LORTON, Va. — Museum exhibits and openings are common in the District, but now a brand new museum is about to hit Virginia -- in a building with an illustrative history.
The Lucy Burns Museum, a new museum honoring the women's suffrage movement, is set to open in Lorton, Virginia in January. The museum is in a restored and newly designed Lorton Prison building, where many suffragists were kept while fighting for the right to vote.
Just miles outside of D.C., the exhibits hope to pay homage to the many suffragists who were imprisoned for picketing the White House and fighting for women's rights in 1917. The museum plans on opening in January to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment being ratified.
The space is funded by the Workhouse Arts Center, which transformed over 10,000 square feet of the Lorton Correctional facilities and the Lorton Workhouse prison that stopped operating in 2001.
According to the museum website, the Workhouse prison housed notorious criminals like Gordon Liddy -- chief figure in the Watergate scandal -- as well as hosted famous performances from the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra.
"From the prison’s founding by President Theodore Roosevelt during the progressive reform era to the current site adaptive reuse project, re-purposing of the property to support an innovative and growing arts center, the museum explores a vast history including an incredible cast of characters of notorious criminals, some of the biggest jazz artists of the 21st century, and activist and suffragists," the museum's website states.
January 25 is the first day the public will be able to see the new museum, but the grand opening for the museum isn't scheduled until May 9.
