Museum of the New South

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Museum of the New South The job of a museum is to make connections. It might show the connections between cotton mill entrepreneur D.A. Tompkins and banker Hugh McColl Jr., two men who shaped the region a century apart. It could help children and adults of the 1990s see what the electric trolleys that followed the horse-drawn streetcars of 1887 had to do with Charlotte`s sprawl and today`s roads.

In destroying so many of our old buildings, we`ve removed many reminders of our past. The absence of visible markers makes it even more important to have historians - and institutions like the Museum of the New South - to explain where the currents are and why some of them retain so much power to sweep us away today.

Robert Weis, is the first director of Charlotte`s Museum of the New South. He came to Charlotte from Salem, Mass., where he was curator of the Essex Museum - begun in 1821 when city leaders wanted to preserve the old days they felt were slipping away.

Charlotte is different. ``It is a great challenge now to help people understand the city when we don`t have a lot to show them that`s historic,`` he said. ``They`ve done very well in preserving some of the older buildings - Rosedale and Hezekiah Alexander House, some of the sites at a distance - but not of the urban culture of Charlotte.``

One of the first projects is will be focusing on the role and history of The Square and the surrounding uptown: for example, historic photographs of College Street could be mounted with explanatory text in the new walkway over College Street.

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