Explore the streets of a frontier village. Brave the cramped conditions of a coal mine, or travel back to prehistory to see how coal was formed. Through environments like these, the West Virginia State Museum celebrates the state’s land, people and culture.
ThemeWorks’ immersive exhibits place visitors in the thick of West Virginia history. As visitors travel forward through time, they move from a grand 1920s movie theater to the shuttered banks of the Depression, arriving in a soda shop where women and African-Americans fought for equal rights. Emerging in the modern era, visitors see recreations of two West Virginia landmarks, Memorial Tunnel and the New River Gorge Bridge. The scale-model bridge, set among thousands of handmade trees in the full flush of fall color, is a fitting link to the next chapter in the state’s storied history.
PROJECT DETAILS
Project: The West Virginia State Museum
Designer: Matthew Martin DesignWorks, LLC
Client: Design & Production, Incorporated
Size: 24,000 square feet (2,229 m²)
Photography: Rob Witzel Photography
Scope of Work: ThemeWorks produced all scenic facades, immersion environments and dioramas for the museum. Highlights include a coal swamp with integrated AV and artifacts, a frontier outpost with a period barn and palisade, a simulated coal mine, a scale model of the New River Gorge Bridge over 18’ in length, artificial rockwork, textured scenic flooring surfaces and a mining “company town”. The company town includes numerous period building facades including a boarding house, train depot, general store, 1920s movie theater, VFW hall, and a drugstore.