Military Heritage Museum

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The museum opened as the Florida Military Heritage Museum in a storefront at Fishermen's Village, on Pearl Harbor Day in 2001. It has since moved into the IMPAC building at 900 West Marion Avenue, a former business training center, and opened there in April 2019. Alongside the exhibits it keeps a library of more than five thousand volumes of military history, technology, biography and personal narrative, which makes it a working research collection as well as a display. Flight simulators and other interactive exhibits are part of what visitors can use. The building runs to seventeen thousand square feet and the collection to more than twenty thousand artifacts. The galleries are arranged by period on the first floor and cover the Revolutionary War through to modern conflicts across all six branches of the service: an eighteenth and nineteenth century gallery, a twentieth century gallery, a twenty-first century gallery and war room, and a hall for special exhibits. A training center runs live presentations and documentaries. Alongside the flight operations simulator there is a virtual reality experience and a smokeless laser range. The cockpit of a Bell UH-1H Huey is open for tours on Saturdays between eleven and one. The museum opens Tuesday through Saturday from ten until four. Admission is charged, with active duty military admitted free and a reduced rate for veterans, and the guides are themselves veterans