The U.S. Army Ordnance Museum - a prominent Harford tourist attraction scheduled to move to Virginia in a military base shake-up - could be leaving some heavy-duty possessions behind.
Officials say it might be too costly to move all of the museum's more cumbersome artifacts, so some could be left at Aberdeen Proving Ground, dividing the collection and disrupting preservation efforts.
`Rare and unique'
"There's been a lot of motion tied to the effort over the years to preserve this collectoin and restore it. It is rare and unique," said Kone Brugh, chairman of the museum's nonprofit support foundation.
"The fear is that the price tag will be too great to move it all," Brugh said. "That would split up the collection, and there would be artifacts abandoned at APG."
While gaining thousands of military jobs under the national base consolidation plan, APG is losing the Ordnance Center and School to Fort Lee, Va.
The entities are inseparable, officials say, because visits to the museum are part of the school's curriculum.
The museum had an average of 200,000 visitors a year until Sept. 11, 2001, when security measures restricted base traffic to military personnel and Department of Defense civilians.
Reopened in 2002
It reopened to the public in the fall of 2002, and attendance was 50,000 last year, museum officials said. It is still considered one of the county's top tourist attractions.
The items on display have served as a link to APG's past that county officials had hoped to preserve.
The museum features thousands of artifacts from the U.S. military and from other countries, such as tanks, assault rifles, grenades and a 43,600-pound World War II-era bomb that proved to be too heavy for an airplane to carry at the time.
The most recent exhibit came from Iraq and includes a 12-foot shell for chemical bombs, a Saddam Hussein painting and an Iraqi flag seized by troops from a presidential palace.
"The museum is significant and has been a significant attraction in this community for generations," said J. Thomas Sadowski, head of Harford County's base realignment task force.
`We're all hopeful'
"A lot of folks are hoping it stays in some way, shape or form at APG," Sadowski said. "We're all hopeful that there will always be that link to APG's past."
For the museum's boosters, abandoning the items would be troubling.
