The Unpretentious Role of Historic Sites

Well, for three reasons it was a big week for history last week in Durham, North Carolina.

Even among those involved in tourism, most people don’t realize that a greater percentage of travelers visit historic sites than attend concerts, theater and dance performances combined.

Travelers who take in historic sites also outnumber those who golf or attend/participate in pro and amateur sports combined.  They also outnumber those going to theme/amusement parks, zoos/aquariums and water parks combined.

Soon those visiting historic sites will rival the number attending conventions and meetings or going to the beach or other waterfronts.

And because historic sites are also on the most authentic end of the spectrum of activities, they add destination appeal even for those participating in those more mainstream activities.

First, on Sunday a week ago the Bull City (Durham’s nick name) celebrated the re-enactment by Bennett Place of the surrender here ending the Civil War 150 years ago.

It would be another 58 years before the state took stewardship as a historic site.  More on the history of that endeavor later.

The next day, in Atlanta, three of those involved in the startup of the Durham History Hub including executive director Katie Spencer were asked by The Museum Group to be one of its five prestigious “conversations at AAM.”

TMG is a consortium of 31 of the top museum consultants in the world.  AAM is the American Alliance of Museums which was holding it annual meeting in Atlanta.

They wanted to hear more about the Durham’s History Hub, which they characterized as “a sustainable new model for community-based museums” affectionately termed by a friend and historian as an avatar for the day there is a Museum of Durham History.

But Katie Spencer is no avatar.  She is rapidly rising star and the startup has already mounted an incredible 18 exhibitions at the “Hub” in less than 24 months.  Hopefully Durham can keep her.

Her work in Durham caught the attention of those at AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums because the pop-up exhibitions at the Hub are an ingenious way to help officials and community leaders here understand why a Museum of Durham History has been ranked for decades by residents as the #1 cultural need.

The pop-ups also serve to identify residents who have artifacts that could be loaned and safeguarded when a full-fledged history museum becomes a reality.

Durham’s third history event last week took place on Wednesday when the state’s three historic sites here were celebrated by nearly 400 people attending the Annual Tribute Luncheon which is facilitated for the community by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau.

A video reenactment wove the pre and post role that Historic Stagville, Bennett Place and Duke Homestead played in the history of not only Durham but especially the transformation of North Carolina.

After some editing, the video will be posted at this link along with a handful of the more than 20 Durham Annual Tribute Luncheons DCVB has produced over the past two decades.

North Carolina’s 27 state historic sites have been systematically starved through repeated budget cuts going back to shortly after I was recruited here 26 years ago, notwithstanding their importance to the state’s appeal for economic development.

Lawmakers today seem to have become unmoored from the public value of these sites as it was so well understood by their peers in 1923 when Bennett Place was donated as a state historic site, nearly 50 years before gaining national recognition.

The state apparently took possession of Bennett Place more than a decade before it began keeping track of theses assets in 1937.

It had been preserved and donated to the state by the Durham founder’s second generation in honor of its first.  Within six years, this generation went on to salvage Duke Homestead.

But it became a National Historic Landmark seven years before it became a North Carolina State Historic Site in 1973 at a time when Margaret Haywood was working to ensure the oldest of Durham’s now three state historic sites would be preserved.

For more than 25 years, Bennett Place fell under the precursor to the State Department of Economic Development showing that lawmakers and businesses back then and through the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s better understood the link of historic sites to economic development.

In 1955, Bennett Place was transferred along with by then 11 other state historic sites to to the newly created Department of Archives and History.

Less than two decades later, the nation including North Carolina were swept up in preparations for celebration of the America’s Bicentennial and Duke Homestead and Historic Stagville became state historic sites.

A decade earlier, Duke Homestead became a National Historic Landmark in 1966 and then part of the state’s historic sites, which in 1975 became its own unit in the Department of Cultural Resources.

Of course, the unique historic sites owned and operated by the state represent only 27 of the 2,780 Tar Heel listings on the National Register of Historic Places including 500 historic districts.

Only 15% are publically owned but 25% are of significance at the state level and another 5% at the national level.

Today, North Carolina Historic Sites are funded at roughly the same amount they were two decades ago or 54% less accounting for inflation even though the number of sites has increased.

This slow starvation has been bipartisan in nature, even though in the early 1970s voters overwhelmingly embedded an amendment to the state constitution to “conserve and protect”…”for the benefit of all its citizenry”…to preserve as a part of the common heritage its”…”historic sites”…

Although economic analysis of cultural assets shows a 7-to-1 return to governments on dollars spent on museums and cultural organizations, North Carolina invests only 52 cents per person on state historic sites, less than 2 cents per site.

Because they can also be leveraged into visitor centric economic development, the state has rightfully come to think of the 78 assets it began to accumulate beginning in 1879, such as historic sites, museums, zoos/aquariums and parkland/recreation areas, as “attractions.”

Unfortunately, state government doesn’t or isn’t able to conduct the analysis that would credit these “attractions” with the overall tax revenues they help harvest.

If that day comes, maybe lawmakers will resource them accordingly.

Looking Back To Detect the Future

One of the signature artifacts of Durham, North Carolina’s past that has been lost during the eight decades of neglect since a local history museum was first proposed is a calliope.

Beginning less than a decade after the Civil War ended here 150 years ago next month, this musical instrument sat atop the now repurposed Old Bull Building and simulated the sound of a bull at each factory shift change and other special occasions.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in the Rockies so when I first read about this famous calliope, I had no trouble imagining the sound it played (click here to hear a bull.)  It celebrated Bull Durham tobacco and the “Bull City” it was soon to make world famous.

It is important to remember that in 1870 as plans were being laid to erect the Old Bull Building, now a National Historic Landmark, Durham was already very different than the rest of North Carolina.

At the time, Governor W.W. Holden was standing up against gangs of Ku Klux Klan riders who were marauding through nearby counties committing public murders and whippings while intimidating officials from doing anything about it.

Several counties were declared to be in a state of insurrection and state militia were deployed.

These gangs of terrorists were targeting “blacks who did not know their place” and whites who advocated for the rights of blacks.  In fact, maybe the sound of a Bull blaring from Durham was meant to ward them off.

Seriously, this is when Durham residents began talking privately about formation of a separate county which got its unique shape when several pieces of land were lopped off during passage of the controversial 1881 bill in the legislature, enabling voter approval.

But Durham’s industrialists and merchants were divided on another issue, bonds to build graded schools.  Republicans were opposed, arguing that education by families and in private and parochial schools was enough.

Opponents sued to overturn voter approval so voters approved the bonds again while proponents started a “moonlight school” for factory workers.

Artifacts such as the now lost “bull calliope” will be crucial to a fully-functional Museum of Durham History, should officials ever make it the priority public opinion polls have shown for decades.

The compelling essay entitled “Looking at Artifacts, Thinking About History,” notes that artifacts reflect and symbolize changes.  Had the old calliope survived, it would today serve as a clarion reminder that Durham is different, and proud of it.

There are people who dismiss the past by claiming they only want to think about the future.  This is the kind of thinking or lack of thinking that leads quickly to a surrender of sense of place in so many communities.

It is by understanding the patterns of the past that we see into the future.  It is why a class in historical analysis should be required as a prerequisite in business schools for one on strategic thinking and/or strategy making.

With each passing day, Durham loses more and more of its history in exchange for mainstream culture that can be found anywhere.

For those still puzzled about why we should care and in need of lists to check, below are just a few reasons a Museum of Durham History, stocked with both artifacts and the latest technology, is crucial:

• Story Telling. It will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that stories are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and “generica.”
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifacts, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting, etc.

Maybe it is because I am something of an artifact myself, that this has now become so clear (smile.)

At The Altar of Shiny and New

I left off in yesterday’s essay by noting the irony that some cities sacrifice sense of place at the altar of fantasy and things “shiny and new” while others even nearby fight hard to preserve it. Last week, while attending an awards banquet in a Winston-Salem hotel, I had pause to reflect on how emblematic that non-descript, designed to be “Anywhere, USA” 1980s structure and its 1970s twin are of that community’s struggle to hold on to sense of place. Invariably, unless a community’s advocates succumb to the demons of the “shiny and new,” the latter will always eclipse the former because research shows that the distinct sense of a particular place is ultimately more appealing, even to those visitors and newcomers seeking fantasy. When I arrived in Durham, NC twenty-five years ago, part of its appeal to me as its newly hired guardian was that the importance of sense of place was apparent here but even so it has been besmirched here and there by those worshipping the “shiny and new.” Startups are incredibly intense but indispensable is taking time to interview those with ties to the founders who had helped perpetuate and protect it. One of the questions I had learned to ask during these interviews was, “Which community in the state had done the best job leveraging sense of place?” Invariably, during my first few months in Durham the answer always came back, “You’ve got to study Winston-Salem.” So even before visiting nearby Raleigh, which even back then seemed intent on surrendering sense of place to the “shiny and new,” I targeted Winston-Salem for my first excursion while familiarizing myself with North Carolina. En route, I took a swing through Greensboro, which confirmed what my sources had noted would be more in the mold of Raleigh when it came to undervaluing sense of place. Winston-Salem’s “sense of place revolt” occurred in the wake of WWII nearly three decades before one similar in Durham, 1948 to be exact, less than two months after the first flight aboard a DC-3 of W-S’s home-grown Piedmont Airlines, now folded into American Airlines. In April there was a union-organized civil rights protest but it was a zoning request in July for a supermarket that kindled Winston-Salem’s “sense of place revolt” (coincidentally also my birth month/year.) Back when Durham was just emerging as a crossroads, Winston-Salem had just been “Salem,” the administrative town for a 100,000-acre tract the immigrant Moravian Church had purchased and named Wachovia in the early 1750s. This also included several other settlements, some slightly older. For the next hundred years, the church owned the land and members owned their own structures. But by 1849 the church transitioned away from that model, turning over administration of the town to residents and setting in motion the sale of land parcels to each respective structure-owners with some acreage remaining as community “commons.” This was occurring just as the newly created Forsyth County was eyeing Salem as the natural county seat. Passing on that opportunity, the Moravians instead sold some land just upland for creation of the new gentile-friendly town of Winston for that purpose. Like Durham, Winston became an industrial powerhouse, quickly tripling in size as Salem declined. Fast forward fifty years and the U.S. Postal Service created the name Winston-Salem for as the name for newly combined postal facilities. By 1913, just as the iconic Camel cigarette brand was created, the two towns merged but one had already become more of a neighborhood. Gradually over the next two decades, non-Moravians moved or established businesses in Salem including Krispy Crème Doughnuts, founded there as a wholesale operation in 1937. Symbolic, nearby was a brothel. To put this in context, this was the period when the Wake Forest School of Medicine, then an extension of a small Baptist college north of Raleigh, opened in Winston-Salem thanks to a trust set up by RJR executive Bowman Gray. Some historic Salem structures had tragically been torn down and replaced by incongruent structures that certainly didn’t fit or belong. But it was plan to plop a supermarket in the midst of the old village that sparked a community-wide “sense of place revolt.” Within a year, an architectural design overlay, only the fifth in the U.S., was created to protect Old Salem. A Boston firm whose two principals had helped create Colonial Williamsburg was commissioned to conduct a historic survey and propose a plan for preservation. But a young WWII Navy veteran and antique collector named Frank Horton had already been busy combing through the meticulous Moravian archives to identify which buildings were truly historic. He accompanied the survey team and in late 1949, the findings were presented to Winston-Salem leaders in the 1920s-era Robert E. Lee Hotel, a contemporary of the Washington Duke in Durham. While even older landmark hotels are still in service in many communities across the country such as Spokane, where I served, both the Robert E. Lee and the Washington Duke would soon be imploded by the forces of “shiny and new” in favor of generic substitutes. Mayor M.C. Kurfees had just been elected and moved quickly to form a commission to oversee preservation, headed by James A. Gray III, the scion namesake of the then head of R.J.R Tobacco and nephew of Bowman Gray. The long-serving Kurfees is as crucial to Winston-Salem as his contemporary, the equally long-serving Mayor of Durham, E. J. “Mutt” Evans. But as sense of place advocates rallied, so did disciples of the “shiny and new” a few blocks away. Without due process and against Kurfees’ caution, officials listening to chamber types fired the city manager there and replaced him with a relative newcomer, a former FBI agent who had recently been Police Chief. The manager soon became a spearhead for commercial boosters of the “shiny and new” there pursuing an expressway and setting in motion destruction in the guise of urban renewal. Significantly, not only was Gray connected to the power structure in Winston but his mother was also a Moravian with deep ancestral roots in historic Salem. Together with Charles Babcock, a newcomer with connections, and Frank Horton as officers, Gray, a newspaper executive, founded Old Salem Inc. to implement the preservation plan. Gray and Babcock, also related to RJR by marriage, raised the funds to implement the preservation plan for the old town of Salem, while Horton took on the challenge of buying and destroying 120 intruding structures. In 1954, Horton was joined for two decades by another vet, Frank Albright, as director of research, who in real life was one of The Monuments Men, a special unit made famous this year in the acclaimed George Clooney film. Already Horton had begun reclaiming Salem artifacts that had slipped away and began reconstructing the story of Old Salem. Albright, an archeologist by training, soon began excavations. As I first walked through Old Salem in early 1990, Horton, Kurfees and Gray had retired as legends, but the results of their four decades of work on Old Salem was incredible to see including several restorations serving as museums, clearly distinguished from reconstructions. Gardens were also being restored and Horton had founded the adjacent Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, populated in part with the meticulous collection he and his mother had assembled. Making sweet irony, its home was a former Kroger Supermarket. Within a year of my first tour of Old Salem, Hobie Cawood, with whom I would then work on state-wide tourism issues, retired from a three decade career with the National Park Service to head Old Salem for a decade. On our morning walk after that awards banquet last week, we headed down the hill through Old Salem, my first visit in over two decades. It is a “real” and authentic place. No Disney-ification here. It is now managed and programmed by more than 200 employees and its historical research and archeology continue. It is clearly the temporal heart and soul of Winston-Salem and the enduring symbol of its sense of place. The area had been re-branded before I retired from a four decade career in destination marketing as Old Salem Museums & Gardens and the village as the Historic Town of Old Salem, but at its heart remains Old Salem Inc. The 1950s were heady times for Winston-Salem in other ways including relocating the rest of what is now Wake Forest University there. But panic set in as its manufacturing heartbeat quietly began to lose steam. Leaders had been stung by criticism during that 1947 “sense of place revolt that the town wasn’t new and modern enough and that its flair for the fantasy arts a joke. Next came a new convention center followed by implosion of the old Robert E. Lee to make room for two equally incongruent formula hotels without the character or the bones of the old hotel or its connection to sense of place. Little more than a decade later Durham would make the same fatal decision, an incongruent testament to the “new and shiny” in violent contrast to the state’s first commercial district on the national historic register. In the 1960s, in part because the first arts council had also been created there in 1949, leaders pursued the new UNC School of the Arts which protects the southern approach to the Old Salem Museums and Gardens as does green space along Salem Creek. UNCSA saved and restored a 1929 silent movie theater from the forces of “shiny and new,” and restored it in 1983 as a 1400-seat performing arts center. Now the acclaimed school has plans to add a 3,000 seat performing arts center downtown. Experts note that most performing arts centers are in “the assembly-line business” rather than being actual creators. But in Winston-Salem, the new center for performing arts will be both. As such, it will leverage rather than put sense of place at risk as most large-scale venues do. But advocates for the “shiny and new” are impatient with growing indigenous festivals and culinary arts. Downtown advocates there have sought instead to try and lure away name restaurants and festivals from other communities such as Durham, failing to recognize that sense of place would not come with them. A new visitor’s center at Old Salem is now linked from the west by a state DOT pedestrian overpass in the form of a recreation of an old wooden bridge. Pinned down by those obsessed more with the “shiny and new” when I visited Winston-Salem in 1989, its much longer established destination marketing organization lagged behind until recently, so beholden only to the solicitation of the 10% of national visitation drawn for conventions and meetings that it didn’t even have a visitor’s guide at the time. So Durham was able to rapidly eclipse Winston-Salem by adopting data-driven holistic community marketing and fulfilling the customary role as guardian of sense of place. Beginning in 1982, Durham was also first to begin adaptively reusing millions and millions of square feet of its old factories and warehouses, but still lags behind Winston-Salem and other similarly sized destinations with only an avatar of a local history museum, more than 60 years after residents and officials embraced it during its centennial in 1953. But many community leaders in Winston-Salem have never lost sight of sense of place as a as a priority. In the 2000s, a New Winston Museum was created (a museum of local history distinct from Old Salem – get it?) Plans are for a new facility downtown, along with a new Carolina Air & Auto Museum along the north edge of downtown. RJR buildings are now also being adaptively reused, one as the state’s first Kimpton Boutique Hotel. But Winston-Salem has also learned from that near miss in 1947. It is careful to define districts and works hard to guide developments and architectural styles into those where they will coherently belong. Durham has design guidelines but proponents of development often sell out for fear of losing, even with the community’s own public facilities. Durham is better at community branding, understanding than an overarching personality is about what a place really is, not what you strive to be. Still stung by those 60-year-old criticisms, Winston-Salem has proclaimed itself the city of arts, now adding on innovation. But this isn’t where the city is distinctive, falling far below many other cities on indices for these traits, even in North Carolina. Communities such as Winston-Salem and Durham, where sense of place has been preserved, are still torn by the forces of fantasy lobbying incessantly for things “shiny and new” things that make them the same rather than distinct and threatening to hollow out sense of place. The less rooted in these communities should take heed from a famous 1952 quote by Frank Horton as work on Old Salem began: "There will be no window dressing. We plan to restore the old town as it was and not as we imagine it should be. Whatever is done in the name of history must be honest, authentic, and accurate.” Communities such as Durham and Winston-Salem cling to sense of place while others long ago gave up and became merely commercial replicas in pursuit of “edifice envy”, forces from which no community is ever immune. Thanks to those with ties to founding generations but when each community was still 90% North Carolinian, they set a standard for sense of place. Now it falls to more recent and often unfamiliar generations as well as newcomers to take up the torch. Hopefully Durham and Winston-Salem are still learning from one another and can tame the forces of “shiny and new.”

A Priceless Little Leather Pocket Book

My concern that Durham, North Carolina, where I live is losing valuable artifacts and records every day that passes without erection of a full-fledged Museum of Durham History is personal.

One of my great (x2) grandfathers and a great-great-great-grandfather selected in 1846 as part of a small vanguard to blaze a largely new pathway into the Rocky Mountains kept a diary.

He wasn’t the official diarist for the company, but his notes shatter some stereotypes of what it was like as they marked and created infrastructure along the 1,100 route that others would follow through territory of the United States yet to be organized.

Before I touch on some of his revelations, I must note that when I was growing up, both sides of my family were pretty mum about my ancestral involvement on that wagon train.

I’m sure they were aware, but even as we passed through from Idaho to see family, my parents neglected to mention that the names of these ancestors were inscribed on a monument that was then centered at the Salt Lake intersection at Main Street and South Temple.

But none of us realized my great-great-grandfather had kept a diary until someone unrelated who had read it growing up, turned it over to family members in Idaho the year I graduated from college.

After memorial copies were made and distributed to descendants, the small little leather pocket book was placed for safekeeping in the Mormon Church Historical Department where then one of my professors was an assistant.

His prominence in the vanguard group was only as chief wheelwright due to being a carriage-maker back as a sixth-generation Quaker-American in his native Upper Providence, east of the Schuylkill.

In his diary, he describes being chosen as one of ten people to hunt buffalo along the trail when provisions were needed and standing as guard during stops.

But he was also one of the head cooks chosen by his group of ten men (they organized into 14 groups but there were only three women and two children.)

Meals included a hot breakfast and dinner with a cold lunch prepared in advance for a midday stop to feed, hydrate and rest the livestock.

The wagons weren’t all uniform and they didn’t travel single file like they do in the movies unless required by the terrain.  They traveled five vehicles abreast, some buggies and smaller wagons, some covered wagons, but not the big Conestoga wagons.

The diary covers several years including this four month journey, and a trip back to visit his mother prior to departure.  It includes a journal of services provided, detailing the date, for whom, the repair and payment if any.

These tended to be primarily converted farm wagons.  Usually people walked or rode alongside.  Mostly they used huge teams of oxen as draft animals to pull the wagons.

Oxen are mature, castrated male cattle, as compared to milk or breeding cows and bulls or beef cattle which are steers.  But at the time, a steer who reached four years old was considered an ox.

American oxen were generally 1,800 to 2,000 pounds of pure muscle, standing about six feet tall, about that long and eight feet around.  Oxen were preferred to draft horses because they were better in muddy conditions including when teams doubled up to cross rivers.

They could also survive on little food of poor quality which was common as they crossed the Great Plains of Nebraska and the High Plains of Wyoming, especially where overgrazed by huge herds of Buffalo that would stretch for a day at a time.

This vanguard unit circled their 73 wagons when possible at night with the livestock inside the loop, including 66 oxen, 52 mules, 93 horses (mostly saddle,) 19 cows, 17 dogs and some chicken.

A bugle sounded wake-up at 6 a.m. and when it was time to retire each night at 8:30 p.m.  Often they danced, played cards and sang at night, sometimes according to my great-grandfather, a little too loudly.

His dry sense of humor comes through when he mentions speeches that were sometimes “rather long” or “ not very edifying.”

He also describes in a passport application soon after this journey that he stood 5’8”, a little bald with grey eyes, a Roman nose, full mouth, ruddy complexion and oval face.

This ancestor’s favorite song was “leather breeches,” a jig danced with “controlled abandon” across America at that time.  But it would have been without musical instruments which were deemed too heavy to bring along.

Although these wagons could carry up to a ton and a half, the uncertainty of this vanguard journey would have meant they were kept as light as possible.

If they sang about their final destination, they would have used California, the term at the time for anything over the Rockies.

I’m sure an a cappella version of Come, Come Ye Saints, a hymn penned a year earlier and put to the music of an older camp revival melody earlier by a member along for that journey, was already as popular as it is still today.

Another was probably Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.

The diary records that the party stopped to help others traveling across the Platt River on the California Trail and that some were fellow Missourians who had some members of the group out of that state less than a decade earlier.

Each member of the vanguard was required to have a rifle primed and ready to fire (flintlock) at a moment’s notice, with a piece of leather to keep the firing mechanism dry.

They often encountered Nation Americans including Otoe, Sioux and Pawnee, the former at war with the latter, as well as Arapaho, Cheyenne and Shoshone.

The diary records a visit to a burned out Pawnee village and the huge size and construction of lodges.  Sioux visited and stayed overnight inside the circle of wagons one night.

But others bands often attempted to extort food and other supplies.

We are blessed to have this account, written in the hand of an ancestor, but I wonder how and when it slipped away for so long?  As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, this makes me concerned that families with deep Durham connections may be losing sight of the importance of artifacts and records so important to preserve.

Hopefully, officials in my adopted hometown will soon realize the same sense of urgency for a Museum of Durham History long shown among residents in public opinion polls.

Heritage is perishable.

If A Statue Should Be Erected One Day

With all due respect to a long-time friend and contemporary of mine who led the final charge, I have a suggestion should a statue ever be erected to honor the individual most responsible for the resurgence of Downtown Durham, North Carolina.

Besides, we’ve already been memorialized (although I’m 25 pounds lighter now).  But we clearly stood on the shoulders of many others, including some with ties to Durham’s founding generation.

Having passed away earlier this year, this person was tiny and unassuming and yet a powerhouse of community activism.  She probably began in areas such as pioneering child-care for families with both parents who work.

When I arrived in Durham on a mission to jumpstart this community’s first official destination marketing organization in 1989, having helped start several others, I was under no illusion that I was coming to the rescue.

For any new DMO exec, the first order of business is research into what has been done to shape any sense of place that may remain.

Dating to its first, it was obvious generations here had shaped a community worth loving and worth visiting, but it was not without battle scares.

Asking around about who had been most passionate about Durham in the decades before my arrival led to audiences with a number of individuals.  It is a good way to learn what had worked and what hadn’t over the years.

None was more dynamic than Margaret Davis Haywood, then in her 70s.  Standing about 5’4” or so, she was unpretentious and humble but incredibly helpful and supportive.

She gave me clues on where I should start, which were echoed in meetings with George Watts Hill, Josephine Clement, Southgate Jones Jr., Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans and Elna Spaulding, all contemporaries of Mrs. Haywood who have also now passed on.

I wasn’t so brave as to expect an interview with these people but often the people I would contact for referral's would insist on paving the way.  Each not only knew first hand several generations of Durham natives back to the very first but had been an activist for Durham.

Margaret Haywood, I would learn from others, fed up with the failed policies of urban renewal, had helped instigate what I call a “sense of place revolt” while in her 50s.

It was an insurrection sparked in defense of the 1920s-era Carolina Theater, which in the early to mid-1970s had been targeted for demolition to create a parking lot by local officials.

The “sense of place revolt” she and cohorts inspired not only saved the cultural landmark, but forged an organization as guardian of other landmarks as well as an inventory of historic treasures by state officials throughout what we call the City Center District today.

As a result, this commercial district was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, the first in North Carolina so recognized.

Often it is those who raise the funds who get the credit—as they should—while co-conspirators in “sense of place revolts” such as Mrs. Haywood, are overlooked because they take a more strategic role.

The “sense of place revolt” led by Haywood and others raged for a decade, inspiring efforts by others to safeguard other ingredients and assets that make up Durham’s sense of place.

It inspired Duke student to rally in support of a historic black neighborhood and commercial district in the path of the Durham Freeway and formation of an alliance of neighborhoods and the banning billboards.

Others simultaneously worked with landowners and developers to establish a scenic overlay along Durham’s stretch of I-40 and push for signature landscaping around the co-owned airport.

It is through the unsung grit, determination and valor symbolized by Haywood that also a new breed of developer was inspired to begin adaptation of historic structures.

Two decades before their now idolized successors, they initiated the trend of converting these sense of place assets into restaurants, residences, stores and offices rather than just grumble about them being in the way.

A decade before Margaret’s “sense of place revolt” sparked what would become a complete renaissance of Downtown Durham over the next three decades, the New York Times had, in the wake of the tragic implosion of Old Penn Station in that community to make way for an nondescript office tower, penned:

“We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”

That, too, spawned a “sense of place revolt” to preserve and adaptively use other landmarks there.

Margaret Haywood is proof that the self-less determination of just a few individuals can save a community’s distinct sense of place from forces that would otherwise homogenize it.

To use a phrase coined by one of my co-workers at the time I first met Mrs. Haywood, communities really can “fast forward without saying goodbye to yesterday.”

Today, Durham’s sense of place is at risk again, but this time from a another breed of developer, who was drawn to this sense of place, but now seems eager to pollute it with “franchise architecture,” and “formula developments” that drive up rents and hollow out the authenticity of its tenants.

All Margaret Haywood could focus on that day we first talked was the failure to save the historic Washington Duke Hotel from implosion a year or so after the revolt.

Opening in 1925 within a year of the Carolina Theater, the hotel had cost $1.8 million, seven times the cost of the theater and nearly $25 million in today’s dollars.

It was the finest hotel in the South at the time.

A mid-century annex is being restored today as one of several hotels around the CCB Plaza where the old Washington Duke once stood, including a 21c Museum Hotel and a boutique hotel called The Durham.

More than a decade later, people in Durham that December would recall to me its implosion with descriptions of clouds of debris flooding downtown streets similar to what we saw when terrorists brought down the Twin Towers in New York, but without the horrific human tragedy.

The implosion, even more than the demolition of Union Station here a few years earlier, galvanized some—but not all—Durham residents around sense of place.

And we would see on the heels of those initiatives I mentioned earlier incredible design incongruity of public facilities such as the Civic Center, Detention Center, Performing Arts Center, Transportation Center and Human Services Building.

I’m reminded by a friend that in the early 1970s, after a Southern business and development magazine labeled Durham a “hot dog” town, Haywood and some friends formed Pride Builders of Durham.

It was a precursor to a grass-roots successor we would forge two decades later as Durham Image Watch involving hundreds of resident volunteers who rallied to help Durham’s community destination marketing fulfill its role as guardian of image, identity and sense of place.

Business and university executives, as well as most politicians and executives of other types of economic development organizations are wary of standing up so overtly on behalf of a community, although most were very supportive when DCVB did.

There were always a few exceptions during my career.  Some would join with us when asked, balancing out a far bigger number who would duck for cover, and a few more trying to pull us back for fear of rocking the boat.

But residents of Durham both in public opinion polls and through personal involvement always wanted us to do more, especially those I mentioned above and none more than Margaret Haywood and her Pride Builders.

The implosion of the old hotel in 1975 spurred local officials a few months later to launch a consultant-led study of the feasibility of a new civic/convention center for the old hotel’s site.

But its location, when erected a little more than a decade later, would be hijacked when officials tore down another full block of historic buildings across the street instead to appease the developer of an office tower.

This island of incoherence remains an inspiration for those who today seem more pursuant instead of “franchise architecture” and corrosion of of sense of place, aided by some sworn or elected to defend it.

Today, thanks in part to the community marketing that gave it oxygen and awareness beginning in 1989, Durham is now recognized as one of the country’s “foodiest” towns, including perhaps even hot dogs.

But unless repeatedly called to task by citizen activists like Margaret Haywood, Durham often seems to take two steps forward only to inexplicably take one or two back when fostering the sense of place.

In her 80s by then and more than two decades after that “sense of place revolt,” Margaret was still rallying others to step forward, this time for a Museum of Durham History to memorialize Durham’s sense of place.

The struggle continues to keep Durham distinct, both in the economic importance of being different and its worthiness of love.

It may even require another “sense of place” revolt.

The First Generation Kindling of Durham’s Passion for Place

It was conceived at a pivotal time in my community’s history when a population of only 8% of what it has become today was already seeking to preserve Durham, North Carolina’s history.

Whenever visitors to Durham first see Duke University Chapel, the first thing they often say once they catch their breath is, “that’s not a chapel, it’s a cathedral.”

I’m sure I even said something like that when I was given a tour of the community during my interview twenty-five years ago to become the startup executive for Durham’s marketing agency.

Today I know that tour was really an audition to see if I had an understanding enough of sense of place to truly grasp the essence of Durham’s.

But the term chapel has never been a reference to size, nor does the term cathedral always mean large.

One is a term used by many religions, especially in reference to churches embedded within universities, e.g. King’s College Chapel at the University of Cambridge.

The other refers to central as in diocese vs. parish.

What distinguishes Duke’s collegiate gothic cruciform chapel from those at other universities that seek to evoke a cathedral of the English Middle Ages is its 210 foot high tower made to seem even higher by its placement.  It’s just five feet short of the cathedral at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Duke Chapel was envisioned in the mid-1920s when a prototype that still serves as a church here was built to test the use of various sources of stone during a pivotal decade in the evolution of the part of Durham’s sense of place centered around its “built” character.

This was also when Duke Forest was envisioned as a means to rehabilitate depleted tobacco fields, now a vast symbol of Durham’s broader urban forest canopy and a vaunted part of it “natural” character.

It took from between 1950 and 1960 until 2000 to establish and mature a pine forest in Duke Forest and foster an understory of hardwood trees.

The transition of parts from pines to hardwood forest began at the turn of the century and will continue until 2030.  The first hardwoods there will begin to climax from 2030 on.

All of that is to put 100 years of Durham history and its urban canopy today in context.

But by 1920, the founding generation of Durham was also already busy preserving its five decades of history.

Durham was stunned in the fall of 1921 when the original Bennett Place farmhouse where the Civil War had effectively ended here 56 years earlier burned to its foundation.

Many across North Carolina at the time preferred to remember the war only through a revisionist movement known as “the lost cause.”  But many in Durham, including Washington Duke, had been “unionists” and fought only because it was mandatory.

Samuel Tate Morgan, who had purchased Bennett Place anticipating a memorial park there, had died a few months earlier. Trust titan James Buchanan Duke, also a Durham native, served as one of his pall bearers.

Morgan’s father had died when he was eight, around the age of my grandsons now.  He was fully aware as pursuing Union cavalry caught up with Confederate units trailing through Durham resulting in a truce and culminating in the pivotal surrender at Bennett Place.

Soon, Morgan moved from his Flat River roots a few miles south, to the crossroads known as Durham where the Dukes, Carrs and Blackwells were busy earning Durham a national reputation for manufacturing. 

He founded the Durham Fertilizer Company recycling wasted stems from tobacco processing which soon became the nucleus of his huge Virginia-Carolina Chemical Co, the largest in the world.

At the time of his death, Morgan was also president of the Southern Cotton Oil Co, the Charleston Mining and Manufacturing Co and a director of the Texas and Pacific Railway, but he never lost touch with his Durham roots.

Knowing his reverence and plans for Bennett Place, his widow and heirs donated the property to the state, while Durham’s state lawmakers pushed the General Assembly to designate and maintain it as a state historic site.

To make that happen Durham Representatives Reuben Everett, an early Durham civil rights attorney and advocate, and Frank Fuller Jr., an attorney and part of a group known as the Durham Dynamos, worked with Durham state Senator Bennehan Cameron, a farmer and railroad executive.

Cameron also helped organize the First Bank of Durham, now adaptively reused as office space, across from where a 21C Hotel is doing the same to another famous Durham banking landmark.

Both are just up Main Street from where another historic bank building is being converted to restaurant, adding to Durham’s reputation for locally-owned, chef-driven facilities and a national foodie reputation.

Everett, Cameron and Fuller’s father were all contemporaries of Morgan and J.B. Duke and all shared life-long devotion to Durham and preservation of its history and other elements of sense of place.

They were working to preserve Durham history long before some of the old tobacco factories and warehouses we consider so historic today were even built, including major portions of the American Tobacco, West Village and Measurement Inc.

Much of the brick work in these buildings is distinct from that of buildings in other communities of the day.  Durham’s first generation, in thought and deed, revered its sense of place.

Frank Fuller Jr., whose historic Morehead Hills home was inhabited until recently by an acclaimed Durham architect and his jazz singer wife, was the scion of one of the founders of the Durham Buggy Company, Frank L. Fuller Sr.

Ironically, more than a decade ago a Durham developer offered to restore one of the historic buildings developed by Frank Fuller Sr. in the 1930s as Duke Chapel was being built.

It had been sitting vacant since 1992 when it last served as a clearing house for social services and then deed it back for $1 to the proposed Museum of Durham History.

The then county manager nixed the proposal, instead leaving the building vacant and decaying for another decade when it was adaptively and lovingly reused as event space only to soon close.

As foretold, the building revealed a treasure trove of Durham history and it wasn’t the first time in the past 60 years that Durham officials let pass a perfect opportunity to house the Durham history museum. 

In fulfillment of Samuel Tate Morgan’s wishes, in 1923 Durham leaders also erected the Unity Monument near the ruins of the Bennett Place farmhouse.

In part, the monument was designed by T.Y. Milburn who lived near Fuller in Morehead Hills and was also busy at that time designing many of the buildings that are signatures of Durham’s sense of place including the Carolina Theater, Durham School for the Arts and the King’s Daughter’s Inn.

Milburn’s civic engagement also spanned the era three decades later when he and other Durham leaders transformed the state’s economy once again laying its foundation as a center for research, hi-tech and healthcare.

But let me take a brief break from this story to put into context that early 1920s and 1930s era of Durham’s historical reverence and memorial at a time when the community was only a third as old as it is today.

This is the period that spurred second-generation Durham textile executive and newly minted radio entrepreneur, Mayor W.F. Carr (William Frederick) in 1934 to ask famed city engineer John Michie to lay the foundation of a Durham history museum in the months prior to Duke Chapel’s dedication.

Carr was mayor until 1948 but the movement for a museum of Durham history was tabled due to the Great Depression and then WWII.

In 1949, according to Durham historian Jim Wise, Southgate Jones Sr. offered his father’s historic mansion along with memorabilia as a site for the museum.

Instead, a few years later it became the site of a hotel and is now the site of a new transportation center that somehow eluded historic design guidelines.

The proposal as a museum was deep sixed back then by city and county managers and elected officials during a four-decade era of obsession with “holding taxes at all costs,” which compromised not only reverence for Durham’s past but nearly choked off its future.

Famously pro-Durham, Southgate Jones Jr. was one of my strongest backers when in 1989 I started the agency for Durham charged with marketing the community and championing its sense of place.

He was also a passionate advocate for a local history museum, a public priority still being hamstrung by a few officials even though the need is still held in high esteem among residents of a community that has grown many times in size.

Ostensibly it is still throttled because this long-held cultural priority would cost the equivalent of what was just spent to overall the 18-year-old Durham Bulls Athletic Park.  But that is less than half of what was spent a few years ago on a new theater.

As an organic measure of how much time has been lost in the 90 years since first proposed, the depleted soils where Duke Forest now stands have gone from crabgrass to shrubs to pine forest to emerging hardwood forest.

Just sayin’.

In the late 1950s Durham residents stirred again, hoping to replicate the old Bennett Place farmhouse in time for the Centennial of the Civil War.

Civil War buff Charles Pattishall who owned a garage on Markham Avenue just off Ninth Street was assisted by Dr. Lenox Baker, who took me on one of those orientation tours when I first moved here.

Using the pattern and materials from an identical farmhouse being torn down on Chapel Hill Road, they reconstructed the Bennett farm house where Confederate General Joe Johnston disobeyed Jefferson Davis and surrendered to Union General William T. Sherman putting an effective end to the tragic war.

A call went out for artifacts which were relocated or returned.  It was completed in time for the first reenactment of the surrender in 1965 and attended by U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey and newly-elected Governor Dan Moore.

In the 1970s, the state added a visitor center on the site after officially making it a state historic site.

The period bookending the preservation of Bennett Place also marks the preservation of two other state historic sites in Durham.

In 1930 Washington Duke’s granddaughter, Mary Duke Biddle, whose daughter I came to know, bought the old Duke Homestead after returning to Durham from New York City and presented it to Duke University in 1931 which began to restore it.

In 1966 it was named a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service and became a state historic site in 1974 with a working history farm and the addition of a mini-museum and visitor center in 1977.

In 1973, Margaret Haywood, who passed away three months ago, began a crusade forming Preservation Durham, saving the Carolina Theater and igniting the reinvigoration of downtown that spanned my tenure in Durham.

She also set about to earn a designation for the 1787 Bennehan House in northern Durham near where Morgan was born to the National Register of Historic Places.

In turn, she then persuaded the owner of Liggett and Meyers Tobacco Company to put their house, outbuildings, historic barn, a yeoman farmers house of the same period and slave quarters, all of which lie along the Great Indian Trading Path in Northern Durham, to the state as a historic site and archeological resource.  It’s called Stagville State Historic Site now.

Dating to when it was younger than I am now, (65) Durham residents were already busy passionately preserving the community’s history and its green infrastructure, a lesson yet to be learned by political regressives in high office a hundred years later.

They seem to yearn for a time of desecration while Durham’s founders yearned for sense of place.

Now that more than 160 years have passed, is it time for elected officials and administrative caretakers to do the same:

Fulfill the community’s 90 year old yearning for a Museum of Durham History and develop comprehensive strategic plans for preservation of its urban forest and historic buildings.

Never Underestimate The Power of Artifacts

Some really cool people are making the Museum of Durham History a reality.  But from the outset, a few have been petrified of being in the “artifact” business.

Granted I am an artifact junkie.  In my former career, I kidded unmercifully the now retired head of our local science museum for giving away a very cool 1942 DC-3 to another museum.

It had been purchased from the military by Western Airlines the year before I was born and then sold to Piedmont Airlines in North Carolina and flown as the Potomac Pacemaker from 1956, when I was the age of my grandsons now, until 1965 when I was a senior in high school.

During that span, the plane most certainly flew in and out of RDU International Airport which is co-owned by Durham, but through Raleigh subterfuge (see page 6), the other co-owner had the name  switched out of alphabetical order.

In fact, in the image below, that very well could be the Potomac Pacemaker sitting in front of the RDU terminal in the late 1950s.  Piedmont few in and out of RDU from the airline’s inception in 1948 when it was founded in Winston-Salem, NC.

When I was growing up, we either took livestock for auction to Bozeman or Idaho Falls which are very roughly equidistant from our ancestral ranch in the Yellowstone—Teton nook of Idaho.

When the choice was Idaho Falls, my paternal grandfather, who was born in 1888, loved to go out to the old airport that had been built there in the 1930s by the WPA and watch Western Air Express prop planes such as the DC-3 take off and land on routes from Montana to California.

A decade after it was retired, the Potomac Pacemaker was salvaged and then donated to the Durham-based NC Museum of Life & Science in 1978 by Durham-native Dillard Teer and his family.

The Teer family has been prominent in Durham now for 125 years, having built the Blue Ridge Parkway and many of the major roads in North Carolina.

They also owned and operated the Durham & Southern railway, built airfields around the world including RDU’s in 1939, developed Research Triangle Park here, and through several generations have served on the RDU Airport Authority.

The family carefully trucked the historic aircraft to the Durham museum where it was lovingly restored and mounted for display by former employees of Piedmont.

When I moved to Durham in June of 1989, I was intrigued by Piedmont Airlines which had been founded in North Carolina the year I was born, only to be gobbled up by US Airways three months after I arrived here.

To me, that made the Potomac Pacemaker mounted at the Museum of Life and Science a valuable visitor feature as well as a significant symbol of Durham’s history.

Of course, had it been retained instead of given away in 2004, it would be too large to be displayed inside what will eventually be a full-fledged Museum of Durham History, unless hung from a vaulted ceiling.

But the old DC-3 could have been mounted at the front entrance of the eventual local history museum as an icon, much as this Mercury Redstone Rocket does today for the Museum of Life and Science.

One only has to look at the front-page news about the recent reclamation of one of Durham’s 1949 fire trucks which will join two others, one from 1902 and another from 1935, in yet another mini-museum, to see how artifacts capture the public’s enthusiasm.

Maybe my friend, the former director, who parted ways with the Potomac Pacemaker is serving penance by being a driving force in retirement for a Museum of Durham History (smile.)

Instead, the Potomac Pacemaker is now in loving hands of volunteers again who are fully restoring it for display one day at the state Transportation Museum in Spencer, NC.

It was given away ten years ago as museums fell under the spell of interactive exhibits, especially for children.  But soon it became clear even to museums created during this span, that it is the genuine artifacts that garner the most attention and create a sense of awe.

It is both/and, never either/or.

By not wanting to be in the “artifact business,” I assume some who are laying the groundwork for the Museum of Durham History (now represented by a hub-avatar) probably fear that people like me will show up with their grandfather’s collection of old National Geographic magazines (smile.)

But museums don’t need to tie themselves down by vetting potential donations.  They could use trained volunteers or contract with entities that do that sort of thing.  We’ve all seen this vetting at work on TV shows such as Antique Roadshow, American Pickers or even Pawn Stars.

The primary importance of history museums, especially local history museums, is the telling of stories.  A recent essay posted by the Smithsonian explains why artifacts are so powerful, far more powerful than just photographs or videos:

• Artifacts tell their own stories.
• Artifacts connect people.
• Artifacts mean many things.
• Artifacts capture moments.
• Artifacts reflect changes.

The authors note that (paragraphing inserted for ease of reading):

“Artifacts are the touchstones that bring memories and meanings to life. They make history real. Moreover, it is a reality that can and should be viewed from different perspectives.

When museums choose not to enshrine and isolate an artifact but instead open it up to new interpretations and different points of view, they provide opportunities to challenge and enhance our understanding of the past.”

Anything but static, “consider each artifact with its many stories as holding diverse meanings for different people, past and present. Think of them as bits of contested history.”

The authors of the essay, National Museum of American History curator Kathleen Kendrick and Dr. Steven Lubar at Brown University, have written several books both together and separately about the legacies of artifacts and what is worth saving.

Because Durham officials have delayed what has for eight decades (half of Durham’s existence) been a top cultural priority among Durham residents as measured most recently during a cultural master planning process, thousands of invaluable artifacts have been dispersed around the world.

Many are in landfills, but many were hopefully plucked by collectors from garage and estate sales when distant decedents of Durham owners, ignorant of their significance, put them on sale or discarded them after cleaning out attics.

This means the Museum of Durham History, when finally fully enabled, will need to put out calls to collectors and pickers for invaluable but forgotten Durham heirlooms and hope they can at least be loaned to the museum.

One only has to watch and observe visitors to the three state historic sites in Durham (mini-museums) to see how significant artifacts are.  Each site has hidden away details on how to relocate hundreds more than they have room to put on display.

With each passing day, Durham loses more and more of its history.  For those still puzzled about why we should care, here are just a few reasons a Museum of Durham History, stocked with both artifacts and the latest technology, is crucial:

• Story Telling. It will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that stories are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and “generica.”
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifacts, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting, etc.

My dad was notoriously unsentimental about artifacts but through the last few decades of his life he learned to ask me first before disposing of old equipment and memorabilia.

Unfortunately, this was too late to salvage tack from the ranch or my great-grandfather’s branding irons.

Never underestimate the power of artifacts.

Perfect Spot For A Museum

I’ve been watching with interest what is going on in the part of Downtown Durham, North Carolina where West Village Phase three is currently under construction.  That’s the building going up in what was a surface parking lot behind the Museum of Durham History’s “History Hub.”

I eat dinner in that area frequently and one thing is for sure, parking is already getting harder to find.  It made me remember an idea I shared with a friend of mine at the City in the 1990s to put a deck in one or both of the surface lots dividing across from Brightleaf Square.

That adjacent district has been in need of more parking since the late 1980s.  This all made me wonder what will happen when the Chesterfield Building which is on the cusp of the two districts and recently sold to Wexford Science & Technology, comes online.

It is clear that adaptive reuse of this building known as the “New Cigarette Factory,” when it opened in 1948 and is one of the few historic tobacco factories and warehouses remaining to transform, will make a parking deck between the two districts even more imperative.

Which brings me to another thought I introduced in a blog last fall.

Wouldn’t it be great if local officials and museum advocates could use the street level of a future nearby parking deck as the home for the permanent version of the Museum of Durham History?

Examples to adapt are ones a friend saw planned in Sarasota, Florida which make use of the ground floor for uses such as this and incorporates a building wrap to disguise that it is a deck as well as multi-use space on top including residential.

Museums are a perfect accompaniment to space needed for offices in the daytime because with the exception of weekends, their attendance trickles instead of sporadically surging like other types of cultural facilities.

The average size for a local history museum is 30,000 square feet but only half of that is required for displays.  The remainder is used for offices, artifact, photograph and document storage and space to curate exhibits.

To minimize space for the latter is where Duke University’s support for the museum would be a good fit.  Duke has space where it stores special collections and arranged exhibitions.

None of this will be lost on a good friend who was an early museum proponent and now serves as director of development for Wexford Science & Technology, a developer of urban research parks such as the one planned for the “Chesterfield Building.”

Probably 99% of the people who pay attention to Bull City Mutterings don’t live in Durham, heck, half don’t even live in the United States.  I write about Durham more as an example.

Hopefully, this is useful to Durham readers or those of you from elsewhere who are trying to minimize costs for cultural facilities.

If not, from what I read, there may be a lot of former Wal-Mart space coming on the market soon.

The Ticking Clock on A Community’s Sense of Place

I noticed in a report last month that the recently opened History Hub, a kind of avatar or alter ego for a proposed Museum of Durham (North Carolina) History was already drawing 75% of its attendance from outside Durham with the majority between the ages of 18 and 49, younger than many expected.

Fortunately, the facility is tracking statistics such as these because they run counter to comments by detractors over the years, even though the proposed museum has been overwhelmingly favored by Durham residents in public opinion polls over more than two decades.

The facility also surfaced as the top priority in a cultural master plan and in a gap analysis of facilities needed to optimize visitor-centric economic and cultural development for Durham.

Another interesting metric at the Hub shows that more than 6-in-10 attendees at the museum would like to see more artifacts and photos.  This may be surprising to some advocates who have pushed for a more technological approach instead.

Unfortunately, those who have blocked the project over the past two decades, usually by means of leapfrogging it with other cultural facilities, probably are unaware that during the delay hundreds of thousands of historical Durham artifacts have been discarded.

Often children and grandchildren, as they clean out belongings after the passing of ancestors, fail to understand the importance of these items if not as keepsakes, then certainly to the communities they symbolize.

A few end up in yard or estate sales and are picked up by collectors but the vast majority of these items end up in landfills. 

One of my favorite blogs is Permanent Record, which is authored by a journalist, Paul Lukas.  The blog features artifacts of immense value that are retrieved by strangers from yard or estate sales and often returned to the families of those to which they belonged or given to unrelated or tangential museums.

At the pace local officials are moving, a future Museum of Durham History will be made to rely on this means of retrieving valuable symbols of its past or forced to go to the expense of deploying teams  of “pickers” across the land in search of Durham’s heritage.

True visionaries are those who understand the imperatives accrued by a local history museum or the clock ticking on sense of place.

Choice Architecture–Changing Defaults

A flashback on this, America Recycles Day, has me wondering if recycling may offer a possibility for the eventual home of a full-fledged Museum of Durham History, once it moves beyond the current avatar.

When I first visited Union Square in San Francisco, it was late September 1981.  A friend with Alaska Airlines, which had begun service to San Francisco two years earlier, had arranged for a group of us to fly from Alaska down to Oakland to see the Seahawks play the Raiders (Raiders won.)

On the way back to the airport, I asked if we could stop a few blocks west of the Square to see what was the late Bill Kimpton’s first boutique hotel, the Clarion Bedford, which six months earlier had launched a movement that is still revolutionizing lodging today.

Bill created a collection of very distinct properties, each with its own personality and its own chef-driven restaurant.  The Clarion had been a hotel owned by Lord Wedgewood (China) but essentially Bill took the idea of adaptively reusing old buildings to a new level, which is a form of recycling.

Union Square was originally just a park developed in the 1850s on the site of a huge sand dune.  But after the earthquake of 1906 there was talk of turning it into a parking lot, which then morphed into excavating an underground parking deck below the park and plaza, a form of recycling.

That idea didn’t win over voters until the late 1930s after San Franciscans had bet their homes to finance the Golden Gate Bridge.  When I visited, just as the 1980s got ready to economically boom, Union Square was being surrounded by high-end luxury stores.

A luxury hotel, now rebranded a J.W. Marriott, was erected by John Portman seven years after my visit, midway between the Square and the Kimpton’s Clarion Bedford.  That it marked the end of one era and the beginning of another was emerging during a stint there during a several months between gigs in  my field of community marketing.

Portman had started his career in the 1960s by ingeniously making adaptive reuse (a form of recycling) of a parking deck in Atlanta to create a Merchandise Mart.  In the 1970s and 1980s he made his name in hotels during the “brass and glass” era.

First it was by setting a new standard with the design of Hyatt Regencies and then in the 1980s, Marriott Marquis’, one of which kick started adaptive reuse of Times Square in New York while, regretfully, demolishing five historic theaters in the process.

Emerging out of controversy, the hotel was ultimately required to incorporate a new theater on the third floor.

It is clear in hindsight that the 1980s were bookended by the beginning of the boutique movement and the end of the era of huge atrium lobbies and rooftop restaurants.

Lodging began a transition, which is still underway, to Kimpton’s infinitely more distinctive and genuine community-connected approach now being emulated by chains.

Parking decks have evolved too.  Long viewed as uninspiring if not downright ugly necessities, many today are hidden inside retail and residential complexes or wrapped in disguise by developments like hotels or facades.

But old and new public decks are now are being adapted to feature retail or or restaurants or cultural facilities such as museums and galleries on the ground floor with rooftop residential and public spaces.

There is no reason a future new or renovated deck in Durham, North Carolina where I live can’t incorporate, on the ground floor, the 20,000 to 30,000 square feet typically needed by a local community history museum, which come to think of it is itself a form of recycling.

A good example is the State Street deck being built by local government in Sarasota, Florida as part of an agreement with a developer and rendered in the image in this blog.

A big part of getting institutions and individuals to recycle is a behavior called “choice architecture” in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, written by Dr. Richard H. Thaler, a behavioral economics researcher at the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein a professor of law at Harvard.

Getting people to recycle or adaptively reuse involves changing defaults.

One example is called “reverse recycling” which means switching up trash receptacles so trash goes in the little saddle bags once meant for recyclables and recyclables go in the much larger basket usually used for garbage.

A few years ago, I persuaded our sanitation department in Durham to replace my broken trash cart with a much smaller one since I was rarely filling the larger one after the city distributed much larger roll out carts for recycling.

Persistence paid off but I realized the department was stuck with the huge cart being the default.

But there is evidence that if the city gave every one the choice of a smaller cart along with a reduced fee, people would switch defaults and think recycling first and garbage second.  Here is a Nudge blog post showing how changing that ratio works and explaining why.

Studies show the same is true of grocery shopping carts.  Researchers at New Mexico State University found that people made healthier choices about food when carts were marked with tape showing where to put fruits and vegetables.

I love the smaller carts at Kroger and Food Lion but there are only a handful available, and usually none at Harris Teeter where I shop.  It is probably not coincidence that the smaller carts are the default at the more sustainability-focused Whole Foods in Durham.

The second call to action in the recycling slogan is “reduce.”  I bet the choices would be healthier if all stores made the smaller carts the default and the larger carts the exception.

All of these stores need to follow Whole Foods’ lead and at least reverse the ratio of large to small carts.  The first word in the slogan for recycling is “reduce.”

Organic Sense of Place and Power Brokers

Standing in the rain last week at a ribbon-cutting, I surveyed the crowd for the handful of people who fashion themselves as “power brokers.”  None were there, which is a sign the project is a natural fit, more filling in than wedging in, a “win-win” vs. zero sum and complimentary vs. silo.

Dignitaries were there to show support along with many others who truly have power.  But they were sprinkled among a far more abundant number of just regular folks who are passionate about Durham, North Carolina.

Durham has always had one or two power-brokers, fortunately just not the kind who think they are.  I’ve had the pleasure to know and work with three generations here going back to Mary Duke Biddle Semans and George Watts Hill.

Rather than bullying or superimposing their will through heavy-handedness, Durham’s true power-brokers have been patient with process.  Sense of place is about “gardening,” not “big game” hunting.   It is something organic that can’t be stamped out factory-style.

Two weeks ago I attended a dinner to honor one true power broker, Tallman Trask, and tonight I’ll raise a glass to toast the retirement of another, Wib Gulley, both of whom I am also honored to have as friends.

The key to visitor-centric cultural and economic development is only revealed and fueled by good place-marketing.  An indispensible pre-requisite is the existence of an authentic sense of place.

Beyond a mere jumble of culture, sense of place, to adapt the words of another longtime Durhamster, relies on a genuine community personality.

Power-broker “wanna bees” are often betrayed by their impatience with process and frequent use of force, including not-so-veiled threats sometimes.

Deep down, these folks are petrified that the true process of place-shaping will result in “anyone being able to say no, but no one being able to say yes.”

The “wanna bees” have a point, but while they may love Durham, it isn’t for what it is now nor how it came to be.  This makes them puzzled by data and vulnerable to decision-making by hunch, and in extreme cases cannibalistic, because their worldview is zero sum, winners or losers.

Often disparaged as DINOs (Durham In Name Only) even by those from whom they seek admiration, to me they are just afraid…and deeply suspicious of the organic nature of place evolution.

I feel sorry for them, but they certainly aren’t exclusive to Durham, they just stand out more here as an anomaly.

At least ten times that I am aware of over the span of my four-decade career marketing three different communities, power-broker “wanna bees” tried to get me fired.  I learned to respond by seeking to understand them.

In each of these cities I even helped one or two get on my governing board but they soon resigned, impatient with the process of governance or their inability to control a table of equals.  I never let any of their attempts to “get” me affect working with them wherever and whenever possible. 

A friend of mine who is a journalist and historian, who first approached me nearly 25-years ago about the need for such a facility is not being disrespectful when he refers to the herculean step taken last week as “a brick and glass avatar” of the one day Museum of Durham History (MoDH.)

At the time he and I first met, I was jumpstarting Durham’s official community destination marketing agency, an organization charged with telling the community’s story and safeguarding its sense of place, a position from which I retired many years ago.

Part of that mission included a thorough on-going analysis of Durham’s strengths and opportunities as a visitor destination.

As it has repeatedly since, that first analysis revealed that the need for a museum of local history is, and continues to be, Durham’s most glaring cultural deficit, something also confirmed separately a few years ago by consultants conducting a cultural master plan.

Analysis such as that conducted by Durham’s arm for visitor centric cultural and economic development is triangulated by:

1. Comparing our community by facility-type and category, with the average of similar communities in the state, across the region and nationwide.
2. Conducting research to determine a community’s visitor volume and participation in various activities to then compare against benchmarks nationwide.
3. Scientifically surveying a community’s residents and opinion leaders to identify and generalize the cultural priorities of internal stakeholders.

The analysis also ventured to suggest a self-funding mechanism to reinvest what would today be 1.6% of the local tax revenue reaped collectively by the city and county each year from visitors spending into development of a Museum of Durham History.

Including operation and upkeep, that’s less than 2% which would be easily recouped by Durham’s ability to harvest its full share of visitor participation at historic sites and monuments from its annual visitor base, which is now 9 million.

But as it has since first proposed in 1934, the idea of a Durham history museum continues to be leapfrogged by other needs, often disparaged during the process.  In the meantime, Durham historic treasures have been lost when discarded by three subsequent generations who failed to understand their value.

This may include the steam calliope that signaled shift-change atop “Old Bull,” a part of the national landmark which can’t be found.  Appropriately, It imitated the sound of a bull, something I know from growing up on a ranch would certainly get your attention.

All of this makes the “avatar” that opened last week even more impressive, but all has not been lost by the almost 80-year delay.  Many overlapping working groups of determined residents have continued to discuss the project over this span.

Undetected by impatient “list checkers,” each time these discussions have seemed to recycle, the concept has been re-informed along the route by more and more of what will ultimately make the real Museum of Durham History seamless and enduring when it becomes a reality.

Sense of place is not about having a jumble of “palaces,” but a mosaic of natural, cultural and “built” place-based assets forming an overall and distinctive community appeal.  It isn’t about being “world class” or “major league.”  It is about having a distinctive “there” there.

One thing that makes a local history museum similar to other types of cultural facilities is the proportion visitor-related admissions each year.

What truly distinguishes this type of facility from others is that instead of going there to watch the outside world pass by, residents, newcomers and visitors go to a history museum to explore the soul of a community and to appreciate and perpetuate the temporal values and traits that make a community unique and distinct.

In this respect, a local history museum is more a “cathedral” than a “palace,”  a place to glean ideas for the future by understanding the innovations of the past.

History museums are also participative and interactive, fulfilling the increasing need of Americans to modulate the amount recreational resources used at any given time.

Durham is justifiably proud of the board of directors, staff, volunteers and donors for the MoDH and its new hub.   This milestone is incredible and stands on the shoulders of Durham residents who have worked hard over the past eight decades to see it take this step.

They are genuine power-brokers, Durham-style.  Below are just four of the many additional reasons this tile in the mosaic of Durham’s sense of place is so important:

• Story Telling . it will give children, students, newcomers and relocating executives a place to get in touch with Durham’s story. People who grasp that story are more inclined to be engaged as activists, volunteers and philanthropy.
• Synergy. It will augment Durham’s historic sites by providing exhibition space to stir interest in those locations, making them more sustainable. It will complement rather than undermine other cultural facilities and programming.
• Preservation. It will be a vigilant testimony to what makes the community distinct and unique and insulate its character and personality from the pressures of development and generica.
• Future Generations. As a repository of innovations and artifact, it will inspire future generations to build on the temporal qualities that make Durham, well, Durham…creative, entrepreneurial, caring, innovative, accepting etc.