A Vision for a Higher Arc of Relevance

By Mark Miner, Chairman, Board of Trustees
From Silver to Gold Gala, Aug. 14, 2025

Some people in town probably think we have a nice … little … harmless … boring … museum. Do you think so? The Pittsburgh Business Times doesn’t. They’ve ranked us 17th largest in the region, counting all the things we do – Garrison Day, Memorial Day, Fort McIntosh Day, Beaver Tales and Speaker’s Series.

And our trustees don’t think so either.

Tonight is about expressing our vision. We’re punching far above our weight class. We’ve mounted award-winning exhibits and documentaries with national and state recognition and lots of news media coverage. We’ve built a fabulous permanent collection of artifacts and ongoing educational programming for students and adults. Our team is leading a refresh of the Museum interior that will provide a higher level of visual and technological history-telling.

And we … have … really … big … dreams.

Tonight we celebrate our 25th anniversary (we’re actually in our 27th year) and our aspiration to be on a higher arc of relevance. And we’re celebrating a new CSX caboose that will be a center for rail history and unite this campus on a rail theme. This focus should help us attract a host of rail enthusiasts from far outside the county line to see what we have here.

There are big plans to refurbish the caboose inside and out and have it house an impressive collection of visual content. Some of it already exists, scattered downstairs and in various places of the museum. We’ll be looking to unite and expand that.

We are advancing a vision to transform the fort site on River Road into a national tourist experience. We want to utilize our Pentagon contacts to have the Army formally recognize the fort as the first home of the standing U.S. Army. This in a year when the Army is marking its own 250th anniversary.

We have a vision to professionally study, organize and display the tens of thousands of fort artifacts that came out of the archaeological digs of the early 1970s. And have sat in boxes ever since. And we’re guided in this work by experts with Michael Baker International.

We want to relocate our gift shop and convert that big space into a fully dedicated Fort McIntosh Room. When combined with the upgraded River Road site, the fort package will be worthy of a true national destination for scholars and buffs of the Revolutionary War, frontier forts and Native American Indians.

Using precise GPS survey coordinates, we’d like to build a digital scale model of the fort that would appear on our flat screen TV. It would have overlays such as landmarks and the scatter patterns of artifacts, and could be rotated at any angle.

And we have a big vision to use technology to convey more historical content, to reach young people. If it’s not on kids’ mobile phones, we’ll lose them. This includes an app for audio tours of the museum, maybe expanded to the fort site, and even historic buildings in the downtown business district. And we want more video content for our YouTube Channel.

We can do this. We have the desire. The ideas. The people. The expertise. The track record. It’s all within our grasp. The funding is the last piece to get us started. Thank you for joining us for the journey.