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Nashville's Ryman Moves 1897 Confederate Gallery Sign From Auditorium to Venue's Museum
The Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tenn
The legendary Ryman Auditorium in Nashville has quietly moved a
symbol of the Confederacy that long held a prominent spot in the 125
year-old building. According to the Nashville Scene,
the sign, which read "1897 Confederate Gallery" in honor of an 1897
reunion of Confederate veterans at the Ryman, prominently hung from the
upper lever of the auditorium, directly across from the stage in
performers' direct sightline.
Though the Confederate signage was
sometimes covered and read "1892 Ryman Auditorium" during such
high-profile events as a John McCain campaign visit in 2008 and the
filming of a Netflix comedy special last year, the Confederate memorial
has now been permanently removed from the main auditorium and added to a
museum exhibit about the hall's history.
"If you come to the
Ryman [as] a big name performer and you’re looking right out at the
center of the balcony and you see that sign, you don’t know what it
means," historian and Ryman consultant David Ewing told the Scene while
standing in an upper level hallway that's home to an extensive Ryman
timeline and the Confederate sign, complete with an explanation of its
history. "Or if you’re a fan that comes at night, not during the tour,
you don’t know what it means either. This is the appropriate place to
have the sign and tell the story of 125 years of the Ryman and
particularly how the gallery got built."
Ewing said the sign was added a few months after thousands of former
Confederate soldiers visited the Ryman for their annual reunion, with a
local plantation owner and Confederate general leading a fundraising
campaign to build the upper gallery of the Ryman to make enough room for
the gathering.
"If they didn’t come [to the Ryman], their Plan B
-- or maybe their Plan A -- was they were going to go to the
[Tennessee] Centennial Exposition … and build a temporary building for
them to have their three-day convention in," Ewing said. "The temporary
building would’ve cost a little over $2,000 in 1897 money, and they had
budgeted that, and since they came [to the Ryman] they didn’t have to
build a temporary building. After their convention was over, they were
doing their accounting and they had $2,300 left in their budget, so they
donated it to the Tabernacle [the Ryman was then referred to as the
Union Gospel Tabernacle] because the Tabernacle built this balcony that
cost $12,000. They kind of felt a moral obligation to give their
remaining convention money to this."
Curiously, the sign that was
moved to the museum is not even the original Confederate memorial, which
appears to have disappeared sometime between the Grand Ole Opry's
departure in 1974 and the building's 1994 renovation. When the Ryman
re-opened in 1994 following extensive renovations a reader wrote a
letter to The Tennessean newspaper praising the makeover, but wondering where the Confederate Gallery sign went.
"I'm
sure after seeing that, and maybe having some other calls or
old-fashioned written letters, Gaylord [Entertainment Company] probably
decided to reproduce the sign and put it back up where it was," Ewing
said.
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