Museum of The Confederacy - Location Near Virginia State Capitol

Location Near Virginia State Capitol

The Museum and White House of the Confederacy are located two blocks north of the Virginia State Capitol, and within walking distance of several other museums and historic sites, including the Executive Mansion of Virginia, Monumental Church, St. Paul's Church, John Marshall House (a Preservation Virginia property), and the John Wickham House (Valentine Richmond History Center). It is, however, completely surrounded by and its view is cut off from those sites by the VCU Medical Center (formerly the Medical College of Virginia hospitals) of Virginia Commonwealth University. The neighboring and expanding hi-rise medical facilities stirred debate in 2005 about the possible relocation of the Museum and the historic White House building. In 2006, Museum officials announced that the White House of the Confederacy, a National Historic Landmark (1963) and Virginia Historic Landmark (1966), will not be moved.

Critics of the Museum of the Confederacy's leadership in recent decades note that it previously owned the very land on which the new hospital construction is taking place, and allege that the Museum sold it to VCU to help finance the very museum building now purportedly threatened by the hospital's expansion on the site.

In fact, the Museum owned part of property in question between 1894 and 1933. The Commonwealth of Virginia informed the Museum, in 1933, of its intent to build a steam plant on part of the property to supply heat throughout the small, adjacent, medical school campus and to Capitol Square. The 1930s-era Museum had little recourse but to give up the land to the state - its only mitigation being that it could acquire steam from the new plant. At that time, no hospital expansion plans were available to the public that foreshadowed any danger to the fabric of the Court End / Shockoe Hill neighborhood. Indeed, the first significant hospital expansion (A.D. Williams Clinic and West Hospital) was not built until 1941, and the majority of the modern hospital buildings were not built until the late 1970s. No evidence supports the allegation that the Museum sold any of its property to pay for its current building.