Gerard Eisterhold thrives on learning.
“I’ve always had this kind of distance perspective observing what’s going on,” says the man charged with designing exhibits for the Civil War history center under development in Fayetteville. “I like to learn stuff, but as you learn stuff you keep track of what was interesting about that and you try to leave bread crumbs for other people to have those same little discoveries.
“I like to learn things,” Eisterhold continues. “And I assume that there are other people who like to learn things and that if I find something interesting, they’ll find something interesting. In a way, it’s a self-centered perspective, I suppose. But that’s where I come from.”
Eisterhold, 71, builds content and exhibits for museums from the ground up. His previous work can be found in the International Civil Rights Museum & Center in Greensboro and other facilities focused on history.
Based in Kansas City, Missouri, he was hired for the job by organizers of the N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction in Fayetteville.
“We knew from the outset this was a difficult topic with lots of sensitivities,” says David Winslow, who is responsible for fundraising and putting a staff together for the history center before a director is named. “We purposely sought out somebody that could deal with this.”
The center will be constructed on the grounds of the U.S. Arsenal at the Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex in the Haymount Historic District. Some skeptics question the organizers’ intentions and adamantly oppose a museum that might pay homage to the Confederacy and overlook racial injustice.
History center leaders promise that will not be the case.
They say it will be an educational “collecting” history center, telling stories that involve African Americans, Native Americans and women and come from other minority perspectives from the Civil War-Reconstruction period.
Supporters stress that it will not be a static, traditional museum with statues and memorials but one that gives historical accounts of an important time in U.S. history.
‘The stuff that tells the story’
Eisterhold, a quirky kind of guy with a gifted mind and folksy way with words, is no newcomer to shaping how history is told in this more diverse period of social equality.
“Every project is like reinventing — gathering the content, gathering the people all together,” he says. “It’s the stuff inside. The stuff that tells the story.”
Before the Fayetteville project, he helped bring the International Civil Rights Museum & Center to fruition in Greensboro.
Winslow says he wanted Eisterhold for the Fayetteville project, although he did not have a vote in choosing the exhibit designer. The history center’s board chose Eisterhold. The designer’s work, Winslow says, “is absolutely key” to the project.
“He really is thinking on a very high plane,” Winslow says.
Winslow worked with Eisterhold on the International Civil Rights Museum.
“I was really impressed how he was able to tackle the Jim Crow era, and that’s what that was about,” he says. “In a way, that really resonated with the African American community and, at the same time, was welcomed by the white community. The fact that he was able to navigate the racial and political landmines associated with that period and do it in a way that was really constructive (is) really impressive.”
Winslow says the Fayetteville history center should open by the summer of 2026. He expects the building to be completed in 2025. After that, he estimates, the exhibits will take another six to nine months to install.
Eisterhold says he’s not creating the content but, rather, shepherding it.
“You’ve got to come up with the plans. You’ve got to raise the money to do it,” he says. “It’s not like a quick thing. But there is a growing need for museums dealing with ideas and identity as opposed to, ‘Here’s a collection of durable wedding dresses,’ or whatever.”
While some people may think it’s taking too long for the history center to take shape, the International Civil Rights Museum & Center in Greensboro took at least 15 years from idea to completion.
The exhibits there were designed by Eisterhold’s company, Eisterhold Associates of Kansas City.
Another of his projects, the National Museum of the United States Army in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, was a 20-year process, according to Winslow.
Eisterhold visited Fayetteville in October and January to attend community forums to explain what is planned for the local history center and to gather feedback from local residents, particularly those in the Black community. Information sessions were held at the 100-year-old Mount Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, a historically Black church across from Fayetteville State University. Other feedback sessions were held at Highland Presbyterian Church, which has a predominantly white congregation.
During his October visit, Eisterhold talked with CityView at the historic Culbreth House on the Museum of the Cape Fear grounds. He says he was hired for the Fayetteville project because of his work at the Greensboro museum.
“They knew of us,” Eisterhold says of his Kansas City company. “I think it was 2010. They put out requests for a proposal, and that’s how it works. We competed for it, submitted a proposal, did the interview, and we were awarded the contract.”
Transforming an existing regional museum into a statewide history center will require a tremendous amount of planning, he says.
The projected cost of the history center is $80 million, with the state legislature providing $60 million in its last budget. Last year, the Cumberland County Board of Commissioners reaffirmed its commitment of $7.5 million for the center, and the Fayetteville City Council pledged $6.6 million plus donations of several parcels of land.
Discovering ‘a larger world’
Eisterhold is a native of Rich Fountain, Mississippi, who started college at the University of Missouri as an agronomy student.
“I had not seen people with suits and ties and 9-to-5 jobs,” he says. “I thought everybody was going to be a farmer. That’s why I went to school, and I discovered a larger world.”
He later switched his field of study to general sciences for a couple of semesters before entering the arts program. He says he thought he should take up a major that was alien to him.
“My GPA went down a point, but it’s been much more interesting,” he says of the switch.
He then transferred to Kansas City Art Institute, majoring in graphic design and photography.
Eisterhold says he has never had a job in either graphic design or photography.
“I had bad guidance counseling that said you never get a job in what you’re trained for,” he says. “I worked in an animation studio for a couple of years because I thought that would be interesting.”
Then, he says, “this museum thing came up. I’ve remained in that field and been confused ever since. You’re always encountering this new world, and that remains interesting.”
Over the years, Eisterhold has put his imprint on civil rights-themed museums including the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee; the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh; the African American Museum in Philadelphia; and the Rosa Parks Museum and Children’s Annex in Montgomery, Alabama.
Other projects include the President’s House in Philadelphia, the U.S. president’s residence that predates the White House; the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri; and Walt Disney’s Hometown in Marceline, Missouri, a town that was the model for Disneyland’s Main Street USA.
And now, he’s focused on raising the roof on the N.C. History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction.
Eisterhold sees it as a for-the-record mission.
“It’s to teach the fundamental lesson of how people make history out of the stuff that happens,” he says. “There’s been a whole lot of not very useful narratives that have been lying on the ground. And part of the reason why we’re going back to these personal narratives (is) trying to show how these people’s lives and agencies and resilience played out in the landscape, if you will, that they were given.
“So, we’re paying a lot more attention to the how and why of what happened back then than to the names and dates of just what, where and when,” Eisterhold says. “Because people need to understand how this happened if they’re going to learn from it. And by taking it down to the basics, then people start to think how that role in history came about and what it means and the stage it set for today. And it still resonates. It’s right under the surface.”
In October, he said he was a couple of months into the work of designing exhibits for the Fayetteville center.
“The particular thing about it is there is a need to break this history down to the granular component parts and then show how history has been made out of that in the past,” he says.
Some of what he sees as pertinent to the center’s historical content is how people were living their lives in North Carolina during those years; what they did for their livelihood; the economic factors that were in play; and the power structure from a time so long ago.
His motivation is building a museum not with brick and mortar but with ideas.
“I like to learn stuff and then see how you can make something of it, and then seeing the other part of that equation and seeing how people pick it up. It’s not enough to just put something out there,” he says. “You have to kind of mirror how someone else is going to observe it and take it on, carry it on down the road.”
