Professors to create virtual Civil War battlefield

BY DAN KEGLEY
Staff

Late next year, the Museum of the Middle Appalachians will enable visitors to experience in a new and vivid way what it was like to be in Saltville in 1864 as Union forces advanced on the town and its salt works.
Radford University has announced Cliff Boyd, professor of anthropological science, and Bob Whisonant, professor emeritus of geology, recently received a $66,903 grant from the National Park Service’s American Battlefield Protection Program to oversee the creation of an interactive virtual battlefield. The project, a joint venture with the Saltville Foundation, will be housed at the museum and will be available online.
“We want to show people what Saltville looked liked in 1864 so they can really get a feel for the environment as it was during the Civil War,” Boyd said in a release about the project. “The environment has been altered quite a bit over the past 150 years, and a virtual tour would be of great benefit to the museum, its visitors and to anyone who wants to learn more about the battles at Saltville.”
In the release, Whisonant said the creation of a virtual battlefield is the culmination of a three-part Saltville battlefield preservation project he and Boyd have been working on for several years. It began when the two, using geographic information systems and GPS technology supplemented by archaeology and geophysical investigations, created maps of the battlefields detailing earthworks such as forts, infantry trenches and cannon emplacements.
The second part of the project was creating a preservation plan and a successful nomination to the National Register of Historic Places that also landed the battlefields on the Virginia Landmarks Register. Each of the first two phases of the project was also funded by grants from the American Battlefield Protection Program.
After mapping and protection, Whisonant said, the third part of the project will be to educate the public about Saltville and the importance it played in the Civil War. “Our idea of education is to provide a pretty snappy tour of those battlefields,” he said. “Saltville really is an undiscovered jewel with its Civil War history.”
Reached in Radford last week and asked to describe the nuts and bolts of the exhibit, Whisonant said the exhibit “will have a lot of computer graphics, including photos, videos, 3-D maps, et cetera. We don’t know who will design all this because we will hire a contractor to do this. We will look for a professional firm that specializes in state-of-the-art computer exhibits that permit virtual tours of battlefields.”
According to Whisonant, the hunt for the right firm will bring a lull preceding the flurry of creativity to develop the exhibit.
“We will work closely with MOMA and the American Battlefield Protection Program, our funding source, to find the best outfit to do this,” Whisonant said. “Finding the right contractor will take some time, so nothing much will be happening for the next few months as we conduct that search.”
According to Whisonant, evolving technologies make it difficult to know now what final form the exhibit may take.
“We definitely intend to have created an interactive display at MOMA that will let the visitor participate in the virtual tour by manipulating 3-D maps so they can view the battlefield features from different perspectives and maybe even do a virtual fly-over of the forts and other earthworks,” he said. “Honestly, we don’t know exactly what can be done electronically as this is changing rapidly, but we want a first-rate computer experience for the Saltville Civil War tourist.”
According to Whisonant, the exhibit could be the first of its kind, because he and Boyd “haven’t seen an exact model of what we want, just various parts of it here and there. We know that 3-D mapping is making a lot of incredible visualization of ground surface features possible from different angles. Battle maps showing the movement of troops as the fighting occurred are being done elsewhere. There is a pretty neat computer map of the evolving Battle of Brandywine that we have seen. Our project is going to be especially exciting because we hope to find very creative experts that will produce a new and different kind of battlefield tour.”
When the picture of what the exhibit will be becomes clearer Whisonant and Boyd said they will share the vision with the public in “a couple of town meetings in Saltville along to the way to let everyone know what we’re up to and how it’s going.
Whisonant and Boyd hope to complete the virtual battlefield project by December 2012 – good timing with other Civil War events and Saltville’s growth as a tourism destination.
“We are hoping to bring state-of-the-art technology to Saltville to really take advantage of the timing of the state’s Sesquicentennial and promote Saltville and MOMA,” Boyd said.
Jon Jarvis, director of the National Park Service, said in the Radford University release, “We are proud to support projects like this that safeguard and preserve American battlefields. These places are symbols of individual sacrifice and national heritage that we must protect so that this and future generations can understand the struggles that define us as a nation.”
The funding to the Radford professors is one of 25 National Park Service grants totaling $1.2 million to preserve and protect the sites of all significant battles in wars fought on American soil.

dkegley@wythenews.com