention.

“Friends [in the field] were not encouraging,” said Bryan. “ I was leery. I was told it was a closed shop. But when I met with the search committee, I sensed the attitudes were changing. I threw my hat in the ring [and] they offered me the job.”

Under Bryan’s leadership, exhibitions have become a particularly important aspect of VHS programming.

For example, there is Soldier of Peace, organized by the George C. Marshall Foundation in Lexington and on view here through January 25. The show commemorates the 50th anniversary of Marshall being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, stemming from his overseeing the European post-WWII recovery program known as the Marshall Plan. That occasion marked the only time the world’s most prestigious award for fostering peace was won by a military man.

Running through April 25 is Charting the Old Dominion: Maps and Books from the Collection of Alan M. Voorhees, a fascinating exhibition of 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century maps and charts of Virginia, all donated to the VHS by Voorhees, a long-time trustee.

A third show, the long-term Story of Virginia, covers Virginia’s history with a broad brush: from prehistoric times to the Jamestown settlement; from the American Revolution to the Civil War; the Confederacy and Reconstruction; from the two World Wars to Massive Resistance - all the way up to the present day.

Rethinking Exhibitions
Past exhibitions indicate several that would have been inconceivable at the old Virginia Historical Society. These include A Dream Deferred: World War II and the African American Experience (2002-03), Enslaved: Life on Virginia Presidents’ Plantations (2002-03), and FDR in Virginia (2002).

Perhaps the exhibition that most dramatically conveyed the notion of change at VHS was Eye of the Storm: Civil War Drawings by Robert K. Sneden in 2002 - for the show dealt with drawings not by a Confederate soldier in gray, but by a blue-uniformed enlisted man in the 40th New York Volunteers.

In 1994 Bryan and James C. Kelly, VHS’s Director of Museums, had met with an antiques dealer who opened a mysterious suitcase. It contained a trove of material that virtually no one knew existed, including four scrapbooks filled original art depicting Civil War scenes, all of which were created by an obscure private in the Union’s Army of the Potomac.

Authenticating the original find and subsequently tracking down Sneden’s memoirs evolved into to an adventure nearly as fascinating as the prolific Civil War artist/writer’s work itself. Bryan and Kelly learned that Sneden’s wartime scrapbooks had been stored in a Connecticut bank vault for decades. His memoirs, written after the war, were eventually found in an Arizona storage bin.

To secure the acquisition of the unprecedented find - consisting of 800 maps, paintings, and drawings; plus 5,000 pages of memoirs - Floyd D. Gottwald of Richmond put up the money to make the VHS the Sneden collection’s permanent home. Then Bryan and Nelson D. Lankford, VHS director of publications and scholarship, went on to edit the collection into the form of a handsome book, Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey, which was published by Simon & Schuster’s Free Press. The book proved to be quite successful, earning money for VHS and spawning a sequel, Images from the Storm.

Changing with the Times
Bryan smiles at the notion of change that mounting such an exhibition suggests. “When a new set of evidence comes along, you have to consider that.”

Thus, he approved of VMI accepting women in 1996 and said so publicly. Looking back on his stand, Bryan pointed out that before 1913 the school didn’t even offer a liberal-arts major, and that integration finally took place in 1968; and he offered: “If VMI never changed, it would have been long gone.” More recently, Bryan no doubt ruffled more feathers when he approved of placing a new statue of Abraham Lincoln and his son in Richmond.

“Mind you, not everyone agrees with what we’ve done, although their numbers are small,” said Bryan. “One disgruntled man resigned his membership recently, saying that we’ve become too ‘politically correct.’”

On his fifteen years at Battle Abbey, Bryan said, “I’ve been fortunate in surrounding myself with some very hard working and smart people who have done much to help build the new VHS.

“A lot of it has to do with timing. I have long felt that had I come to the VHS ten or fifteen years earlier than I did, we would not have been able to do nearly as much as we have over the last decade. The leadership of the VHS and Richmond in general were willing and able to change, and might we say, ‘the rest is history.’”

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What: The GA offers House Joint Resolution No. 198, commending Dr. Bryan. In anticipation of his retirement later this year, Dr. Charles F. Bryan, Jr. is [being] recognized for his outstanding service to the Virginia Historical Society and the citizens of the Commonwealth, and for his many contributions to the preservation of Virginia’s rich and diverse history. (The entire text of the resolution is available at http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?081+ful+HJ198)

When: Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008 at 12 noon.

Where: Virginia State Capitol, Second Floor Chamber. There will be a surprise unveiling and a light reception at the VHS, 428 North Boulevard, shortly afterward.

The information about the events tomorrow was furnished by Jennifer E. Mason at VHS. For more information contact her at (804) 342-9665, or jmason@vahistorical.org. The photo of Byran is from the VHS website.