Atlanta History Center celebrates 100 with ambitious slate of new exhibitions
This year, the Atlanta History Center is celebrating its centennial — and America’s 250th birthday — with an ambitious slate of happenings.
The Center will publish a commemorative coffee-table book, massively overhaul roughly one-third of its gallery footprint to update its permanent Civil War exhibition, welcome a rare touring exhibition of America’s founding documents from the National Archives, give its Goizueta Children’s Experience an Atlanta sports makeover and expose under-told stories from Georgia’s Trail of Tears.
“This is our opportunity to really open up to the community,” the Center’s President and CEO Sheffield Hale said. “We’ve gotten this place to this point over a hundred years of additions. Now it’s time to tie a bow on it and open up the present for Atlanta.”
Such a bold year would not be possible, Hale said, had the Center not spent 100 years evolving from a scrappy historical society to a world-class institution.
The history behind Atlanta’s History Center
In 1926, Americans were celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and showing a renewed interest in the nation’s legacy.
The city of Atlanta was also undergoing a growth spurt.
That year, the High Museum got its first home on Peachtree Street, Emory University broke ground on its first library, Candler Field Airport (the precursor to Hartsfield-Jackson) opened, and a small but passionate group of 14 civic-minded historians and antiquarians chartered the Atlanta Historical Society.
Among them were Eugene Mitchell, the father of author Margaret Mitchell; Ruth Blair, a librarian and Georgia state archivist; and the society’s founder Walter McElreath, an Atlanta attorney who invested in Georgia Power and served in the state Legislature. Together, the group felt compelled to start preserving Atlanta’s stories and artifacts.
“The whole growth of the city had been so rapid since the war and industrialization and the New South,” Hale pointed out. “They were trying to be different and beat out the other Southern cities like Birmingham … To do that, they wanted to be able to amass things that any big city would have, like a historical society.”
For the first 40 years, the society operated out of a number of spaces along Peachtree Street, including office space at the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel (then a glamorous hub for high society guests including Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the Erlanger Theatre building and the Willis B. Jones mansion. There was talk of constructing a space on Peachtree Street, but plans never materialized.
In 1951, McElreath died and left his roughly $5 million estate to the Atlanta Historical Society. The organization inherited those funds in 1965 when McElreath’s wife died.
In today’s dollars — approximately $60 million — the gift was transformational. It allowed the society, in 1966, to buy Edward and Emily Inman’s property in Buckhead for roughly $450,000, including roughly 22 acres and the elegant Swan House designed by famed Atlanta architect Philip Trammell Shutze.
The classical mansion, with its two-story portico, Corinthian columns and manicured grounds (which today is still a highlight of Atlanta History Center’s campus), opened to the public in 1967 as both a house museum and the new headquarters of the Atlanta Historical Society.
The society’s footprint expanded as the Atlanta Historical Society purchased new properties along West Paces Ferry Road and moved pieces of history from other parts of the state to the property.
In the 1960s, Atlanta’s postwar suburban expansion — particularly the construction of I-85 — threatened some historical sites, including the Tullie Smith farm and house, which had been built in 1845 and sat on an 800-acre farm in DeKalb County near Emory.
A group of preservation-minded individuals worked to move the farmhouse to the Atlanta Historical Society grounds in 1969, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in November 1970. Volunteers traversed Georgia to find period-appropriate furnishings, outbuildings (including a circa 1850 barn from Cartersville and a cabin) and plants. The property has become a window into the antebellum farming period.
Other major milestones in the society’s history include the construction of McElreath Hall (from 1972-1975) to serve as the society’s expanded history archives; a 400-seat auditorium; exhibit spaces and meeting rooms; and the construction of a new museum building to house an impressive collection of Civil War artifacts donated to the society in 1986 called the DuBose family collection. The largest private collection of Civil War artifacts in the United States at the time, it elevated the historical society’s standing as an organization with serious assets.
The construction of the museum to house the collection was funded by a $15 million capital campaign and catalyzed the society to change its name to the Atlanta History Center in 1990.
The name change signaled that the Atlanta Historical Society would no longer be a club; it would be a front-facing, public museum and community resource for all. The museum opened in 1993.
Numerous expansions, acquisitions and restorations have taken place since, including a museum expansion, Swan House restoration, construction of the Grand Overlook ballroom, off-campus acquisitions of the Margaret Mitchell House and the installation of the Battle of Atlanta cyclorama (which was moved to the property and opened in 2019).
Today, the 33-acre Center and its satellite resources include nine curated gardens, three historic homes, a research center, library and ever-growing digital storytelling platform.
It is known as one of the city’s cornerstone cultural institutions, attracting roughly 200,000 visitors a year, and has become a hub for education. During the 2024-2025 school year, the Center served 54,000 students through field trips and other programming. The archives and collections are a well-sought resource for academics.
The century of growth has positioned Atlanta History Center for what Hale said is likely its most ambitious year yet.
Here’s what’s in store at the Atlanta History Center in 2026 (in order of opening):
In March, visitors can see founding documents that forged the nation
This year, as the Atlanta History Center celebrates 100 years, the nation will celebrate its 250th birthday.
In honor of both milestones, the Center has collaborated with the National Archives’ Freedom Plane Tour initiative to host a rare traveling exhibition: “Documents That Forged a Nation.”
The Center will be one of only eight locations nationwide — and the only one in the Southeast — to host the exhibition.
The show features some of the most consequential documents in early American history, including the Articles of Association (1774), oaths of allegiance signed during the Revolutionary War, an 1823 stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris (1783) that ended the war and David Brearley’s secret printing of the Constitution (1787).
“These are the nation’s documents,” said Pola Changnon, the Center’s chief content officer.
The exhibition opens March 27 and runs for 16 days. Throughout its run, the Atlanta History Center will offer free admission to the public — a requirement from the National Archives to ensure broad access.
Changnon emphasized the importance of this accessibility.
“It’s really important that as many people have an opportunity to see them as possible. They might not be able to get up to D.C., so they’re going to be able to see them here in their hometown,” she said.
The documents’ arrival in Atlanta will be marked with a ceremony on the tarmac at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on March 23.
In April, a new coffee table book highlights 100 treasured artifacts
On April 24, the Atlanta History Center will unveil “Atlanta in 100 Objects: A Century of Stories,” a coffee-table book featuring 100 artifacts from the Center’s expansive collections.
The selections range from historically significant pieces to quirky cultural gems, reflecting the Center’s philosophy that history isn’t just about grand moments, but everyday objects that tell Atlanta’s story.
“Some things are surprising because they may not feel historic, but they’re culturally important,” Changnon said.
She points to the Pink Pig from Rich’s department store, a beloved fixture of many Atlanta childhoods now preserved in the collection.
Other objects pack more emotional punch. The book features the shoes that civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy wore to protests.
“The patina of those shoes and the lived-in-ness of them speaks to his commitment in terms of civil rights and the miles that he must have walked behind that commitment,” Changnon said.
Other notable inclusions are a collection of ornate hats created by Lillian Head, a Black milliner who designed for Atlanta’s elite in an era of segregation, and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s copy of a photography book by Civil War photographer George Barnard, which documents the destruction Sherman’s troops wrought on Atlanta.
In conjunction with the book’s release, all 100 objects will be featured in a campuswide exhibition. Dresses from the textile collection will be displayed within the Swan House. The massive globe from Atlanta’s Carnegie Library will greet visitors at the Kenan Research Center. A billboard celebrating Hank Aaron’s home run race will appear in the Gatheround exhibition, telling not just a baseball story but the story of how a divided community came together to recognize greatness.
Visitors can explore the objects through self-guided tours on the Bloomberg Connects app, which provides supplemental stories and context for each item.
The book includes a foreword by former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador Andrew Young and an introduction by Hale.
In May, the Goizueta Children’s Experience will get an Atlanta sports-themed makeover
Just in time for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the Atlanta History Center’s Goizueta Children’s Experience will debut a new theme starting May 30.
The 5,000-square-foot interactive gallery, designed for children from crawlers to age 8, rotates its theme annually. This summer, it will transform into a sports-centric exhibition celebrating Atlanta’s five major professional sports teams: the Braves, Falcons, Hawks, Dream and Atlanta United.
Each of the five teams collaborated with the Atlanta History Center to create branded, interactive games, activities and storytelling that emphasize teamwork, perseverance and hometown pride.
“There was immediate excitement about it from the teams,” said Changnon. “Practically speaking, they’re always looking to grow fans and why wouldn’t you want to grow them from diapers on up?”
From dressing up as players to trying out athletic challenges, kids will step into the action while learning how sports have shaped Atlanta’s identity.
Since opening in January 2025, the Goizueta Children’s Experience has driven significant increases in family participation and membership at the Center, Changnon said.
Massive overhaul of the Center’s Civil War permanent exhibition will open in two phases
The most ambitious of the Atlanta History Center’s 2026 endeavors will be the complete overhaul and expansion of its Civil War permanent exhibition — a project that will transform roughly one-third of the museum’s permanent exhibition space.
The renovation arrives in two phases: “More Perfect Union: The American Civil War Era” opens July 9, followed by “Hard Hand of War: Soldiers, Weapons, and Mass Production” in October. Together, the exhibitions will occupy 15,400 square feet.
For Gordon Jones, the Center’s senior military historian and curator, the project represents a full-circle moment. Jones was 28 when he arrived at the Atlanta History Center in 1991 to work with the newly donated DuBose collection. The exhibition he helped create opened in 1996 for the Atlanta Olympics and ran for nearly 30 years.
That original exhibition reflected its moment: the height of Ken Burns’ influential documentary series and peak public interest in battlefield tactics. But today’s visitors are asking different questions.
“They want to know what is it that’s going on? All these things that are going on in my world now, where did that come from?” Jones said. “We live in a post-George Floyd world. We live in a post-Ken Burns world. That approach to the American Civil War, as good as it was at that time for us in 1996, needs to broaden.”
The new exhibitions expand beyond battlefield narratives to explore the war’s causes, its role in defining citizenship and freedom, and its global impacts.
In July, when visitors first enter “More Perfect Union,” they will encounter a media experience featuring period voices discussing secession and union, then explore galleries on enslavement, westward expansion and the road to war. A 12-minute film in a crescent-shaped theater will use animated maps and period voices to explain major events and the centrality of the Atlanta Campaign — “the decisive moment” where President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection became inevitable, Jones said.
Subsequent areas cover soldier life, the freedom experience of enslaved people, the homefront and Reconstruction. A final media area connects the Civil War era to the Civil Rights Movement and contemporary America.
In October, when visitors can explore “Hard Hand of War,” they will encounter an entirely different approach in the Goldstein Gallery. The armory-style exhibition showcases the Center’s extensive weapons and equipment collections to illustrate how the war was fought from an industrial and technological standpoint.
“We have essentially one of every gun ever made or used in the Civil War,” Jones said.
The exhibition demonstrates how Northern industrial capacity and innovation vastly outpaced the agrarian South. The collection has tripled in recent years thanks to contributions from private collectors.
In the fall, a new exhibit will spotlight stories from Georgia’s Trail of Tears
This fall, the Atlanta History Center will debut “Exile from Georgia: The Cherokee and Muscogee Trail of Tears.”
The exhibition will confront a painful chapter in Georgia’s history by chronicling how the Cherokee and Muscogee nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in the 1830s and forced to undertake a harrowing journey to present-day Oklahoma. The migration killed thousands.
“(This story) is not being told here in Atlanta in a sophisticated, sustained way,” Changnon said.
To create the exhibition, the Center sought advisers from both the Cherokee and Muscogee communities.
The exhibition will explain how treaties with the United States government were created and systematically broken, leading to the forced removal. It will also explore the present-day realities of the two nations.
“So much of the story to be told is their interest in representing: We are still here. We are a resilient people,” Changnon said. “Just despite everything that happened to us and the removal from Georgia, we continue to thrive, not just survive.”
Contemporary voices from both tribes will describe how the loss of this land continues to impact their lives today. Visitors will then enter an immersive theater space to experience the brutality of the Trail of Tears and the resilience shown by those who endured it.
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