Saving History

effrey Hull is resurrecting the dead. He's standing on the graves of men and women who died a century or so ago, their lives now reduced to minimalist summaries on tombstones. Mrs. E. L. Miller,1828-1914. Gen. Marsena Patrick, 1811-1888. Row after row of shin-high, white markers line the nearby hills. Above Hull, a few clouds spirit across the blue Ohio sky.

Hull muses over Gen. Patrick's lifelong obsession with discipline-the 7,000 veterans under his care at the Dayton Soldiers Home always wore uniforms in public. But the general gave in, near the end of his life, to constant lobbying for a beer hall on campus. It was shut down a few years later, after Congress learned about it.

Hull points to Emma Miller's grave and remarks on her insatiable work ethic. She ran the soldiers home hospital and personally cared for the sick. She simultaneously kept the supply depot humming, overseeing the manufacture of woolen uniforms and the stocking of medical supplies. She even served as innkeeper of the hotel for visitors in her spare time.

In the locked-up, abandoned chapel, the first one ever funded by the federal government, Hull stands at the lectern. There, President Ulysses S. Grant delivered a speech of thanks to the disabled Civil War veterans. Many of them were missing limbs, but, despite their injuries, they built the chapel themselves. Outside, Hull points up to the chapel tower, which houses a bell cast from melted Civil War cannons for a centennial celebration in 1876. The only other such bell is at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

Along the grotto the veterans constructed, now smothered by weeds and ivy slowly pulling it into the earth, Hull describes the veterans who shared community cups at the bubbling natural spring as they tended the home's gardens in the 1880s.

In the years after the Civil War, thousands of veterans made their way to the Dayton Soldiers Home to be cared for by a band of dedicated staffers. Veterans and caregivers lived out their days there, creating the largest soldiers home in the country. Hundreds of thousands of tourists visited the home every year in the late 19th century to meet the men who saved the union, to explore the home's greenhouses and gardens-then some of the most beautiful in the country-and to view the alligators, deer and bears living on the grounds. Visitors came to hear the nightly band performances and to view a Battle of Gettysburg cyclorama-a life-sized, painted diorama with a landscaped foreground that gave visitors the sense that they were in the middle of the famous battle-across the street from the home.

Today, hardly anyone visits the soldiers home, now the Dayton Veterans Affairs Medical Center, unless they're receiving inpatient or, more commonly, outpatient care. Even in the middle of a gorgeous spring day, it is virtually a ghost town. The home's history nearly had disappeared until four years ago, when Hull found old photos, books and records in the home's 123-year-old library. Hull, a pharmacist who now works in administration, began piecing together the home's history. After thousands of hours of research, much of it on his own time, Hull gathered enough information to apply to the National Park Service to make the home a National Historic District.

Hull wants others to learn the stories of Emma Miller and Gen. Patrick, of founder Lewis Gunckel and the home's workers. More than a century ago, when government work was little more than making war and collecting customs, they proved that the federal government could run a complex social service program. "You get to know these people," Hull says. As he tells the stories of the men and women now long gone, Hull is bringing them back to life.

PROGRESS VS. PRESERVATION

Across the country, civil servants like Hull are trying to save history. The past two and a quarter centuries have left thousands of properties with historic significance in the hands of federal agencies. According to the National Park Service, agencies own or manage 5,118 of the 75,241 properties on the National Register of Historic Places. The register is the nation's official roster of sites worth saving. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation is a 50-person independent federal agency charged with monitoring the government's efforts to save history. In 2001, the council estimated that federal agencies own at least 20,000 properties that are designated historic resources and hundreds of thousands of buildings, sites, archaeological resources and other assets of historic significance. Preservationists generally start reviewing the possible historic value of properties when they turn 50, so the inventory grows every year.

Historic properties and the people trying to save them are as varied as federal agencies. Susan Saul, a Fish and Wildlife Service outreach specialist, is educating people about the site of an Indian village in Oregon visited by Lewis and Clark on their famous expedition 200 years ago. Rolando Rivas-Camp, director of the Center for Historic Buildings at the General Services Administration, and his keep 455 historic federal buildings humming and profitable. Doug Stephens is working out of the Forest Service's Denver office to rehabilitate historic ranger stations and dude ranches into rental cottages and activity centers.

Many sites are up against the same challenges that nearly erased the history of the Dayton Soldiers Home. Time eats away at buildings and scatters documents and stories. Neglect exacerbates the effects of time and increases the cost of restoration. Apathy further condemns historic properties. Agencies must focus on their primary missions. Appropriators and administrators are unwilling or unable to invest resources in preservation.

The Veterans Affairs Department, for example, has been criticized for poorly managing properties, historic or not. The VA owns 4,700 buildings; 40 percent are more than 50 years old and 1,600 have historic significance. In 1999, the General Accounting Office estimated the VA was wasting $1 million a day maintaining properties it doesn't use. Many of the properties are historic, but unneeded since the VA now is focused on outpatient rather than inpatient care.

At the Dayton VA Medical Center, the chapel, the old administration building, several barracks, the library and several 1920s duplexes that once made up the soldiers home sit empty. Some of the old buildings have been put to new use. One of the barracks now houses homeless people. Other buildings are just rotting away. The medical center's police force uses the old clubhouse as its headquarters office, but officers want to move into more modern facilities. The group that is providing housing in the barracks wanted to renovate the duplexes into transitional housing as well, but VA headquarters failed to approve the group's plan before its funding deadline passed.

"Preservation responsibilities are not high on the VA's priority list," says Kathryn Higgins, vice president for public policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington-based private nonprofit group that leads the national effort to preserve historic properties. In fact, with GAO and Congress pressuring the VA to reduce its inventory of unused property, the department may simply demolish many of its old buildings. If so, the VA won't be alone.

"By and large, agencies feel they have to comply with the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law," says Higgins. "It's just not the way they think about the world." Federal agencies mirror American culture in tending to value the new over the old. When Americans no longer need a building, they're more likely to tear it down and build a new one than to preserve it.

Preservationists argue that the cost of preserving old buildings is not as high as the cost of losing history. But the cost of preservation can be quantified and the cost of losing history can't, so preservationists often lose. "There's a delicate balance between the need for historic preservation and the need to develop," says Giovanni Coratolo, director of small business policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

ENTER JOHN NAU

John Nau is President Bush's chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Nau says a key problem with preservationists is their image. "Preservationists have a habit of not being heard," says Nau, who also heads the Texas Historical Commission. "We're always saying no and always having our hands out."

Nau intends to change that image on the federal level. By day he is a beer distributor from Houston, and he puts his task as the government's top preservationist in sales lingo. "How do you get preservationists out of this position where they always have their hand out?" Nau asks. His gestures illustrate his answer: "You move from a hand out to a handshake. Both sides have to benefit."

Nau says a good businessman must answer three key questions: What is his product? What is his market? What is his delivery mechanism? A preservationist's product is historic property. The market these days, and in the years to come, is the Baby Boom generation, Americans who are entering their retirement years with the money, time and desire to explore the country and its history.

The method of delivering history to baby boomers varies. A historic property could be a draw in and of itself, but only a few sites, such as the Alamo or the Statue of Liberty, hold that level of attraction. Alternatively a property could be put to new use, as was the 1839 Tariff Building in Washington. The General Services Administration leased it to the Kimpton Boutique Hotels group. Now it's the luxurious Hotel Monaco.

Nau also promotes packaging historic properties and other sites into "heritage trails," lists of attractions that fit into a theme. The Chisholm Trail in Texas, for example, is a collection of sites related to cowboy culture from Brownsville on the Rio Grande to Bowie on the Oklahoma border. A Texas Historical Commission brochure maps out the attractions so tourists can plan their routes. The commission also has put together trails related to Texas independence, frontier forts and the Civil War.

Margaret Kruckemeyer, a nurse at the Dayton facility, is the fund-raiser and promoter for the soldiers home. She is president of the American Veterans Heritage Center, a nonprofit organization based in the old library at the Dayton medical center, which is trying to raise money to save the home's buildings. She has hired a lobbyist to get the Bush administration and Congress to provide funding. In short, Kruckemeyer has her hand out.

But she also envisions a veterans heritage trail with the home site as a key stop, and talks about the trail's benefits to the Dayton-area economy. People already visit Dayton to learn about hometown boys Orville and Wilbur Wright and to see the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Veterans and people interested in their history would stay longer if they had something to visit at the medical center, she suggests.

Nau wants to see more federal officials thinking like Kruckemeyer involved in those kinds of efforts. Nau is widely credited with getting the White House to issue an executive order this spring pressuring agencies to beef up their historic preservation efforts and develop "heritage tourism" initiatives, the current term for history-related travel. The order, which First Lady Laura Bush announced March 3 at a National Association of Counties meeting in Washington, also requires agencies to inventory their historic properties and lay out the steps planned to improve them and the possibilities for economic development and heritage tourism. It also calls on agency leaders to attend to historic preservation. And it requires agencies to come up with ways to work with outside groups to draw visitors to historic properties.

LITTLE CABINS IN THE WOODS

Outside groups can be a source of funding, as Doug Stephens has discovered in attempting to save thousands of old ranger stations, ranches, lookout towers and other structures on the Forest Service's 191 million acres.

Stephens works for Recreation Solutions, a fee-for-service office at the Forest Service that sells its services to forest managers across the country. Stephens found that forest managers just don't have the money to rehabilitate unused, neglected structures. So he teamed up with a nonprofit group, the Rocky Mountain Heritage Society Partnership in Estes Park, Colo., which raises money to renovate the service's historic buildings.

For years, skunks and foxes were the main residents of the two-room Grizzly Creek Guard Station in Colorado's Medicine Bow-Routt National Forests. Like thousands of Forest Service ranger stations built in the first half of the 20th century, the Grizzly Creek building was falling apart, its roof and stone stoop crumbling. The heritage society got money together through private donations to save the station.

Today, you can rent the station for a weekend getaway for $55 a night. It sleeps five and has a propane heater, a stove and refrigerator. Stephens uses the rental fees to maintain the 81-year-old structure. "Our main mission is historic preservation," Stephens says. "But we're taking a business approach to it." Stephens says some properties are worth preserving even if they have no commercial value, such as a ghost town on the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming that helps tell the story of the gold mining industry. Stephens' office attempts to manage forest properties so those that bring in extra funds subsidize those that don't generate revenue.

Another property with no commercial value is an abandoned village on the Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Chinook Indians lived there for 350 years. Lewis and Clark visited in 1806. Within a few decades, disease had decimated the population and the Chinooks had abandoned the village. The village has largely vanished, but the local Friends of Ridgefield volunteer group has taken on the job of preserving its story. Using information unearthed by archeologists and others, the group is building a replica plank house, which is a tennis-court-length, one-floor structure built of cedar that Chinook families used to live in. They hope to finish it before the 200-year anniversary of Lewis and Clark's visit. The group has raised $200,000 of the $500,000 needed for the project.

INTANGIBLE REWARDS

Stories such as those of Doug Stephens, the Chinook site, and the Dayton VA Medical Center show that in pockets across government, people are taking historic preservation seriously. The new executive order is aimed at drumming up attention among agency leaders by requiring regular reports to the president on preservation progress.

The order puts teeth in the preservation duties spelled out in the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. In small agencies and field offices, historic preservation is an extra duty for people with many other jobs. They don't get much training. They tend to be in the middle ranks of the bureaucracy, lacking the clout to make key asset management decisions. And there isn't much reward for raising historic preservation concerns that slow other projects down.

"They need a lot more support than they're getting," says Connie Ramirez, director of the three-person Federal Preservation Institute at the National Park Service. Ramirez has been a preservation advocate at several federal agencies, including the Army and GSA. At GSA a few years ago, Ramirez complained that the Park Service wasn't doing enough to help preservationists in the government. So the Park Service hired her to start up the institute. It runs a monthly training program for preservationists in Washington and is putting up a Web site. "No agency has historic preservation as its primary mission but every agency has historic preservation as one of its missions," Ramirez says.

There's also intangible motivation behind preservation efforts. Jeffrey Hull is essentially the historian for the Dayton VA Medical Center, but it's not his official job. Still, he has locked up a lot of old photographs, books and other items for safekeeping, scrounged eBay for items from the Dayton Soldiers Home, and gathered materials about the soldiers home from the Library of Congress. He also put together a Web site that tells the story of the home (www.dayton.med.va.gov/museum). But it's the story in a single picture that keeps Hull digging in the home's past.

Shortly after Hull began investigating the history of the soldiers home, he came across a photograph showing uniformed veterans lined up in front of their barracks in formation. On an archway over the road in front of the veterans, an inscription spells out in flowers "Welcome, Mary Lowell Putnam, our friend and benefactress." A woman sits in a horse-drawn carriage along the road. The picture stuck in Hull's mind.

Over time, Hull learned the story of Mary Lowell Putnam. Putnam's son was killed in one of the earliest battles of the Civil War. After the war ended, she wanted to commemorate her son in a way that would help surviving union soldiers. So she started sending books and pictures to the Dayton Soldiers Home to help educate the veterans. By 1872, the library had 100 pictures and 2,000 books.

Hull continued to wonder about the photograph. Then he came upon a reprint of a local newspaper article from 1872. It explained that in 1872, Putnam traveled from her home in Massachusetts to visit the Dayton Soldiers Home for the Fourth of July celebration. A welcoming ceremony had been arranged. Hull read that the band played "Hail to the Chief." At one point, Putnam proceeded past the veterans in her carriage and turned right. Hull came to the following passage in the article: "Here there was a short halt, when Bunker, the photographer, on the roof of the veranda of the library building, took a picture of the scene embracing the arch, the barracks, the veterans in line and the thousands of spectators."

Hull had the picture. And now he knew when it was taken and why. That moment has stuck with him. It's the kind of moment that motivates people like Hull to take on preservation when their agencies provide no real incentive to do so. "You're piecing together things that no one knows," Hull says. "For a while, you're the only one on Earth who knows this information. You have a desire to get it out and let people know."