Although the dark oak container looks inconsequential next to the original Declaration of Independence, it carries the inscription, "Carried at the Battle of the Brandywine." The date: Sept. 11 - of the year 1777.
In other words, it's a big deal.
So are thousands of other artifacts - including a fowling firearm carved from curly maple; Washington's tents at Valley Forge; a list of soldiers from Massachusetts, some barely old enough to shave - destined for display at the Museum of the American Revolution, slated to open in Old City in 2015.
The challenge now - besides raising $150 million for operations and construction and designing and erecting the 112,000-square-foot building - is presenting the brutal conflict without the benefit of photographs or film.
It falls to R. Scott Stephenson, director of collections and interpretation for the new national museum, to tell the story of what happened during the country's revolutionary period, which was only recorded on paper or stowed in survivors' memories.
"We don't have Mathew Brady," said Stephenson, referring to the man who photographed much of the Civil War, a conflict with images most anyone can conjure up. He calls this issue the "core conundrum."
"It's one of the challenges," to get people to "believe it actually happened," he said.
That's true, said Joseph J. Ellis, the Ford Foundation professor of history at Mount Holyoke College, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner. Over two centuries after these events, an aura surrounds the Founding Fathers.
"I think there is a mystique, an electromagnetic field built around the founders," Ellis said. "No realistic pictures will suffice."
And, added Stephenson, those existing pictures are of individuals who had money. "To modernize the artwork is challenging; it's stiff and formal."
Perhaps Stephenson's biggest challenge is to attract a 21st-century public. Using input from the museum's board of historians - which now takes up "many feet of shelf space" - Stephenson and staff will develop story lines and characters, connecting the academic to the creative in a don't-remind-me-of-social-studies-class way. They are exploring using trained interpreters and costumed reenactors. And of course, multimedia is on the design table.
