Photos: Virginia Historical Society embarks on $38 million improvement project

Project includes renovation of all public spaces, expansion of programs, and much more.

August 22, 2014; 1:42 PM • by Trevor Dickerson

The Virginia Historical Society, originally constructed in 1913 with several later additions, is on track for $20 million in capital improvements, part of the museum’s $38 million Story of Virginia fundraising campaign.

VHS galleries are closed for the duration of the project, but the research library and gift shop remain open.

According to the museum’s Board of Trustees, The Story of Virginia Campaign is designed to help the VHS refresh portions of our existing facility and to maximize the existing footprint of the building, allowing the museum to display more of their collections and host larger special events and lectures.

The ultimate goal? “To collect, preserve, and interpret Virginia’s past for future generations,” according to Board of Trustees chairman E. Claiborne Robins, Jr.

Construction should take just over a year and be complete in the fall of 2015.

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The Campaign:

$20 million for capital projects

Renovation of all public space on the main level
A larger Story of Virginia long-term exhibition
The creation of a pedestrian-friendly Boulevard plaza
A new south entrance with better accessibility and visibility
The reorganization of exisiting space on the ground floor to create a multi-classroom learning center that will be named the Carole and Marcus Weinstein Learning Center
Virginia Voices, a mostly crowdsourced documentary

$8 million for programs

A website redesign
Restoring the Charles Hoffbauer Memorial Military Murals
Creating more digitized content online including Unknown No Longer: A Database of Virginia Slave Names
Processing and cataloging projects to make our research collection accessible through a single search solution
Support for existing programs