Stars and Stripes Museum lays groundwork for major expansion

BLOOMFIELD, Mo. -- On the outside, The Stars and Stripes Museum/Library doesn't look like much: a couple of metal buildings with a military helicopter and two artillery pieces sitting out front.

On the inside, it is bursting at the seams with nearly 150 years' worth of history and artifacts.

Gary Capps, executive director, estimated the museum has around $3 million worth of artifacts -- and not nearly enough space to store them.

"We turn away artifacts," Capps said. "We don't have any place to put them." With less than 8,000 square feet, the museum only has room to display about a tenth of the artifacts it already has at any one time.

But plans are now in the making to change all that.

"We want to make it the museum that this collection deserves," said Bill Prost, director of development for the museum/library.

"We have a three-year plan. Within three years we plan to be constructing about 40,000 additional square feet," Capps said. "If you're going to do something, you need to do it right. We think the time is now to do what we have dreamed of for 16 years."

The new facility will be made up of "several museums within a museum," Prost said, which feature a "nostalgic design."

The goal is to raise $10 million to fund the expansion. Prost said that although this amount may seem high to some people, it really isn't that much when comparing it to similar facilities elsewhere.

The Pacific War Museum at Pearl Harbor raised $14 million in six months, Prost said. The Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg, Texas, has over the last nine years raised $38 million and is now expanding with a 40,000-square-foot addition.

An initial concept and design for the expansion was drawn up free of charge by Bill Hanway, vice president of the EDAW architectural firm in London, as a tribute to his late father who was a writer for The Stars and Stripes, Capps said.

In 1991, a group of men and women formed the Stars and Stripes Museum/ Library Association Inc., a not-for-profit corporation committed to preserving the history of the U.S. armed forces military newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, which was first printed in Bloomfield.