You mean the hated tariff, which no one ever bothered to secede over until the abolitionists came to power?
"There's no marketing budget. It's by word of mouth," Matthews explained this week. "Some months it's thin. Some months it's thick. We just manage to stay with it."
Today, though, promises to be different. Matthews expects about 300 visitors. To entertain them, he will have an actress on hand portraying Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman.
The reason for the surge in interest is Juneteenth, the state holiday that commemorates the day in 1865 that Union Gen. Gordon Granger announced in Galveston that President Lincoln had ordered freedom for all slaves -- two years before.
Matthews noted that Granger wasn't standing there alone; he was accompanied by as many as 300 black soldiers in Union uniforms to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. Matthews said those black Civil War soldiers would later go on to become buffalo soldiers when the black regiments formed in 1866.
To him, there simply would be no Juneteenth without the black soldiers. He said the museum volunteers make sure those soldiers are remembered.