Bills owner Ralph Wilson was on hand this morning in Canton for the dedication of the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s new Ralph Wilson, Jr. Pro Football Research and Preservation Center with a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony.
The 10,000-square-foot Center is named in honor of Wilson, a member of the Hall of Fame and founder of the Buffalo Bills, whose gift of $2.5 million dollars made the state-of-the-art facility possible.
The Ralph Wilson, Jr. Pro Football Research and Preservation Center will house and preserve the more than 20 million document pages and 3 million photographic images in the Hall of Fame’s collection.
The addition of the new Center also allows the Hall of Fame to renovate the space that previously housed the document collection and the three-dimensional artifact collection. The retrofitted space will then exclusively accommodate the ever-growing artifact collection.
“Ralph Wilson’s outstanding contributions to pro football over many decades are legendary,” stated Steve Perry, president/executive director of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. “His generous gift has greatly enhanced our ability to preserve the Hall of Fame’s rapidly growing collection of historic documents and artifacts.”
Stay tuned to Buffalobills.com for more on this story including video footage of the dedication.
