The Gettysburg National Military Park is full of monuments. Gettysburg itself is home to numerous museums that interpret and display artifacts from the seminal 1863 Civil War battle.

So, when the new Beyond the Battle Museum opened last April, some asked does Gettysburg need another museum? How will this one be different?  The Beyond the Battle Museum was unique in Gettysburg and has had great success in the short time it’s been open.

Now the museum has been recognized nationally with USA Today’s 10 Best Readers travel award for “Best New Museum” in the United States.

With us on The Spark Wednesday, Andrew Dalton, Executive Director of the Adams County Historical Society talked about what makes the museum different,"The story of the battle, of course, is told in museums in Gettysburg, the story of the soldiers and the generals and the troop movements and the strategy behind everything. What's sort of missing is the story of how this community lived through all of it, and not just the battle, but Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and if you fast forward, Dwight Eisenhower lived here, had a farm here. There's a wonderful National Historic site dedicated to that, but still, kind of the single story of this place had never been told from the beginning of time to now. And so our museum takes visitors through Native American history, early colonial history of the area, going into the Civil War, of course, talking about the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of the civilians. Then moving into the modern era, the 20th century, and how the community changed and became Gettysburg, became a tourist Mecca for visitors all around the world."

Dalton said part of the reason the museum was created was the Adams County Historical Society had accumulated so many historic documents and artifacts,"We have amassed a collection of rare documents, artifacts, photographs that numbers in the millions. And most of this collection was actually stored in crates at a warehouse offsite. We had no access to it, really, in some cases, no idea what we had, but it was an absolute treasure trove of Gettysburg related material. So, it was only right for us as an organization to seek out a new home for this collection."

Dalton indicated history is being discovered all the time, including a find just last week,"It's a book, and it's just an agricultural history of Pennsylvania from printed in, like, the early 1860s. And it was something that we were debating. Do we even need to keep books like this? And so we're going through and kind of weeding out our library and deciding what materials we keep. And I open up the book to the very back, and there's a handwritten inscription in pencil written by a wounded Union soldier who's lying in this house -- just about I can pretty much see where this farm was out the window of our building on the first day of the battle. This guy's wounded. He crawls to this house, and he pulls this book off the shelf, and he writes a note to the owner of the house telling his story, and then just shoves the book back on the shelf. And I guess the family kept it and donated it to us, but it was just sitting amidst our library of hundreds, if not thousands of books here, with this handwritten note from the soldier written during the battle. I know that's not nationally significant, but it's the type of thing that really makes you excited when you open it for the first time."

Dalton said it was an honor to be nominated for the USA Today award but there was some stiff competition too,"I know there was an art museum, a large art museum in Buffalo, New York that I think they came in second in the contest and the one that we always joked about -- there's a new punk rock museum in Las Vegas, and we were running neck and neck with them for most of the competition. And so I'll have to go see that when I'm out there. There's a very intense following for punk rock, too. So, I'm proud that the history buffs out there put us over the top."

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