USM students to submit mock exhibition proposal for new Moeller Museum

HATTIESBURG, Miss. (WDAM) - A group of students at the University of Southern Mississippi could play a big role in the development of a new museum in Hattiesburg.

More than one dozen students in a class focused on museum studies, called Public and Applied History in Theory and Practice, are working on a mock exhibition proposal for the new Moeller Military Vehicle Museum.

That facility, which will be operated by the Hattiesburg Convention Commission, will be built across the street from the African-American Military History Museum.

The students will design ways to display the vehicles within that museum.

“They’ll be thinking about the nuts and bolts of putting a 4-ton truck on display and the difficulties involved with this but also thinking more broadly about contents and thinking about who they want to speak to and why this vehicle is important in this space,” said John Winters, assistant professor of history at USM.

“If (the proposal is) something we feel fits in the overall goal and what we want to see in the end result, we definitely will incorporate it and use it,” said Vanessa Molden, operations and education supervisor for the Hattiesburg Convention Commission’s Sixth Street Museum District.

Students checked out the site of the new museum on Tuesday.

Their mock exhibition proposal will be due at the end of October.

About one dozen rare vehicles belonging to Georgia physician Dr. Don Moeller will be on permanent display at the Moeller Military Vehicle Museum.

It will be an interactive facility, with visitors being allowed touch and climb on the vehicles that are displayed.

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