American Civil War Museum — Historic Tredegar

Built inside the surviving buildings of the Tredegar Iron Works, the foundry that produced roughly half of the Confederacy's artillery and was one of the largest ironworks in the country before the war. The setting does a lot of the work — brick ruins, the James River rapids directly outside, and the remains of the canal system that fed the site.

The museum was formed by merging the old Museum of the Confederacy with the American Civil War Center, and its organising idea is to tell the war from three perspectives at once: Union, Confederate and African American. Exhibits run chronologically through a large permanent gallery, with heavy use of original artifacts — uniforms, weapons, the sword Lee carried at Appomattox — alongside personal accounts from enslaved and free Black Virginians.

Practical: allow around two hours; open daily, ticketed, with parking on site validated for a few hours. The adjacent Civil War Visitor Center run by the National Park Service is free and covers the Richmond battlefields. Belle Isle and the Brown's Island canal walk are a short stroll away.