All posts filed under: Heritage Travel

Introducing Rugby (TN) to the next generation

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Rugby, Tennessee, is a unique community on the Cumberland Plateau, with an incredible story of perseverance. It is also a place that means a great deal to me, as it was where my preservation career began. Today I took the opportunity to introduce Claire, Andrew, and Candice to Rugby and to show them the places that inspired me. Here’s the official story from my last post: “Rugby was established in the 1880s by the successful Victorian-era author Thomas Hughes as a Utopian community for the second sons of English gentry.  Due to the system of primogeniture, these men would inherit little or no property and had very limited career opportunities.  Hughes established this colony in the beautiful but hard-scrabble Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee.  After some initial success, the colony fell on hard times, ultimately failed and was largely forgotten.  In the mid-1960s, residents of the area began to restore the remaining historic buildings and over the course of five decades have saved this wonderful place and turned it into a thriving community and a …

Eating Local

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With a great deal of travel on my schedule for June – November, I’m trying to focus on what’s wonderful about leaving home. So this will not be a post about the state of the airline industry in the U.S. Instead, I am thinking about food. Local food to be exact. Regular readers will know that I like to avoid chains and hotel restaurants when I travel, seeking instead the local landmark. I’m only two days into this week’s trip to the west coast and I’ve already hit my “go local” stride. Lunch on Tuesday came from a wonderful cheese and sandwich shop named Cheese Plus which features tasty sandwiches with locally themed names such as the Willie Brown Duck (named for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown), Crissy Field, and Castro’s Cubano.  I had the Happy Thanksgiving, which – along with the brisk city breeze and temperatures in the 60s – made me wish for the fall. After a drive to Sonoma County to view a site where we’re working, and especially after a …

A Day at Joshua Tree

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National Parks are all unique.  They have different histories, different stories of how they were saved, different challenges in today’s world. I was fortunate today to be introduced to one of the most unusual:  the Joshua Tree National Park in California.  With a half-day to myself, I stuck my toe into the vast park where the Mojave and Colorado deserts converge and was fascinated with what I saw. What follows are photos from the northwestern edge of the park – from the village of Joshua Tree down to Key’s View, where one gets a remarkable panorama of the San Andreas Fault.  Here’s a bit from the park’s brochure about what one sees in this part of Joshua Tree: Amid the boulder stacks are pinyon pines, junipers, scrub oaks, Mojave yuccas, and Mojave prickly pear cacti….What tells you most you are truly in the Mojave Desert is the wild-armed Joshua tree.  It isn’t really a tree but a species of yucca….Joshua trees can grow over 40 feet tall – at the leisurely rate of an inch …

Celebrating 40 years of preservation

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(Editor’s Note:  The following are excerpts from my keynote address at the 40th anniversary of Historic Staunton Foundation, delivered on Sunday, January 22, 2012.  To read the full address, go here.) Anniversaries are great times to reflect, celebrate, and resolve. I’d like to do all three with you this afternoon. Let’s begin with some reflection.  I’ve always enjoyed the movie It’s a Wonderful Life – for the dramatic (some might say cheesy) way it showed the impact people have on others and on their community.   And while I’m no Clarence Odbody, the guardian angel who showed Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey the transformation of Bedford Falls to Pottersville as if George had never lived, I would like for all of us to reflect on how Staunton might have developed if HSF were not formed 40 years ago. Let’s begin down at the Wharf – where generations of visitors initially saw Staunton as they stepped off a train. The first thing you would notice is that there isn’t any Wharf…for the buildings that make up that unique historic …

San Xavier Del Bac – A World Treasure

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My trip this week to Tucson was filled with meetings, tours of work-related projects, and presentations.  But one part of the tour allowed me to slip into full-tourist mode:  the visit to San Xavier Del Bac. A National Historic Landmark, San Xavier Mission was founded as a Catholic mission by Father Eusebio Kino in 1692.  Construction of the current church began in 1783 and was completed in 1797, when Southern Arizona was part of New Spain. This is – simply stated – a spectacular building of international importance, with masonry vaults and beautiful  interior artwork, the latter restored after $2 million was raised by the local community.  Little is known about the artists – most likely from Queretero in current-day Mexico – but their work mixes New Spain and Native American motifs.  The architect, Ignacio Gaona, designed what many consider to be the finest example of Spanish mission architecture in the United States. We had a great tour from Bob, one of the leaders of the Patronanto San Xavier, who recommended A Gift of Angels …

Landmark alert: World’s best custard

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Travel has its benefits. I was in Milwaukee yesterday for the announcement of the 2011 list of America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.  We had a terrific event with our local partners, pointing out the threat to a real national treasure:  the National Soldiers Home Historic District.  One of three homes built for Civil War veterans after Abraham Lincoln authorized them as one of the last acts of his presidency, the Milwaukee Soldiers Home is the only one to maintain the context of the historic buildings and landscape.  One of the veterans who spoke at our event said that this place was critical to his recovery from PTSD, noting that the two words most associated with the site by veterans were “peace” and “serenity.”  To lose such a place of healing would  be a travesty. On this trip my colleague Genell introduced me to another national treasure (though not endangered):  Leon’s World Famous Frozen Custard.  My, my!  What a wonderful frozen custard.  It was great to watch the employees pour a large bucket of milk …

Disappearing governance, disappearing heritage

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Preservationists  have grown increasingly concerned about the nationwide trend to balance national and state budgets on the backs of our heritage. This isn’t a new issue but the impact is now being felt nationwide, not only in national programs but in state after state.  A large number of legislatures this past winter went for  disproportionate cuts to historic preservation, historic parks, and incentives for reusing and revitalizing our communities. It is such a short-sighted approach to governing.  But perhaps – just perhaps – the national media and the public are finally beginning to see the issue. Just yesterday, two stories came out that spoke to this folly. The first, a column by NY Times writer Timothy Egan, speaks to the misguided approach by the State of California.  Egan is a favorite of mine, who writes from outside the New York-to-Washington echo chamber and has two great histories out in his Dust Bowl-related The Worst Hard Time and The Big Burn, which chronicles the founding of the Forest Service.  Yesterday’s Fall of the Wild column in …

NYC: Continuing a Spring Break Tradition

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This is a tradition that begins with an oft-told story. When Claire was in fourth grade, she returned home from school one day to announce that the teacher had asked everyone to tell the class what their parents did for a living.  So I asked Claire, “What did you say?”  She replied, “I said my father signs papers and goes to meetings.” In her own straight-forward, fourth grade sense of the world, she was correct, and I told her so.  But I also said that meetings and papers were not why I worked.  And from that conversation, the annual Spring Break trip to get to know Daddy’s world was born. A few weeks later I spoke to my then-boss and said I’d like to take one child with me on a trip during Spring Break to see the work of the National Trust.  Dick blessed the idea, saying he had done something similar when he worked in the White House. My rules:  it had to be a legitimate work trip where they could see some …

Theatre Rebirth

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I knew that I had become my father when I found myself telling a friend a few years ago that “I paid more for my last car than I did for my first house.”  It was one of those lines that my father used when I was young – and here I was repeating it!  (Just to set the record straight, our now 10-year-old car wasn’t that expensive; it just happened that as newlyweds, we got a great deal on a 1910 townhouse that needed a lot of work.) Another story that I heard from my father when I was young was how he spent nights and weekends taking up tickets and serving as the back-up projectionist at the Franklin Theatre in his hometown of Franklin, Tennessee.  Daddy knew all about the movies and stars from that era, because he had a free seat. So it was no surprise to me that Tom Brown would be in Franklin last Saturday evening when the lights in the marquee of the historic Franklin Theatre were turned on …