Last year, in one of his better decisions, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed that Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College take over the State Museum of Agriculture – the Agrirama – in Tifton. Dr. David Bridges, ABAC president, readily agreed, although there was no real funding for the additional 95 acres and numerous historic buildings representing a traditional 1870s farm community and an 1890s progressive farmstead.

Bridges, however, did get the Agrirama buildings placed into the state’s formula for facilities maintenance. And ABAC also got more than merely increasing its campus’s physical size by nearly 23 percent; it also got an opportunity to further develop its rural studies curriculum with historic authenticity.

We are coming up on the one-year anniversary of ABAC taking over the Agrirama, which has now been formally rechristened the “Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village.” Without the Agrirama’s transfer to ABAC, the Tifton attraction would have, indubitably, met the same fate as the state’s music and sports halls of fame in Macon – either shutting its doors for good or hoping a private entity would come along and take it over from the state.

The Agrirama opened 35 years ago on the nation’s 200th birthday, July 4, 1976, featuring a sawmill, blacksmith shop, schoolhouse, feed and seed store, print shop, grist mill and turpentine still. The Tift House, once belonging to Tifton’s founder, was relocated with family donations from its original site at the corner of Prince and Second streets where Tift Towers now stands behind the Gazette building. The steam train, which was acquired in 1976, was eventually refurbished and operational by 1981.

There have been numerous additions to the Agrirama through the years, most recently the modern meeting rooms and modern museum building, as well as the Peanut Museum and Tifton Welcome Center.

But we never believed that the Agrirama ever reached its true potential. Now that the “Agrirama” is no more and is now ABAC’s “Georgia Museum of Agriculture and Historic Village,” we hope its potential will be met under the college’s supervision.

The past year has been one of transition for the agriculture museum as ABAC began reviewing what it has acquired and what it can do with the site. We have always believed that the “Agrirama” was a diamond in the rough for Tifton and could be marketed much better and include so much more. The museum should take folks through the living history of agriculture’s past and into the 21st century of cutting-edge agricultural techniques and innovations.

ABAC is a forward-thinking institution, and we wait to see what its long-term plans are for the agriculture museum. Its future definitely looks brighter than its past.