Page Title
News Archives
No, Not Yet: Keep Confederate White House Where It Historically Has Stood
BRYAN GREEN
TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Sunday, August 28, 2005
At a General Assembly hearing last month, Waite Rawls, executive director of the Museum of the Confederacy [whose remarks appear at left], cited a recently published article in the Virginia Department of Historic Resources' Notes on Virginia, which argued that moving historic buildings should be undertaken only as a last resort. Rawls asked if the White House of the Confederacy should be moved. After outlining three possible scenarios, he concluded moving the venerable White House of the Confederacy was the only solution, that it was, in fact, the last and only remaining resort.
As the author of the study cited, I would like to respond to this argument. When is a last resort really a last resort?
Most historic buildings -- including virtually all historic masonry buildings are disassembled and moved in pieces. It is rare and difficult for a substantial masonry building such as the White House of the Confederacy to be moved as a single unit. All too often, moves result in what is essentially a new building containing elements of the old.
Richmond's Maupin-Maury House is an unfortunate example. The historic structure, then listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, was moved across Clay Street, out of the path of a planned MCV expansion. While initial planning called for the building to be moved as a unit, the result was essentially a new building with some salvaged interiors. Consequently, the building was removed from the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places in 1993, a rare act that underscores the serious and unfortunate results of moving the Maupin-Maury House.
White House Will Lose Status
For the White House of the Confederacy, there is also the nearly certain elimination of its venerable National Historic Landmark status, the threat of removal from the National Register of Historic Places, rendering the diminished historic resource ineligible for many preservation incentive programs such as rehabilitation tax credits and Save America's Treasures grants. Relocating historic buildings seems, in historical perspective, only a temporary solution. Moving historic buildings should be viewed as the very last resort, done only when preservation in place is simply not possible.
This said, the plight of the White House of the Confederacy is significant. The expansion of MCV (the VCU Medical Center) has created a situation in which the White House of the Confederacy is now surrounded by substantial structures dwarfing and isolating the residence from the rest of Court End. As Rawls succinctly summarized, "We are simply in their way, and their expansion is simply in our way."
The Commonwealth should acknowledge that one of the unintended effects of the success of one of its agencies the VCU Medical Center -- has unduly burdened the museum. The state could offer to subsidize the museum for the loss in its visitation for an agreed-upon period. At the end of that period, the agreement could be re-evaluated for fairness.
Re-Evaluating Hospital Expansion
Some might argue, however, that for the Commonwealth to underwrite the day-to-day operations of the museum would be tantamount to supporting a political position unacceptable to Virginia's African-Americans. Perhaps as part of the solution, the Commonwealth should agree to set up a fund that would support, in equal measure, initiatives in African-American history of the Civil War era and Reconstruction, including the excavation, documentation, and story-telling of Lumpkin's Jail, a notorious slave jail that later was used as a school for former slaves -- the forerunner of Virginia Union University.
The solution also should include a re-evaluation of the VCU Medical Center's expansion down historic Clay Street. All of Court End is threatened by unabated expansion, and the removal of the White House of the Confederacy would not only cripple a telling of its own history, it would hobble the telling of the history of Court End. While there is still time to save historic Clay Street and Court End from destruction, the focus should not be on the White House of the Confederacy as a single historic building under threat, but as one building among many, all of them facing the same threat.
City Changes, History Shouldn't
The setting of the Museum of the Confederacy never again will look the way it did when Jefferson Davis sat as president of the Confederate States of America, just as it will never again look the way it did when Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad visited as the ashes of Richmond's Evacuation Fire cooled, and residents set about the task rebuilding both their lives and their city. Despite these changes, the most important part of the context of the White House of the Confederacy -- indeed, the very reason that the Brockenbrough house became the White House of the Confederacy -- remains: the State Capitol. That all-important connection between the White House of the Confederacy and the Capitol (during the Civil War, the Capitol of the Confederacy) would be irretrievably broken if the White House of the Confederacy is removed from Court End.
Cutting the White House loose from its historic location and carting it off to what appears to be a more hospitable location, are disservices to the history of Richmond, the history of Virginia, and the history of the Civil War. The White House of the Confederacy has held on through some tough times: war, defeat, fire, evacuation, and a hundred years of urban change -- and through it the building has persevered. For history's sake, keeping this landmark firmly anchored in its historic setting is the best, rather than the last, resort.
Bryan Green is an architectural historian, co-author of 'Lost in Virginia: Vanished Architecture of the Old Dominion,' and author of the forthcoming 'In Jefferson's Shadow: The Architecture of Thomas R. Blackburn.'