After World War II, the heightened restoration activity at Hopewell Village National Historic Site echoed the explosion of construction nationwide. The political and social environment that accompanied such rapid development also influenced the preservation policies of the park and the National Park Service overall. What began as the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s, fed into the anti-war, women’s rights, and environmental movements of subsequent years. These movements highlighted a need to include the working class, women, and minorities in America’s stories, and promoted awareness of the environment in response to the energy crisis. At the same time, the passage of the Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the 1976 Bicentennial (the events surrounding America’s 200th birthday) a decade later promoted national unity, a shared American heritage, and pride in the country’s success. The National Park Service would be at the forefront of both events, and the events, in turn, would promote a time of transition and change for Hopewell Village NHS. The park budget nearly quadrupled between the years of these landmark events.1 With the bulk of restoration completed and a rising tide of conservatism regarding issues of preservation, physical development took a backseat to interpretive programs and protection issues.
A Sturdy, Stable Staff
When Benjamin Zerbey accepted a promotion in 1965, John C. W. “Bill” Riddle became Hopewell Village’s ninth superintendent in less than thirty years. He brought experience from both natural and historical parks. Like many of Hopewell’s superintendents, Riddle was
relatively green as an administrator. He had only just cut his teeth with his first superintendence at the Mound City Group National Monument (today called Hopewell Culture National
Historical Park), a prehistoric mound group in Ohio. Prior to that, he served as district ranger at Acadia National Park in Maine, Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania, and
1 This estimate does not take inflation issues into account. U.S. Congress, House of
Representatives, Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, hearings, 1966-1977.Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1981. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia.2 Employees remember him as “an old ranger type,” and thus fairly conservative about matters of reconstruction and interpretation. When he arrived at Hopewell, Riddle focused on issues appropriate to Hopewell (preservation,
maintenance, visitor services, and protection), but he frequently consulted with the regional office for advice.3 Most critically, Riddle at last acquired a staple of most national parks: a permanent, full-time ranger on Hopewell’s staff.
Naturalist Denny Beach, who arrived at Hopewell from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1966, served as Hopewell’s first supervisory park ranger. Beach was educated in geology and soil sciences, but had minored in American History. Coming from a vast, popular natural park, Beach met Hopewell Village, which he had to scour a map to locate, with a degree of “culture shock.” As the park’s only year-round ranger, Beach took up residence with his family in one of the tenant houses and assumed a variety of duties formerly performed by superintendents. These included protection, law enforcement, traffic counts, monitoring water samples, monitoring both the wild and domestic animals, maintaining relations with French Creek staff, and even conducting tours. Hopewell required far less law enforcement than the Smoky Mountains, but Beach nonetheless implemented several security and safety systems.4
An Operations Evaluation by the regional office in 1970 reorganized the park’s personnel into an Interpretation and Resource Management Department, with the position of park
historian replaced by a supervisor. The evaluating office determined that, “a realignment of responsibilities would produce a more effective unit, create better team effort, and stimulate imaginative and innovative management in reaching the objectives and goals of the area.”5 As a result, Beach’s successor Ranger Larry Points (1970-74) took on increasingly more responsibility for the interpretation program and increasingly clashed with the traditional Riddle. Perhaps because he was relatively new as a park administrator, or because he was keenly aware that Hopewell’s first superintendent, Lon Garrison, was now Regional Director, Riddle was a stickler for regulations and exercised a fairly authoritarian style. Historian Earl Heydinger
2 Ron Cockrell, Amidst Ancient Monuments: The Administrative History of Mound City Group National Monument / Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Ohio (Omaha, NB: Midwest Support Office, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 1999), http://www.nps.gov/hocu/adhi/
adhi4a.htm (accessed May 15, 2003).
3 Warren “Denny” Beach to Leah S. Glaser, E-mail, “Hopewell Village Notes as Promised,” July 24, 2003.
4 Ibid.; Bitler, Interview, July 25, 2003.
complained bitterly to Roy Appleman that Riddle belittled much of his and the assistant
historians’ research. Charlotte Fairbairn had joined the park as a junior historian to Heydinger in 1962, and Jane Henzi replaced her in 1969. Henzi, hired more for interpretive purposes rather than research, worked primarily with Supervisory Ranger Points. Both Henzi and Points often felt like they had to “work over, in, and around” Riddle in order to develop new programs.6 However, the living history program began under Riddle’s administration, and its success in the following years would finally put Hopewell “on the map” (see Chapter 10).
In spite of some of the personnel conflicts, Heydinger, Fairbairn, and Henzi
accomplished important historical research, and the park’s full-time permanent staff was the strongest and most professionally diverse it had ever been. The park even hired Nancy Prine, a museum aide, to work with collections from 1968 to 1969. Even more critical, the administrative and maintenance staff, who lived locally, solidified the park through their long-term service.
Wilhelmine “Helmie” Malizzi was a highly organized administrative clerk and worthy heir to Catherine Fritz. Veronica Fitzgerald held a long requested part-time clerk-typist position (essential for the many structural reports required of restoration activities), and Collier Elmer Kohl, who could reportedly “charcoal a Sears and Roebuck catalog,” often performed the ever popular charcoal-making demonstrations.7 For the first time, Hopewell Village’s maintenance staff was adequate with four fulltime employees (until then only two maintenance men, a part- time charwoman, and seasonal laborers made up the division): Charlie Seidel (foreman), Lloyd Huyett (laborer), Daniel Miller (painter), Elmer Musser (laborer), and Marie Care (a part-time janitor/ charwoman) and one or two more laborers joining them each summer. Both Huyett and Miller were skilled in a variety of areas including plumbing, stonework, and electrical work, making it somewhat easier for Seidel to address all of the park’s maintenance needs with a limited crew. 8 In April 1972 Larry Nash arrived from Independence National Historical Park as
5 “Operations Evaluation of Hopewell Village National Historic Site” (Northeast Regional Office, April 1970), 3, Central Files, HOFU.
6 Earl Heydinger to Roy Appleman, January 31, 1970, Appleman to Heydinger, Feb 12, 1970,
Hopewell NHS, Correspondence 1960-1975, Historical Files, WASO; Larry Points, Taped phone interview by Leah S. Glaser, July 9, 2003.
7 Chief Nathan B. Golub, Division of Maintenance to Regional Director, June 27, 1967, “Hopewell Village NHS 1965-68,” General Correspondence 1966-68, Northeast Regional Office, RG 79, NARA-P;
Points Interview, July 9, 2003.
88
Chief Nathan B. Golub, Division of Maintenance to Regional Director, June 27, 1967,
“Hopewell Village NHS 1965-68,” General Correspondence 1966-68, Northeast Regional Office, RG 79, NARA-P; Points Interview, July 9, 2003.
an interpretive specialist to replace a departing Georjean Bender who was following her new husband, an NPS Ranger, to Tonto National Monument in Arizona.9
At the end of 1972, Riddle left Hopewell Village NHS after over seven years of service and moved on to the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana where he finished his thirty-two year NPS career. Ranger Points briefly took over superintendent duties until January 7, 1973, when Wallace B. “Wally” Elms, Chief of Interpretation and Resource Management at Herbert Hoover National Historic Site, arrived as the new superintendent.10 Trained as a traditional protection ranger in primarily natural parks in the West, Elms allowed his interpretation staff considerable freedom, but safety and legal issues dictated many of his management decisions. When he arrived, he found that the staff ran the park “pretty well” and sought only to continue existing activities. The living history program dominated the overall impression of the park during his administration while other operations “kind of rolled along.”11 Employees regarded Elms, a native of the Southwest, as charming and pleasant. He was “on top of everything, but not dictatorial,” attested Bill Bitler. Helmie Malizzi added that he was also open to suggestions for how to improve the park’s administration.
Elms’ friendly and laid-back demeanor won over the staff, which grew to ten permanent employees when Theodore Ziegler, who had apprenticed under Elmer Kohl, was hired as a full- time collier following Kohl’s retirement in 1973. Kenneth E. Reitz and Kevin Ziemba soon filled other new positions for a carpenter and farmer-demonstrator, respectively. Peter Baril from the new Albright Training Center in Harpers Ferry briefly replaced Ranger Larry Nash in January 1974 as an interpretive specialist. Helmie Malizzi was promoted to an administrative assistant.
Chief Ranger Larry Points left for Assatague Island National Seashore and Ranger Lawrence
“Larry” Masters of the Natchez Trace Parkway took over his position at the end of the summer in 1974. Clerk Victoria Fitzgerald, Charwoman Marie Care, Ranger-Historian Bill Bitler and
9 Wally Elms to Assistant Director, Operations, January 17, 1973, Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, Annual Report, HFC.
10 Elms served his first superintendence for a little over two and a half years until he left for Petersburg National Battlefield in Virginia, and then returned to Pennsylvania in 1981 to take charge of Valley Forge. “1st Woman Named at Hopewell,” Eagle (October 23, 1975); “Elms Going to Virginia,” Eagle (August 14, 1975).
11 Nancy Brown, Taped interview by Leah S. Glaser, July 8, 2003; Wallace Elms, Taped phone interview by Leah S. Glaser, July 9, 2003.
Park Technician Charles Diechert all received full-time career-conditional appointments and completed Elm’s staff.12
The elimination of the historian position underscored the end of research and
restoration as a focus at Hopewell. The administrations of Riddle and Elms oversaw the last era of major archeological excavations, restorations, and reconstructions as staff focused more on interpretation, preservation, and resource management. The staff and students of the
University of Pennsylvania, including NPS Archeologist John Cotter (who held an Adjunct Professorship in the former Department of American Civilization at the university), directed investigations of the Schoolhouse and Tenant Houses in 1967-68, and then at the Smokehouse and the Springhouse in 1969. The Schoolhouse excavation determined the structure’s floor plan and window arrangement in anticipation of reconstruction, and the park completed part one of its Historic Structure Report for the structure in 1970. Unfortunately, by the time restoration plans could be made, the attitude of the preservation movement and the National Park Service had become far more conservative in its views of historic reconstructions.13
The National Historic Preservation Act
The year of 1966 not only marked the fiftieth anniversary of the National Park Service, but the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). New highways, bridges, roads, and skyscrapers of post-war urban development threatened to destroy old
neighborhoods and architectural treasures.14 In response, the historic preservation movement sought to save much of the basic fabric of these communities. Three years earlier, members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation had met at Colonial Williamsburg for a three-day conference that resulted in a published report called Historic Preservation Today. With support from the Johnson administration and the First Lady in May of 1965, the National Trust
published With Heritage So Rich. The book called for a national system of historic preservation and inspired the NHPA legislation the following year.15 All of the historical units of the National
12 “New Ranger at Hopewell,” Reading Eagle, August 29, 1974, K34 Newsclippings 1974-1983, Central Files, HOFU; Elms to Assistant Director, Operations, January 17, 1973, Elms to Regional Director Chester Brooks, January 17, 1975, Elizabeth Disrude, Annual Report, March 10, 1977, Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, Annual Reports, HFC.
13 Kurtz, “History of Archeology,” 81.
14 See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
15 Murtagh, Keeping Time, 64-65.
Park System became some of the first properties to make up the National Register of Historic Places, a list of significant cultural resources administered by the NPS.
The NHPA formalized an approval process for all federal agencies through Section 106 of the law. The provision required that any plans for development, including a master plan, interpretive prospectus, or environmental impact statement, would have to submit to an
approval process. NPS parks would need to follow the provisions of Section 106 and implement its regulations (36 Code of Federal Regulations Part 800) when installing utilities such as power lines and waste disposal systems planned for the 1970s.16 This process was supposed to ensure the integrity of historic resources by requiring that all resources be judged and protected in accordance with National Register criteria, in consultation with the state historic preservation officer, before the government spent any federal money on projects (called “undertakings”). At Hopewell, such projects included the expansion of the water system, the restoration of the Ironmaster’s House, and the rehabilitation of the Blacksmith Shop after a fire. In 1974 the Mid- Atlantic Region and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation negotiated an agreement to
“provide [the] guidelines and flexibility” needed for Hopewell’s staff to properly maintain historic structures by more clearly defining the difference between “maintenance,”
“rehabilitation,” and “restoration,” and which would need to undergo the 106 process. The following year, Hopewell Village hosted a region-wide conference to discuss a memorandum of agreement on restoration policy, but it is unclear what, if any, definitive decisions came out of this meeting.17
Accuracy and Authenticity: Washington Discourages Reconstruction
With the emphasis on preservation and integrity, support for historic reconstruction, and even restoration, was slipping among many preservation professionals in and out of the NPS. In addition to its advocacy of a national preservation system, the publication With Heritage So Rich voiced a rising concern toward historic reconstruction among preservation
professionals. The book referred to such enterprises as “expensive, life-size toys, manufactured
16 Compliance Office Ken Tapman, Hopewell Village NHS, Correspondence 1960-74, Historical Files, WASO.
17 Superintendent Elms to Associate Regional Director, Professional Services, MARO, October 9, 1974, “H4217 106 Compliance,” Elms to William Wewer, SHPO, January 25, 1974, “H3417,” Central Files, HOFU; Glenn O. Hendrix, Denver Service Center, to Wallace Elms, January 23, 1975, MARO Records Center, Philadelphia.
for children of all ages who have forgotten how to read…They may be effective instruments of education, amusement, propaganda, or some kind of special pleading, but they have precious little to do with history, and absolutely nothing to do with historic preservation.”18
About the same time, a new generation of leaders in the NPS discouraged the type of replication made popular in Williamsburg, Virginia, (and echoed in Hopewell Village) as the best method of preservation. Increasingly, both American and European preservationist
professionals denounced reconstruction as the “projection of fantasy into objects of the past.”19 In 1964, NPS Director Conrad Wirth and longtime Chief Historian Herb Kahler retired after many years of service. Their departure symbolized the passing of a generation that had operated the NPS since the 1930s, the years of Hopewell’s founding. Under the NPS’s new director George Hartzog, the Service published its first general policy on historic structure treatment since 1937’s merely suggestive “Better to preserve than repair, better to repair than restore, better restore than construct.” While men like Roy Appleman continued to emphasize interpretation as the primary mission of preservation until his own retirement in 1970, the new Chief Historian Robert Utley (1964-1972) expressed a great deal more suspicion over the wisdom of the practice.
“A reconstruction, like a modern copy of an old painting, could conceivably be accurate,” he claimed, “but it could never be authentic-the genuine article.”20 In the ensuing years,
questionable reconstructions raised more doubts about the practice.
Issued in 1968, the Administrative Policies for Historical Areas of the National Park System would serve as the basis for the planning period of the Bicentennial and limit the planners’
decision to reconstruct to far stricter guidelines than the 1937 policy. Historic reconstruction was authorized only “if: a) all or almost all of the structure is gone and recreation is essential for public understanding and appreciation of the historical associations for which the park was established; b) Sufficient historical, archeological, and architectural data exist to permit an accurate reconstruction; c) The structure can be erected at original or appropriate site.”21 Superintendents Riddle, Elms, and their successors also made park management decisions
18 As quoted in Richard Sellars and Dwight Pitcaithley, “Reconstructions—Expensive, Life-Size Toys?” CRM Bulletin 2, no. 4 (1979), 2.
19 Ibid.
20 As quoted in Mackintosh, “The Case Against Reconstruction,” CRM Bulletin 13, no.1 (1990); In 1964, Utley became Chief Historian, and placed Roy Appleman in charge of NPS’s research division. Ellen K. Foppes and Robert Utley, “Present at the Creation: Robert M. Utley Recalls the Beginnings of the National Historic Preservation Program,” The Public Historian 24, no.3 (Spring 2002), 74.
21 Barry Mackintosh, “To Reconstruct or Not to Reconstruct.” CRM Bulletin 13, no.1 (1990).
within the parameters of several other restrictions including the Antiquities Act of 1906, the Organic Act of 1916, the Historic Sites Act of 1935, the NHPA, and after 1969, the National
Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). NEPA required an Environmental Impact Statement for any undertaking affecting federally designated resources. Executive Order 11593 (issued in 1971) and the Archeological and Historic Preservation Act of 1974 provided additional enforcement to the “protection and enhancement of the cultural environment” by requiring federal leadership.
The former required federal agencies to take a leading role in national preservation efforts and survey their historic properties and nominate them to the register. The National Park Service forbade the destruction of any building over fifty years old without the approval of the Associate Director of Professional Services (later Cultural Resources Management). Furthermore, the legislation required that any structures less than fifty years old proposed for demolition or major alteration to be evaluated under the standards of the National Register, and nominated if
eligible, to the list. Only the regional director could authorize a demolition for an ineligible property.22 These new rigid policies toward preservation methods and cultural resource management issues would have a significant influence on the options open to staff commemorating America’s 200th birthday at places like Hopewell Village. Out of the
Bicentennial Development Program’s 104 million dollar budget for July 1, 1973-June 30, 1976,
$122,000 was spent at Hopewell Village.23
The Bicentennial and Hopewell’s Revolutionary Heritage
Service-wide disagreements over historic reconstruction in general significantly undermined the park’s plans for Bicentennial development. A decade after the passage of the NHPA, the park would prepare for the 200th birthday of the nation as one of twenty-two
officially designated Bicentennial areas.24 In anticipation, the National Park Service established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission to learn more about and more fully develop its sites associated with the American Revolution and to celebrate the Bicentennial from 1975 to
22 Elizabeth Disrude, “Statement for Management,” January 29, 1976, HOFU; Director Ronald H.
Walker to All Field Directors, January 26, 1973, “HE317,” Central Files, HOFU.
23 Merrill J. Mattes, Landmarks of Liberty: A Report on the American Revolution Bicentennial Development Program of the National Park Service, (Washington, DC: History Division, National Park Service, Department of the Interior, 1989), 74.
24 Mattes, Landmarks of Liberty, 3.