Woodlawn Manor Visitor Center

Projecting images onto the old stone walls of the Woodlawn Manor’s stone barn, BPI brought the rich stories of this place to life. Located within a 105-acre historic landscape, the Visitor Center shares the property within the 1815 Woodlawn Manor House and outbuildings.

Listed on the County’s Master Plan for Historic Preservation and on the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, the multimedia exhibits are located throughout three levels of the barn. The programs include audio programs, lighting techniques, and ambient imagery video vignettes. 

The vignettes appear on the barn’s interior, white-washed, stone walls of the middle and upper levels, and tell stories of enslaved, freedom-seeking persons and the free black, Quaker communities in Montgomery County. The exhibition’s center piece is a large scale orientation film projected onto one of the barn’s open walls. The film uses reenactors and local backdrops to provide both sides – the enslaved and the property owners – of this complex local and national story.

All of the AV exhibits and their integration with the architecture, as well as the graphics and casework (by others), were designed and installed with consideration towards sensitivity of the barn’s historic structure and surfaces.