By Richard Hull, Phd.
Historic preservation is inextricably bound up with community preservation and enhancement in all its fascinating aspects and dimensions. A community without a sense of its heritage is a community without roots. Communities that have roots that are understood and appreciated by its inhabitants tend to be vibrant and well-grounded. Its residents find security and pride in their own sense of place and in their feelings of stability and continuity. Yet citizens cannot maintain their psychologically re-assuring connections to the past if the physical world they live in does not also sustain these roots. If a community ignores and neglects its heritage, if it allows its special places to be bulldozed away and demolished, those places or sites that convey meaning will be gone forever and so ultimately will the community’s memory of them.
Collective memories of the past can unite a people. They can contribute to feelings of solidarity, common experience, and unity of purpose. It can be argued that the present needs the past to define and explain it. Indeed, by preserving and understanding the past one can better cope with the present, and more clearly envision the future. As one preservationist so eloquently put it, “planning for the future without a sense of the past is like planting cut flowers.” Too often, a community without its history is a community without vision and without essential tools in which to navigate.
Preserving our physical world, especially our built environment, gives us those essential tools. Historic sites-homesteads, farmsteads, commercial buildings, schools, churches, cemeteries- help us to visualize important events and illustrious people who contributed to the formation of our community’s collective identity. Each structure can tell a story, each site evokes a memory of something special and important in our lives or in the lives of those who came before us. They may inspire admiration and the imperative of keeping those stories alive. They make us feel connected and help us place our everyday fears and uncertainties in a sometimes reassuringly broader context. The black novelist James Baldwin warned that “The most dangerous creation of any society is that person who has nothing to lose”. Conversely, a society that feels it has something to preserve is one that moves confidently, constructively, and peacefully forward and in doing so it progresses. Tragically, many of our landmarks have suffered benign neglect from the ignorance or insensitivity of its current or recent occupants. In the last quarter century alone Orange County has lost hundreds of its historic sites or has seen some of them architecturally altered beyond recognition. Birthplaces and homesteads of illustrious Americans who have inspired theirs and many generations after them have fallen into ruin. Take, for example, Florida (NewYork) native William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, our State Governor, a champion of slave emancipation, and securer of Alaska. His birthplace (pictured to the left) on Main Street, next door to the high school, is currently in an extreme state of disrepair. Restored and well-maintained, it could serve as a precious educational institution for the pupils, a museum that could attract tourists and business to Main Street, and a living reminder of one of our nation’s greatest visionaries.
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We need to be reminded that historic structures inspire and inform. They are essential building blocks of vibrant enduring communities. The late environmentalist and educator John Sawhill reminds us that “In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.” Let us all become diligent stewards of the human and natural landscapes that have so fully nourished the very things that today sustain our democratic institutions but which all too often are taken for granted.
About the Author: Dr. Hull: A native of New York, Dr. Richard W. Hull has lived in Warwick, NY for more than 50 years. He is the official Town historian of Warwick. He earned his PhD. in History at Columbia University and is a Fulbright Fellow. He is a professor of History at New York University and an author of about a dozen books, including "People of the Valleys: History of Warwick 1700-2005, which can be purchased from the Warwick Historical Society. He has been active in local preservation in his community, serving as Vice President of the Warwick Historical Society a trustee of the Warwick Conservancy, and former vice president of the Lower Hudson Chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He has also served as President of the Sugar Loaf Community Foundation, and is a trustee of the Sugar Loaf Methodist Church. He has received the United Nations Distinguished Citizen Award for his community work in Ghana and Revered Orange County Citizen of the Year in 2005.
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