Göran R Buckhorn writes:

It saddens me to have to report that the National Rowing Foundation, NRF’s National Rowing Hall of Fame and the connected rowing exhibit “Let Her Run”, located at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Connecticut, will close its doors today. The G. W. Blunt White Building that houses “the Hall” and its collections of rowing memorabilia and some other exhibit buildings nearby will be demolished to make room for a brand new 14,000 square-foot building that the museum is planning to start building next year. The building, which is to open in 2016, will act as a new main entrance to the museum, have a 5,000 square-foot exhibit space, and also include a cafe.

Sadly, there is no other space within the museum for the Rowing Hall of Fame and “Let Her Run”. Despite an intensive search, the NRF has not managed to find a new space to move the rowing collections, whereupon most of the rowing artefacts will go into storage until a new location has been found. In the meantime, the collection will not be accessible to rowing historians and scholars. Printed material, such as books, magazines and regatta programmes, will find a new home in Mystic Seaport’s research library.

Parties have approached the NRF to house its collections, but as the discussions between these organisations and the NRF are in an early stage, it is too soon to predict an outcome to where and when it is going to move.

The Rowing Hall of Fame opened at Mystic Seaport in March 2008, and HTBS has had many blog posts on events held at “the Hall” – read some of them here.