Monday March 20, 2023
COMMENTARY: Historic Preservation, or Appreciation? | OBSERVED: Ireland over Fredericksburg | PUBLICATION
COMMENTARY: Historic Preservation, or Appreciation?
by: Martin Davis
At the last Fredericksburg City Council meeting, preservation was on the agenda, both formally and informally. The future of the Renwick Courthouse was officially on the agenda. But over the course of the evening, there was also robust discussion about street names and a steam engine.
The ensuing discussions revealed the difficulties with the way we talk about preservation.
It’s not just that we’re struggling to figure out what to preserve, however, that is bothering me about our debates. Rather, it’s the growing realization that our debates about historic preservation - which by definition involve a place, a space, or an artifact of intrinsic historic interest - aren’t capturing the pressing need to tell our area’s full history,
Most in the city, for example, would agree that Renwick is a notable structure that deserves protecting, if for no other reason than its beauty. But how? As a public-private partnership? Do we allow commercial development within it? Do we preserve it as-is?
As for the large steam engine currently sitting at Quantico - it’s a piece of our past, sure, but do we need to lug it down here and find a home for it? Count me skeptical. Just as surely, there are those who can’t imagine telling our city’s story without it.
Conversely, when it comes to street names, from where I sit it’s hard to imagine anyone being upset about changing streets named after Confederate generals who led an insurrection against the nation for the express purpose of preserving slavery. But some very smart folks whom I respect are unabashed that changing those names is changing our history.
Who’s right and wrong? And who gets to decide what stays and what goes?
Those two sets questions have led to some head-scratching decisions across the country.
An article last May in The Atlantic pointed out the many contradictory ways we have answered those questions over the years. From the article:
In Los Angeles, the iconic Brown Derby restaurant is gone, but a Chevron station in Brentwood is on the city’s list of “historical-cultural monuments.” Washington, D.C.’s infamous Yellow House—a focal point of the city’s early-19th-century slave trade—was lost generations ago, but a strip mall and its parking lot a few miles away are landmarked. New York City, which has long had a particularly assertive preservation movement, has roughly 30,000 lots situated within historic districts today. Most of these buildings are of little inherent importance on their own but are considered by the LPC to be significant because of the way they relate to one another—and can remain so only if all are protected en masse.
It’s not just that we’re struggling to figure out what to preserve, however, that is bothering me about our debates. Rather, it’s the growing realization that our debates about historic preservation - which by definition involve a place, a space, or an artifact of intrinsic historic interest - aren’t capturing the pressing need to tell our area’s full history.
Our debates are impassioned and often intense because what remains from our history is limited. And so the struggle to preserve everything grows in intensity with each passing year.
As a number of advocates of preservation in Fredericksburg have told me over the years, once a building is gone, it’s gone forever. We can’t bring it back. Translation - with very few exceptions, we have to save our old structures.
It’s true that once a physical artifact like a building is gone we can’t recover it. But it’s also true that we’ve already lost so much of our history that the effort to preserve what we have is inadvertently distorting our understanding of ourselves, and our collective past.
Perhaps the key to effective preservation is to take our focus off the buildings and artifacts that remain, and work harder to fill the holes in our knowledge and tell the fuller story of who we are and what our past was for all of us.
Chatham Manor and All It Doesn’t Show
Chatham Manor is arguably our area’s greatest historical asset.
It’s also a perfect example of how preservation distorts our story.
Perhaps the key to effective preservation is to take our focus off the buildings and artifacts that remain, and work harder to fill the holes in our knowledge and tell the fuller story of who we are and what our past was for all of us.
Both the house and the grounds are without question among the most stunning in the area. They’re a favorite spot for artists, who can set up their cameras and easels to capture the skyline and river.
As an informational sign near the main walkway to the building notes, it is a place that was frequented by some of America’s most iconic names - Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Barton, and Whitman. It is also a place that reveals, according to the sign:
… the full breadth of Southern history: its rise on the foundation of slavery, its ruin during the turbulent years of the Civil War, and its rebirth in the 1900s. Chatham is not merely the story of a Southern house, but of American culture - sometimes cruel and unjust, sometimes noble and refined, but always interesting.
But search for evidence of the plantation’s “full breadth” and you’ll struggle to find them. This is not an indictment of the National Park Service, which continues to strive to tell the history of enslaved people where it can; rather, it’s the reality of how American history has not simply ignored that of enslaved peoples and Black Americans, but has actively worked to ensure that future generations not know the truth of the horrors the enslaved endured.
One sign board, whether intentionally or not, makes this point with stunning clarity (and I do apologize for the photograph - clearly, I’m not a photographer and didn’t realize until I got home that I captured a shadow silhouette of myself in my shot).
The description (with emphasis added by me) of the drawing reports:
A 1798 painting of enslaved people working under the gaze of an overseer near Fredericksburg. This is the only known image of Fredericksburg-area slaves at work. They are clearing a field for cultivation.
Again, for emphasis:
“… the only known image of Fredericksburg-area slaves at work.”
There are also no surviving slave cabins at Chatham. In fact, scanning the landscape, one would be hard pressed to visualize the hundreds of enslaved people who lived and toiled on this land.
And this begins to expose the problem.
History is complex, filled with holes, and the story cannot be told in a straight line. Demanding that everyone rely on “facts” is of little help, because the traditional sources for those facts (buildings, artifacts, writings) for many, many people no longer exist, or are in such limited supply that tantalize more than clarify.
When we talk about historic preservation and focus on buildings and tangible objects, we are by default starting with a grossly distorted playing field. A playing field overwhelmingly controlled by Europeans and the powerful.
Searching for Flexibility
Every day, Gaila Sims lives with the reality of how distorted our understanding of the past is.
She lives near the entrance to Chatham Manor, and regularly walks her dog on the grounds.
“Every day,” she tells F2S, “I think about those enslaved people who lived and toiled here. I realize that I am walking on the same land they walked.” And she thinks about how little of their history actually remains. Not just the horrors they endured, but what they built.
Despite it all, she said, “they raised families and made lives as best they could” under the circumstances they lived with.
Not only have we lost tangible evidence of these people and the terror they lived under, but we’ve lost tangible evidence of the power of enslaved people to survive and live lives to the fullest extent they were able. We’ve lost arguably the greatest story of human survival in U.S. history.
Sims is uniquely sensitized to what is lost. She is a Black woman, and she is the Fredericksburg Area Museum’s curator of African American History and Special Projects.
Recovering Black stories and making sure we understand them is critically important to Sims. And in her job she leans on “flexibility” to fill in the gaps that have been lost.
“I lead walking tours, write, and collect stories” to ensure that we are preserving the past that lacks for physical evidence, she said.
And it is this observation - the need for flexibility - that seems to be missing from much of our discussion about historic preservation.
Historic preservation can’t just be about saving buildings and artifacts.
It must be a broader discussion of whose stories are being told and whose aren’t; how we’re going to recover and tell those stories with the limited information that we have; and how we weight them in our ongoing effort to tell the totality of the American story.
In short, we need less historic preservation, and more historic appreciation.
That Special Sauce
Telling the totality of Fredericksburg’s story isn’t going to make decisions about what we do with the Renwick Courthouse, or whether hauling a steam engine down here is worth the city’s efforts and the costs it would take to preserve it once displayed, any easier.
But it will ensure that no matter what decisions are made regarding the physical structures that preservationists have to work with, the totality of the city’s people and where it’s headed will be fuller and more complete for the coming generations. And it will set the precedent for how the city deals with the problems it’s going to face regarding density, housing, and what we can and can’t save.
Jon Gerlach, when talking about how the city walks this tightrope, often talks about the “special sauce” that makes this city so special.
Perhaps the special sauce that makes Fredericksburg what it is lies not in any of the buildings or artifacts that we hold.
Rather, that sauce lies in the discussions that we have about our past, and the debates we have about what we can save, and how to honor the stories of those whose history has - whether intentionally or through neglect - lost its physical evidence.
A great example of this is how the city handled the auction block. Not everyone is happy with the decision to place it in a museum, but few would argue that the city is certainly better informed about the block, about the people sold from it, and about what it says about our past and our future.
In that way, the auction block is a pristine example of what effective historic preservation looks like. We save what we can, in a way that tells a fuller story, and we make the city collectively smarter about our past along the way.
A century from now, Fredericksburg will be a very different city. Growth, changing populations, economic realities we can see and we can’t see coming, all guarantee that were we to walk down the streets of the historic district in 2123 we would probably recognize a few things, but not many others.
It’s inevitable.
And we shouldn’t look at it as a catastrophic loss.
For there are historic artifacts and buildings we should preserve. But there is a great deal of history still to be discovered and discussed. Moreover, we must allow space for future generations to preserve what matters to them, too.
Ultimately, the special sauce that is Fredericksburg isn’t found in what we can touch, but in the rich discussion about our past, and our future, that the artifacts we have, create.
OBSERVED
Look up, look down, look around. One never knows what they’ll see walking down Fredericksburg’s city streets. Friday, of course, was St. Patrick’s Day. But on Sunday, evidence of the city’s Emerald Isle spirit was still on display as the flags of some of Ireland’s cities were on display. A couple of quick calls didn’t surface the leprechaun behind the hoisting. So if you know, or were responsible, let us know.
PUBLICATION
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You have hit on the great gap in our local historic preservation effort. There is inadequate research and writing being done. As an example, the new Civil Rights Trail, recently released with great fanfare, has basic errors, not in the oral histories but in other details about local buildings and people. That should not be acceptable. We have also lost buildings because of misunderstandings about their significance. I have said for years that what is old is not necessarily historic and what is historic is not necessarily old. A robust discussion is needed that includes more than those folks who think they know everything about preservation. Cute and quaint ought not to be a guiding force.
Dr. Gaila Sims will speak about FAM's new slave auction block exhibit during the Virginia Professional Communicators' spring conference on May 5 at the Fredericksburg branch of the Central Rappahannock Regional Library. The luncheon speaker will be Kristin Green, who will speak about her new book, "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave Jail." Members and nonmembers can attend. https://vapc.org/vapc/vpc-spring-conference-will-push-boundaries/