On April 11, 1799, one day before his twenty-second birthday, a promising young Kentucky lawyer named Henry Clay was married to Lucretia Hart, the daughter of Colonel Thomas Hart, a well-to-do pioneer Lexington merchant. The wedding took place at the home of the bride’s family, a substantial two-story brick house of some twelve rooms, which sat at the southwest corner of Second and Mill streets in the young city.
After Colonel Hart’s death several years later, his son, Thomas Jr., sold the house to John Bradford, who in 1787, with his brother, Fielding, had established the Kentucky Gazette, the first newspaper to be published west of the Alleghenies. In 1789 John Bradford had also published Thomas Johnson’s Kentucky Miscellany, the first book of a literary nature to come from a Kentucky press. One of the founders of the Lexington Public Library, in 1795, this early-day leading citizen published a number of other notable works in his long career, including a book that later became extremely rare and a coveted item among bibliophiles, Narrative of the Life and Travels of John Robert Shaw, the Well-Digger. Bradford lived in the house until his death in 1830.
Sitting diagonally across Second Street from Gratz Park, the “Bradford house,” as it was often called, belonged to what became Lexington’s most fashionable neighborhood. In 1848, the house served as the setting for a second wedding of special interest, when a young man who, like Henry Clay, would also rise to national prominence, John Hunt Morgan, was married to Rebecca Gratz Bruce. Still later, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, divorced wife of the combative emancipationist Cassius Marcellus Clay, moved into the Bradford house, accompanied by her daughter Laura, a controversial figure in her own right as one of the leading voices in the national women’s rights movement.
By the 1950s the house was possibly the oldest, as well as one of the most storied, of the eighteenth-century houses still standing in Lexington. And then, one day in March 1955, it was gone.
No one in the 1950s could summon much surprise at the sight of a property owner demolishing a 1792 house to make way for a parking lot. That was what governments were doing, too, and on a much larger scale, leveling whole neighborhoods and districts for slum clearance or, as it had come to be more euphemistically called, urban renewal. But this time, the destruction of this single house did not pass unnoticed by all Lexingtonians. Concerned residents of the Gratz Park neighborhood, in particular, suddenly wondered what might happen to the house directly across Second Street from the Bradford house. Once the finest of all the elegant residences on Gratz Park, but now divided into apartments and up for sale, this house had been built in 1814 for John Wesley Hunt, possibly the first Kentuckian who could be considered a genuine tycoon, with his extensive mercantile (including the making and marketing of hemp products), banking, and horse-breeding interests; his wife was Francis Scott Key’s cousin. The home’s graceful spiraling staircase led many to attribute the design of Hopemont, as the house was called, to the noted architect Benjamin Latrobe.
Later, Hunt’s grandson and namesake, the ubiquitous John Hunt Morgan, had occupied this house, and still later his great-grandson Thomas Hunt Morgan, the eminent geneticist who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1933, had lived there. Something must be done; the house must be saved—otherwise, one day soon, the town might wake up to discover that its past had simply vanished, turned into parking lots. That was the feeling.
Perhaps there was something new in the air in 1955, in Lexington and in other cities. Just that same year, after seeing the venerable City Market demolished to make way for a parking garage, citizens of Savannah were organizing to stop the razing of a handsome 1821 brick structure, the Isaiah Davenport house. It was not that the developers saw no value in the old house. Quite to the contrary: they planned, after disassembling the building, to sell the bricks while they were proceeding to convert the site into still another parking lot. The people of Savannah had already acquired a good deal of experience in battling traffic experts, road builders, and other interests that sought, sometimes successfully, to dig up and demolish the city’s famous and distinctive old squares in order to replace them with boulevards. Now, responding to what one preservationist later called “blatant destruction of a part of the fabric of the city,” community leaders went about establishing a private, nonprofit corporation, the Historic Savannah Foundation, with the first aim of saving the Davenport house.
Could Lexington undertake the same kind of preservation?
Even the term “historic preservation” did not enjoy wide use in the 1950s; no full-length book on the subject had yet been published in the United States. As for preservation itself, carried out for whatever purposes—ideological, aesthetic, archaeological, commercial—it had followed a tortuous, up-and-down course in American history. There was never anything automatic about it; people often seemed to believe that for Americans the past and its symbols should hold little importance and only the future counted.
As far back as 1816, concerned citizens in Philadelphia had been forced to organize to keep the state government from tearing down Independence Hall and selling this valuable downtown property to developers. Before the city government intervened to buy the building from the state, two wings of the building were gone and the woodwork had been stripped from the room in which John Hancock and his fellow rebels signed the Declaration of Independence. The familiar tower that has long identified the building dates from 1828, not from the Revolutionary era, and thus provides an example of historic restoration (not preservation, because nothing remained of the original tower; having deteriorated badly, it had been removed almost thirty years earlier).
In 1853, to block a group of businessmen who wanted to buy Mount Vernon and turn it into a hotel with great water views, the governor of Virginia asked the heir living in the house, John Augustine Washington Jr., the president’s great-grandnephew, to sell the property to the state. Since Washington lacked the money to maintain the buildings and grounds himself, he strongly favored this proposal, but he tagged the estate with a hefty price—$200,000 in 1850s dollars. Not putting such a high value even on this symbol of patriotism, the state legislature and the federal government both refused to fund the project. A South Carolina woman who had seen Mount Vernon from the deck of a riverboat wrote to her daughter that she was “painfully distressed at the ruin and desolation of the home of Washington.” She continued, “Why was it that the women of his country did not try to keep it in repair if the men could not do it? It seems such a blot on our country.” Very well, said the daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham, who responded to this brief but pioneering preservationist manifesto by organizing the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, which took up the cause. Within only five years, after conducting a national campaign, the group had raised the needed money and had managed to come to terms with the somewhat contentious Washington; the ladies and their successors have owned Mount Vernon ever since. Late in her life Ann Cunningham made her own addition to the slowly developing preservationist creed: Washington’s home should remain as close to his time as possible, she declared, saying, “Let one spot in this grand country of ours be spared from change.” The successful effort to save Mount Vernon established a trend that has proved permanently true of preservation efforts—the assumption of leadership roles by women. It also seemed to say that preservation is an activity in which private citizens, not government, should take the lead.
Unfortunately for those who hoped that George Washington’s legacy could serve as a national rallying point amid the tremors of approaching civil war, this success at Mount Vernon came too late. Even so, by saving this private house for public purposes the association had created a precedent or model, though one fated often to be ignored for more than a century. (It is also worth noting that among the casualties of the Civil War was John Hancock’s birthplace in Braintree, Massachusetts, which, as land values rose, found no group to save it from developers. Another war casualty was John Washington himself, who died in combat fighting for the Confederacy.)
In the ensuing decades, groups sprang up across the country on the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association model, buying and restoring houses that had been occupied by leading patriots. Michael Wallace, a self-styled radical historian, sourly observed that “these projects enabled the elite to associate themselves and their class with the virtuous and glorious dead.” These efforts also had the effect of bestowing permanent popularity on eighteenth-century architecture; Professor Wallace saw this as promotion of a “class aesthetic” favoring buildings “hallowed by association with the entire pre-immigrant social order.” In 1900, looking at the point from a slightly different angle, a Mount Vernon officer had considered the involvement of children with historic sites and characters a help in “the making of good citizens of these many foreign youths.” Either view—either emphasis, perhaps—makes it clear that preservationists during the second half of the nineteenth century acted primarily from ideological and social motives rather than out of aesthetic concerns. But architecture slowly began to take its place as a second consideration, so that a building might be considered worthy of being preserved even if nobody famous had ever lived in it.
In addition to individual houses, another piece of the past engaged the attention of certain prominent preservationists—the Early American village, whether artificially assembled or resurrected in place. These projects, far too large to be carried off or even conceived by the usual citizen groups, were the work of millionaires and billionaires. The two greatest of these, which offer an instructive contrast, both came out of the 1920s.
Henry Ford brought together buildings from across the country—stores, an inn, a courthouse, a windmill, Thomas Edison’s laboratory, and various others—for his personal monument to nostalgia, Greenfield Village, outside of Detroit. “Greenfield Village,” observed one writer, “where Ford . . . embalmed American life as it was before the Model T.” The car mogul himself considered the village an “animated textbook” to be used for teaching like any other schoolbook. Ford’s creation represented a sort of pre–Disney World, except that the buildings were real, not copies, even though they had been brought from their original locations to Michigan. Preservationists have since classified Greenfield Village as an “outdoor museum,” though they professionally deplore the moving of buildings from their original sites.
In Virginia, John D. Rockefeller Jr. created what continues to be the most famous of such town museums—as familiar to us, one writer said, as Niagara Falls or the Washington Monument—when he waved his golden wand over the sleepy and shabby pre-Revolutionary capital of Virginia to create Colonial Williamsburg. In the mid-1920s a mixture of buildings from four centuries stretched along both sides of the town’s business artery, Duke of Gloucester Street, many of them in one or another stage of dilapidation. A decade or so earlier, the Richmond Times-Dispatch had enjoyed a good laugh at Williamsburg’s expense when the city council refused to appropriate any money to have the municipal clock wound. Calling the town a “Lotus land,” the newspaper said that the “Lotusburgers” had found a simple way to solve all their problems by stopping the clock. Nevertheless, Williamsburg, when the Rockefeller project began, was a lived-in, functioning town, with gas stations, laundries, and other modern (if unappealing) buildings mixed in with the survivors from earlier centuries.
In the astounding new project, workers demolished more than 700 buildings that had been built after the eighteenth century, restored 83 survivors of that century, and reconstructed 430 others of which nothing remained, putting up most of them on their original foundations. Rockefeller arranged for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad to take its distracting twentieth-century operations out of town, and his workmen went even further, uprooting the local Confederate (hence, inescapably, nineteenth-century) monument from its natural place on the Palace Green and carrying it off to an obscure side street, to the vocal distress of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, already deeply disturbed over the force and scope of this new Yankee invasion. The Williamsburg corporation also made sure of its aesthetic security by buying up some 3,000 acres of land to create a buffer zone around the 130-acre core.
All of these actions took place within the framework devised by the project’s teams of architects, archaeologists, and historians, who had the mission of leading the way back to the eighteenth century. Overall, said Rockefeller, he had sought “an opportunity to restore a complete area and free it entirely from alien or inharmonious surroundings.” In 1931 a twenty-five-year-old native of Midway, Kentucky, James Cogar, fresh from studies at Yale, took up a task for which little precedent existed—he was given the remarkable opportunity to become the first curator of Colonial Williamsburg, then just three years away from its opening in 1934. “They had no notion of what a curator was,” he said, “and I had less. We learned it together.”
Cogar proved to be a notably good learner, and his reputation grew with the acclaim Williamsburg received and the popularity it won. Mastering his trade as he went, he paved the way along an untrod path so well that he began setting national standards in historic eighteenth-century interiors, demanding perfection, always striving to render a building or a room as it had originally been. At one point during his curatorship, he had responsibility at Williamsburg for the hostesses, the craft shops, the costume shop, and flower arranging in addition to the collections. When he resigned his position in 1948, Cogar had earned recognition as one of the country’s leading experts in eighteenth-century furniture and furnishings. As an official publication of Colonial Williamsburg summed up his work, his “dedication, taste, and perception resulted in contributions that were invaluable.”
American Heritage would title a 1960 article on Williamsburg “The Town That Stopped the Clock”; in fact, the town had done much more than that. It had parsimoniously stopped time back in 1913, and in the late 1920s and early 1930s had gone much further, turning the clock back for perhaps a century and a half, creating a remarkable time bubble that would become the showplace of twentieth-century preservation. Although generally admiring the results of these gargantuan labors, the author of the American Heritage article, a New York Times correspondent who was himself a native of Williamsburg, had one caveat, expressing some perturbation at the “aseptic implausibility of so much fresh paint and polished brass and tidy lawns and prim table settings.” Professor Wallace dismissed Colonial Williamsburg as a town with no dirt and no smell. How could that be called history?
After the establishment of the British National Trust in 1895, representatives had crossed the Atlantic to see whether they might help the Americans set up a similar organization for preserving historic buildings, but the visitors soon concluded that their hopes were premature. In the ensuing years, specific groups like the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation ably served their individual purposes, and the National Park Service oversaw such properties as Independence Hall and the Franklin D. Roosevelt home at Hyde Park. In addition, regional groups such as the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities flourished, and several cities—Charleston, South Carolina, the pioneer, and New Orleans and Annapolis—had adopted ordinances mandating preservation. But not until half a century after the British preservationist missionaries had come and gone had the picture in the United States changed enough for Americans to begin discussing the need to create a broadly based national, private organization, an adaptation of the British National Trust, that could knit together the work of widely scattered preservationists, take title to historic properties, and mobilize citizens in defense of the past.
The first phase came in April 1947 with the establishment of the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings, under the leadership of Ronald F. Lee of the National Park Service, the agency that in many ways acted as the godfather of the movement; David E. Finley, a Washington figure whose importance was only partially suggested by his position as director of the National Gallery of Art; and George McAneny of New York, president of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, which, despite its sweeping name, had been founded for the specific purpose of saving row houses on Washington Square in Manhattan. This new council gave itself the assignment of establishing an American national trust, and it acquired its first staff member in August 1948 when the National Park Service provided Frederick L. Rath Jr., a young historian from Dartmouth and Harvard then working at the recently opened FDR home site, on loan as executive secretary.
As it happened, Betty Walsh, a recent graduate in history from the University of Kentucky, had just come to Washington with the aim going to work for the National Park Service as a historian. She also had thoughts about going overseas in an army job, but “that was when the Berlin airlift was starting,” she said, and “my mother had other ideas.” At the Park Service she encountered Fred Rath, who offered her a job: “He was looking for a secretary to set up a new organization called the National Trust for Historic Preservation.” Amused at the memory, Betty Walsh said, “I always told Fred that he hired me because I knew half as much as he did, and he didn’t know very much. He didn’t want a smart-alec type of Washington secretary.” But in the lively Betty Walsh he certainly had not acquired a restrained and submissive associate, either.
Working from an office on an upper floor of the building that housed Ford’s Theatre, one of America’s most historic sites, this new team, with the support of board members of the national council, worked on developing a budget, gathering support from foundations, and preparing a proposed bill to submit to Congress for a charter for the proposed trust. The bill won the strong endorsement of the New York Times, which declared in one of its four supporting editorials that “these are days when, more than ever before, we need the inspiration of the past as we advance into a troubled future.” The measure moved briskly through the House of Representatives and, passed by the Senate after some procedural delay, was signed by President Harry Truman on October 26, 1949.
The temporary hold-up in the Senate certainly had nothing to do with money, since the preservationists had not sought federal financial support and the bill explicitly ruled it out. This charter by Congress blessed the National Trust for Historic Preservation with status as a quasi-governmental entity and thus gave high-level recognition to the dawning of a new day in the United States for preservation. Presumably the National Trust could proceed to raise its own money through attracting private support, just as the National Gallery of Art had attracted collections worth tens of millions of dollars and had raised sustaining dollars as well. The preservationists in Washington were to find, however—as a group of preservation-minded Kentuckians would discover not many years later—that the story would not be so simple: art and preservation were different philanthropic animals, with different kinds of appeal and different dynamics. More important in the long run, however, historic preservation had now arrived on the national scene.
But preservation would not have this scene to itself. In the 1930s, a New Deal program inaugurated by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, had found useful work for more than a thousand unemployed architects in surveying and recording in photographs and detailed drawings all the “historic” buildings in the country—more than six thousand of them. In the late 1940s and through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, however, a powerful countercurrent would obliterate much of the national legacy that engaged the attention of preservationists and local historians—including, by 1966, the destruction of more than half the buildings that appeared in the 1930s surveys. Twin streams fed this countercurrent—slum clearance and highway construction. As one historian put it, “Developers rammed roads through cities, demolishing whole areas; urban renewal then devastated much of the remaining landscape.” To another commentator, “Clean-the-slate urban planning sought to erase the burden of the past.” In the mid-1950s, this slash-and-burn approach to reviving cities gained great impetus from the passage of a federal highway act under which a gasoline tax would provide the funding for the creation of the Interstate Highway System. An urban historian declared: “Though transportation had been the most powerful force throughout American history in shaping the development of cities and concentrating greater proportions of the population in urban areas, vast sums of money were now going to be spent on a highway program related neither to a national urban policy nor a comprehensive transportation program.”
Thus in the mid-1950s the federal government looked benignly on the slowly developing movement to preserve historic, culturally valued, or simply well-loved places and buildings from the American past. But the actual federal dollars were going elsewhere, funding forces and agencies that, in the name of building, were dismantling much of the material manifestation of that past. The new citizen preservationists, it appeared, would have to look elsewhere to fund their dreams.