Update: Several corrections have been made regarding details about the holiday tour and the timeline of these events.

After unexpectedly closing its doors earlier this year, the Danville Historical Society is working to reopen, rehire staff and establish itself more firmly within the community.

There’s no timeline for reopening, said the organization’s acting president, Kim Frith. 

Frith and the rest of the historical society’s board members have been working to revamp several of the organization’s policies, which she said were in need of updates. They hope that work will be complete in December, and the process to rehire staff and reopen to the public will begin after that, she said.

“The office has been closed since April, so we’re eager to reopen to the public,” Frith said. “We’re hopeful that it will be sometime next year.”

The Danville Historical Society is the keeper of hundreds of thousands of historic artifacts, documents, newspaper clippings and photographs tracing Danville’s tobacco legacy, its civil rights movement, the rise and fall of Dan River Mills, the city’s Native American history and much more.

A physical location on Cabell Street, where the public could walk in to see these items or ask questions of the staff, opened in 2023. 

This spring, those doors closed with little public explanation.

At that point, it made sense to take a step back to revisit the organization’s policies, website and board, Frith said. 

“It was a parting of the ways and it was somewhat of a catalyst to us realizing that we needed to revamp our policies,” she said. 

And though the doors have been closed and the board has been focused on internal improvements, the historical society has still been engaged with the community.

It has collaborated with two public schools in the city on research projects and is still planning to host its regular holiday tour of historic homes. 

The organization is also considering options for a new physical location where it can better display its materials and be more engaged with the public. 

“We really want to focus on the future and not what happened in the past,” Frith said. 

Working towards reopening

When the historical society shuttered its physical location this spring, it was a surprise — even to some of the organization’s board members. 

Robin Marcato, former executive director of the historical society, told Cardinal News in early April that the organization would be closing its doors to the public. 

That same month, board member Lee Smallwood confirmed the news. He said Marcato had let go of the two part-time archivists working at the society, Cody Foster and Joe Scott, and that she was no longer involved with the organization.

“We were not involved with the decision to let the archivists go. When we were made aware of that, we requested information, and we did not get much information,” he said.

This left the historical society with no staff, as Marcato, Foster and Scott had been its only employees. 

Marcato declined to comment on the record about the closure. 

With the staff gone and the doors closed, the board decided to “take a breath and develop some policies,” Smallwood said. 

There weren’t a lot of formal policies in place, he said. 

“We have done some things in the margins to add some policies, but we really feel that this gives us a good opportunity to do a comprehensive review,” Smallwood said in April. “We want to get strong policies in place for the functioning of the organization so we can work as effectively as possible in preserving the history of the community.”

Part of this process included a restructuring of the board. When former board president Sarah Latham decided to step down at the end of her term in September, Frith moved from vice president into the role of acting president. 

“Our bylaws say that our president has to be someone who’s been on board for at least a year,” Frith said. “I’m technically not president, I’m acting president….But until we have a board member who has been around for a year and is willing to be president, it’s sort of fallen in my lap.”

There’s been a “huge learning curve” with the new position, said Frith. She said she devotes all of her free time to the historical society when she’s not working her full-time job with Caesars Virginia.

Latham will stay on the board for another year in the role of immediate past president to pass on institutional knowledge to the many new board members who have joined. 

The board now has 16 members, which is about double its former size, Frith said. 

“We really went out looking for people,” she said. “This is a working board and we wanted people who would be willing to jump in and roll up their sleeves. … We already had people who were doing that, but we didn’t have enough of them.”

Arianna Ramberg, a local small-business owner, joined the board in September and serves as its treasurer. Ramberg said she “fell in love” with the historical society after visiting it and seeing the “treasures” in its archives.

“We have an extremely powerful board now and a lot of new faces,” she said. “If we can pull together and use everyone’s contacts and network, we can really get the word out there that this thing is alive and well.”

Ramberg said this network includes museums in the city, like the Danville Fine Arts and History Museum, with which the historical society has continued its relationship during its closure.

Sonja Ingram, executive director of the Fine Arts and History Museum, said that the two organizations complement each other. 

The historical component of the museum focuses largely on the Sutherlin Mansion, a Civil War-era building where it is located, from the Civil War through the Civil Rights era, Ingram said. 

“But Danville’s history is multifaceted and far richer than any single institution can tell,” she said. “[The historical society’s] extensive collection represents significant narratives that complement what DMFAH has, and together we can offer residents and visitors a more complete picture of our past.”

The process to rehire staff will likely begin in 2026, after all the updated policies are complete, Frith said. The board has approved a new financial policy and is expected to approve a personnel policy in November and a collections policy in December. 

“We felt very strongly that we needed all of that in place before we hire new personnel,” Frith said. 

Positions will be advertised locally, but candidates are not required to be local. 

“Someone with a community network here would be invaluable,” Ramberg said. “Someone who is organized and driven, and obviously someone who loves history.”

In the meantime, questions about donations of materials to the historical society can be sent to danvillehistorical@gmail.com

Frith said the organization has received recent donations for the archives, as well as research questions from the community. 

“We are more limited with research since we don’t have staff at this time, but we will evaluate research requests on an individual basis,” she said.

Holiday tour, research projects … and a new home?

When it’s not redoing various policies, the historical society board is “laser-focused” on the upcoming holiday tour, Ramberg said. 

Each year, the Danville Historical Society hosts a tour of historic homes in the city that have been brought back to life from various stages of disrepair through painstaking renovations.

The event on Dec. 13 will mark the 52nd holiday tour. The theme for this year: “Everything Old is New Again.”

According to the historical society’s website, the tour will showcase everything from cottages to expansive Victorian buildings, including a rare Y-shaped house and the massive First Baptist Church on Main Street. Tickets go on sale in November. 

Frith’s remarks on the website say that support for the tour is also “supporting the long-term viability of DHS” as it formalizes plans, policies and procedures to ensure a strong future. 

Tickets will go on sale online around Nov. 15, Frith said, and the historical society’s website and Facebook page will be updated when they are available.

As usual, community sponsors for the tour are welcome, Frith said, and the historical society’s annual commemorative Christmas tree ornament is now on sale at several retailers in the city.

“A lot of effort is going into [the tour] right now,” Ramberg said. “But at the same time, we have an internal group that is looking at things like building maintenance and a long-term plan for space. We’re still fostering relationships with the city and with the powerhouse that is Visit SoSi.”

Visit SoSi, the region’s tourism brand, is working to market attractions to the increasing number of visitors coming to the Danville-Pittsylvania County area. Many of these visitors are traveling to the region to visit the Caesars Virginia casino resort, but Visit SoSi aims to make them aware of other opportunities while they’re in town. 

Ramberg said the historical society hopes to capitalize on the region’s increased visitation, drawing the interest of travelers in addition to existing residents.

One of the ways it might do this is by moving into a building with more adequate display space to showcase artifacts in a museum-style environment. 

The Cabell Street location, a former tobacco warehouse, has a dimly lit display space as well as an archival room. 

Frith said that both the display and the archival spaces are “bursting at the seams.”

One of the newer additions to the historical society’s collection is material from the National Tobacco and Textile Museum, which operated in Danville from 1975 to 1991. 

When it closed, tens of thousands of artifacts were packed up, and many didn’t see the light of day for decades until the historical society took them in a few years ago.

Most of the items — pieces like cigar boxes and old cigarette packs with vintage designs — are still boxed and crated, Frith said. 

“We really hope to one day have a larger display space where we can really show off some of the amazing artifacts we have,” she said. 

The board has investigated some spaces for a new location, but nothing has panned out yet, Frith said. But it shouldn’t be too much longer before the historical society can welcome the public again, sharing its important resources with the community.

Ingram said the historical society’s collections, when on display to the public, “are vital for fostering a deeper understanding of our past and ourselves, both the good and the bad.”

“I am really glad to hear that the Danville Historical Society is working toward reopening,” she said. “DHS holds thousands of remarkable artifacts, including the tobacco and textile museum collection, that deserve to be accessible to the public.”

In turn, Frith said she hopes the community lends support to the historical society, which does not receive funding from the city but accepts donations, applies for grants and holds fundraisers. Frith did not share the annual budget for the organization.

The historical society’s most recent IRS Form 990, which is from 2023, reports its revenue at $106,000, its expenditures at $77,600 and its assets at $143,000, as reported on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. 

“If people like the posts that they’ve been seeing on our website and on social media, if they care about the preservation of Danville history, they can show their support by donating or by sponsoring the holiday tour,” Frith said. 

“We really want to move the organization into the future and make the wonderful collection that we are taking care of available to the public. We want to hire new personnel, we want to reopen our office, and we can’t do that without the community’s support.”