It was supposed to attract two million visitors a year and feature a full-scale replica of a slave ship. But the one-of-a-kind, $100-million United States National Slavery Museum is little more than a fading dream, now 10 years on since former Virginia Governor L. Douglas Wilder unveiled plans to develop it.

 

On a 38-acre parcel outside Fredericksburg, there was supposed to be a library, theater, classrooms, and galleries featuring images of slave family life and the Civil War. But the only development to take place is a small garden, now overgrown with weeds, which Wilder opened in 2007 to show progress was being made.

 

Today, the museum-in-name-only owes more than $215,000 in property taxes and fees, and the city is planning to sell off the land at auction.

 

“It just seems that nothing has been happening, and nobody’s answering any of the mail we send to them, so we’re just doing the same thing to them that we’d do to anybody else,” G. M. Haney, the city’s treasurer, told The New York Times.

 

The museum’s director is gone, and so is its board. Wilder has insisted the project will happen, although his last public remarks were posted online in February. Since then he has been quiet on the subject.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Tax Bills Imperil Slavery Museum (by Kate Taylor, New York Times)

National Slavery Museum Project Stalls (by Dionne Walker, Associated Press)