Marion may move to hire museum director

Marion may move to hire museum director

City in the market for someone ‘ focused on nothing but developing a Sultana museum’

news@theeveningtimes.com

With the prospect of 35,000 visitors a year coming to Marion to visit the Sultana, the city is considering hiring a director to get the ball rolling on a permanent museum.

Mayor Frank Fogleman brought the idea up to the Advertising and Promotions Commission about funding a full time position. “That would be 40 hours a week, day in and day out, (someone) who would be focused on nothing but developing a Sultana museum,” Fogleman said.

The Sultana was a Civil War-era paddlewheel steamboat that exploded just north of Memphis in the early morning hours of April 27, 1865, and resulted in the deaths of over 1,700 people, mostly Union soldiers who had been held captive and were returning home from the war.

The sinking of the Sultana is the greatest maritime disaster in U.S. history. The remains of the boat are buried under a soybean field in Marion.

The city has a special connection to the disaster as many of its early residents helped rescue survivors.

The city opened a small museum last year on Washington Street and is considering building a bigger, permanent museum next to the Woolfolk Library.

A preliminary design study estimates that it will cost $2.8 million to build a 10,000 square foot facility.

A feasibility study determined that if the museum were built it would attract 35,000 visitors a year. The museum would cover about 74 percent of its operating costs through admissions, group rentals, and gift shop but would still lose about $135,000 a year.

A& P, which oversees the money collected from the city’s one cent sales tax on prepared foods, has agreed to spend up to $400,000 to help build the museum and another $75,000 a year for ten years to help operate it.

Fogleman said Dr. Ruth Hawkins of Arkansas State University, who has been helping the city with developing the museum, told him that having a person in place will help speed up the process of building the museum.

Hawkins oversaw the efforts to build the Johnny Cash Museum, Southern Tenant Farmers Museum and several other museums for ASU.

“It may entail promoting our humble museum now.

It may be lining up tour packages that bring in tourists. It may be fundraising or bringing in grants — whatever that person needs to do to bring us closer to finding out whether we are going to build a new museum,” Fogleman said.

Fogleman said the person they hire as director will need to be a real go-getter.

“I really think this is going to be as much personality driven as it is topical,” Fogleman said. “I think it takes somebody with an outgoing personality to eat, sleep, and drink Sultana.”

Fogleman said it will probably cost $50,000 to $60,000 a year to attract a qualified candidate to lead the effort.

“We may invest that that for two or three years and see if we are making progress and breathing some life into this and whether this may really happen,” Fogleman said.

“Even if we pay that for two or three years and discover it isn’t going happen, we’ve still spent less money than going out and trying to build.”

Hawkins is projecting that a Sultana museum will generate $200,000 a year in new taxes to Marion.

This month, A& P agreed to spend up to $30,000 to fund an economic impact study for a Sultana museum.

Fogleman said he would rather spend $30,000 to find out what a museum’s impact would be on the local economy rather than just go ahead and build it.

“If the information from an economic impact study looks promising, then maybe we need to try and start to figure out where we find the money (to build a museum),” Fogleman said.

“I think personally we still have an uphill challenge ahead of us. Do I think it will cover its costs? No.

Our ballfields don’t cover the money we put in to them. But the focus was to give our children a better place to play ball. And the tournaments we have on weekends helps offset some of that and helps our merchants. The same with a rodeo arena. And I think a museum will bring people to town and help our merchants.”

By Mark Randall