Exclusive: Inside the Army Museum Support Center for a peak at the rare stuff (PHOTOS)

By Chris Eger

This vintage 1864-made cartridge conversion Springfield has been Army property since the Lincoln Administration and is one of 13,000 historic small arms in storage at Anniston. (Photos: Chris Eger/Guns.com)
We recently had the chance to tour U.S. Army’s Museum Support Center at Anniston Army Depot, the keepers of the flame for military history in the country.
The 15,200-acre installation in North Alabama was established in World War II and overhauls both small arms and vehicles for the Army. A longstanding tenant on the sprawling base, based out of Building 201, is the Museum Support Center, operated by the Center of Military History. The CMH maintains an immense collection of 650,000 historic items across 228 sites including 57 large museums that are a part of the Army Museum Enterprise. Items not yet on display, waiting for a public home, or are excess to current museum needs are stored in the “Army’s attic” in Anniston.
Once relegated to a more primitive existence, the Anniston operation started in the 1980s when the Army moved its museum storage there from Pueblo, Colorado. Until 2012, the center had only four employees to manage a collection that looked like the warehouse scene from Indiana Jones.
That’s been changing as Army

Source: Guns.com