Symbolic For The Living

Later this month, as they do every few years, a group of volunteers in Durham, North Carolina, including some city and county officials, will invest some time and “elbow grease” to tidy the historic Geer Cemetery.

It is an all-black burial ground was established in 1877, twenty years before the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed “separate-but-equal” laws in the South, known as Jim Crow laws. In many states, that even included segregation after death.

Geer had fallen into such disrepair, that four years after that 1896 decision, the 10-month-old Durham Sun opined in an effort to get the city to restore this hallowed place.

But 115 years after that editorial, the City of Durham still finds excuses as to why that can’t happen.

Rather than racism, I suspect it has much more to do with bureaucratic inertia enabled by a reticence found commonly which is that asking questions is associated with criticism and “rocking the boat” with retribution.

This cultural affliction is very difficult to root out and inhibits private as well as public entities.  In my observation, it is most often the culprit holding organizations back from being more innovative.

This will be the fourth or fifth time in my 26 years of residence that volunteers have filled the city void.  Geer Cemetery is only a few blocks from my first house here on Shawnee Street in the Old North Durham neighborhood.

I grew to know the old cemetery during morning walks there with our dog at the time, named Jack.

On an April morning walk less than a year after my arrival, I saw members of the former Durham Service Corps (DSC) working to rehabilitate the old cemetery, a project documented in the report Reclaiming Yesterday.

Volunteers set to do the same thing next month are well advised to click on this link and read the report.

Resurrected, the DSC would be a more strategic, comprehensive and sustainable approach to both the issue of youth employment as well as maintenance of commons such as Geer Cemetery.

There are many benefits to engaging volunteers including a sense of community, physical activity and camaraderie, as well as bringing greater awareness to issues.

But a disconnect occurred about thirty years ago when governments at all levels, including those in Durham, seemed to forget that matching grants such as the one meant to pilot DCS as well as volunteerism are not mean to replace caretaking but to supplement it.

It isn’t that simple when it comes to cemeteries.

When it comes to a true census of cemeteries, it is volunteers including genealogists across the country who work hard to track cemeteries including hundreds in Durham County alone, mapped and maintained on the web by Allen Dew who partners with the Durham-Orange society.

Only a couple fall under the stewardship of the City of Durham.

Keep in mind that even progressive counties such as Durham didn’t begin the practice of issuing death certificates until 1908, a practice not required across North Carolina until 1913, a decade after that chide in the Durham Sun newspaper.

Some cemeteries here are incorporated with places of worship but most are small family plots including those I see seemingly protected in the right-of-ways along roadsides as I ride my Harley.

I grew fond of cemeteries beginning when I was age three as I would tag along with my parents up the hill behind the horse barn to a small cemetery carved out of our ancestral ranch to maintain the graves of many of my ancestors.

I even remember that it was while visiting the small historic cemetery next to a former Jesuit Seminary on a bluff high above Spokane, Washington one Saturday in 1973 that my daughter and only child decided it was time to be born, resulting in a mad dash down the mountain to the hospital.

Volunteers today also staff a website entitled “Find A Grave,” carefully curating cemeteries and individual gravesites on the web.  The nation-wide effort was founded in 1995 in Salt Lake City by Jim Tipton before being absorbed a few years ago into Ancestry.com.

The gravestone shown here in Holliday is that of one of my great-great grandfathers but it isn’t the original one.  One of that community’s first settlers, he was buried there in 1900 but by the late 1980s the old cemetery was in need of rehabilitation including replacement of headstones.

My maternal grandfather rescued the original marker and delivered it on a trip near the end of his life to my sister in Enumclaw, Washington, where as shown in the image in this blog, it rests in her garden.

Cities first began creating public cemeteries in 1831 and they soon they became viewed as the nation’s first public parks.  In fact, seeing how popular they were inspired cities two decades later to begin creating open and forested spaces dedicated as parks.

Just as WWII broke out in Europe, the Durham County health department closed Geer Cemetery in 1939 because it had become over crowded, although a burial or two was still held there until 1944.

It would be another decade before the U.S. Supreme Court would put an end to segregation, although segregationist candidates would continue to openly run and be elected in states such as North Carolina up through the 1990s.

Standing as a reminder of intolerance and our country’s ongoing struggle to overcome bigotry, historic Geer Cemetery deserves more of our recognition and respect including the city and county.

A Time When Infrastructure Was Bipartisan

During my first five years of grade school in the 1950s, even out west, construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway seemed to dominate each issue of the Weekly Reader with news about how it would enable huge cargo ships to transit to and from the Atlantic Ocean as far as 2,500 miles inland via the Great Lakes during nine months of the year.

During my recent visit along the eastern shoreline of 7,300-square-mile Lake Ontario and up through the 1000 Island Region where the Saint Lawrence River spills out of that lake as it straddles the US border with Canada, I spent plenty of time on the water with friends but we were still an hour or so below the six huge locks on the up-river end of the Seaway.

Unlike today, Republicans during the 1950s seemed to be inspired by President Eisenhower to make huge infrastructure projects such as the Seaway and the Interstate Highway System, bi-partisan in nature.

Actually there are actually nearly 1900 islands in the lake-like-archipelago that dots the fifty mile stretch as the Saint Lawrence River emerges from Lake Ontario, under the Great Depression-era-150’-high bridge from the US to Canada and heads northeast toward the Seaway locks.

Officially, “the number of islands was determined using the criteria that any island must be above water level all year round, have an area greater than 1 square foot, and support at least one living tree,” and several are populated with late 19th century mansions such as Boldt Castle, operated as public attractions by the bridge authority.

On the trip back home, we couldn’t resist cutting east first through the “green” infrastructure of Adirondack State Park, which encompasses nearly 20.2% of the land area of the State of New York, nearly the size of Connecticut and larger than several national parks combined.

The purpose of our drive a few days ago was recreation but that is only a by-product of the primary purpose of the park.  In fact, the Adirondack was created and then preserved forever by a popular vote of the people of that state as infrastructure to prevent soil erosion, control flooding and preserve watershed and water quality.

My great-great grandfathers x 7 understood the importance of this infrastructure when they settled in the early 1600s just 30 to 40 miles downstream from the southern edge of what is today Adirondack Park.  Skilled at lowland farming, one family settled an island in the middle of the Hudson that was sensitive to flooding.

Shortly after their takeover two decades later, the English began to aggressively deforest the Adirondacks and this accelerated after the American Revolution when New York sold off lands owned by the Crown for pennies an acre to pay off war debt.

By 1850, New Yorkers became alarmed at the huge price of deforestation in terms of soil erosion, flooding and water pollution.  It took another 35 years for the state to begin protecting the sustainability of what became more than 6 million acres including 57% that are privately owned and 1% owned by towns and hamlets.

The Adirondack is truly spectacular, with 3,000 lakes, 30,000 miles of streams and rivers, 2,000 miles of hiking trails and 46 mountain peaks that are more than 4,000 feet above sea level.

But parkland infrastructure such as this is ultimately far more crucial to commerce and water quality as well as prevention of soil erosion and flooding.  Frankly, it is nearly impossible to imagine elected bodies today being that strategic.

Those we elect to safeguard and maintain infrastructure of all types are negligent, if not criminal, when they dismiss infrastructure as mere recreation and then starve it instead of providing much-needed maintenance and upgrades.

The Origin Of Our Sense Of Place

Studies show that city parks and natural areas give children a “sense of rootedness” and “aesthetic value” and “place making” and “supports the development of sense of place and attachment.”

This may not fully explain why a few ringleaders in the current legislature seem so driven to sacrifice North Carolina’s sense of place.

But it does further illuminate what gives some communities such as Durham, where I live, such a strong sense of place and attachment which is closely linked to economic and cultural vitality and the ability to attract and retain talent and pursue visitor-centric cultural and economic development.

Experts note that if a genetic switch is not flipped in a child they evolve into adults without compassion.  Apparently nature-based outdoor activity flips the genetic switch for stewardship of sense of place.

I’m not surprised that consideration is being given to converting a larger portion of some Durham city parks, such as Rockwood which is down the hill from where I live, back to a natural state although it might be more than a bit disingenuous to neglect the turf and then when it is overtaken by weeds to presume it is no longer useful because no one plays on it.

Historic parks such as Rockwood and Forest Hills are incredibly beautiful and useful but tend to be challenging to maintain because developers typically donated the land in flood-prone lowlands as a means to slow, capture and  cleanse storm run-off.

Still before they were neglected these parks had been beautifully manicured.

My 80+ year old and still very active neighbor remembers when she and her husband bulldozed the street where I live to build their home overlooking the park in the years after World War II, the City of Durham had to be reminded that Rockwood Park was public property.

Rockwood is widely used by both neighboring residents and commuters because it is cool and heavily forested, perfect for family and group get-togethers with a great playground for small children.  But it is also popular for walking pets, exercise and reflection.

Just as I was retiring a few years ago, the head of Duke School, a private Pre-K-8 institution in Durham, Dave Michelman, penned a great blog summarizing the value of unstructured, make-believe play and discovery as a means to increase children’s “self regulation, discovery, wonder and creativity.”

Over parenting, including children sucked into the adult-driven ever hyper-active world of organized sports, is no substitute for what Michelman is wrote about.

Parents today are well-advised to adopt the Marine Corps “rule of threes” as a means to ensure sufficient unstructured time.

But studies about the importance of unstructured outdoor and especially nature-based activity have been lacking a “national baseline regarding children’s time outdoors and to determine what kids are doing or not doing outside, including factors that affect children’s activity choices.”

That was the purpose of incorporating a National Kids Survey into the rolling survey of Outdoor Recreation Trends And Futures (page 82.)  It turns out that 62.5% of children spend two hours or more outside on a weekday, 78.2% on a weekend which is more than many expected.

There are disturbing differences between girls and boys and ethnic and age groups, but overall 84% are just playing or hanging out while 49.8% are playing or practicing team sports.  This study notes that concerns about the shift away from nature-based activities is warranted.

Noted are studies supporting the fact that “direct play in nature is critical for youth cognitive and social development, especially during middle school years” as well as creativity, innovation and concrete skills such as way finding and an overarching sense of place.

More accessible and forested parks with a mix of nature area, well-maintained turf and playgrounds is part of the answer as are the quasi-unstructured exhibits such as those of the spectacular Museum of Life and Science in Durham.

The hugely popular museum is opening “Into The Mist” at the end of the month, its ninth outdoor exhibit which promises a “natural landscape where you can play, explore, and interact with the powerful forces and forms of the earth.”

But there is simply no substitute for time spent just exploring in the woods.

Among the most important factors, according to the study, is not only the emphasis on the unstructured and nature-based time children spend outdoors, but that parents are willing and able to spend time outdoors with their children!

The Codependent Roots Of Tourism And Billboards

Organizations dedicated to community-destination marketing (DMOs) date their emergence to 1895 during the Progressive Era even though towns and cross roads across New England had more loosely used nostalgia and pastoral views to draw tourists from industrialized cities as early as the 1830s the same period that villages and towns initiated the first urban tree planting and beautification.

So maybe it isn’t so coincidental that destination marketing began to formalize the effort to draw tourists to and between cities at about the same time reformers launched the City Beautiful movement to reform the approach cities took to architecture, parks, urban forest, boulevards etc.

City Beautiful was preceded by the mid-18th century village improvement societies and succeeded by movements such as the National Roadside Councils in the 20th century and they give root today to organizations like Scenic America and affiliates such as Scenic North Carolina.

It is puzzling to me then why so many community-destination marketing execs today seem so detached from their role as guardians and curators of sense of place.  In my now-concluded 40-year career in destination marketing I often used trees and outdoor billboards as a litmus test.

If a colleague defended the blight and destruction created by billboards, it is my opinion they didn’t have a grasp of sense of place and their role in shaping and preserving it.  But there is some history as well behind the ambivalence by some in tourism toward outdoor billboards.

The first DMO in Detroit was followed quickly by the emergence of one in Hawaii in 1902, St. Louis in 1904, Denver in 1909 until there were nearly 30 by 1920 when they met in association. To put that in perspective the number of cars in America grew from 8,000 in 1900 to 200,000 in 1908 and to 8 million in 1920.

But many early DMOs overlooked that new technology and remained fixated only on railroads and even more narrowly on the very small proportion (10%) of tourism which was then, as now, driven by conventions and meetings.

Railroads back then often partnered to create tourism such as when the Northern Pacific opened Old Faithful Inn in Yellowstone National Park in 1903 followed by an alternative route to that park by the combined Union Pacific – Oregon Short Line railroads in 1910, which passed four miles east of my great grandfather’s homestead-ranch, the year this very cool “Where Gush The Geysers” brochure was published.

That year the Great Northern Railway developed tourism facilities in the newly opened Glacier National Park.  Attendance to national parks rose from 356,000 in 1916 to 1.5 million in 1925 and 2 million in 1927.

As the population of America grew from 69 million, when the first DMO was created, to 76 million in 1900, to 92 million in 1910, to 106 million in 1920 and 123 million in 1930, the still relatively new technology of automobiles democratized tourism to cities, towns and regions.

As the population and the number of cars grew, the new roadways created for them expanded, outdoor billboard companies turned against the downtowns they had literally wallpapered until then and claimed the mobility of the great outdoors, dismissing technologies such as telephone, radio and magazines as being for “indoor people.”

As detailed in her 2004 book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, Dr. Catherine Gudis documents how the 1920s emerged as the “heyday of civic boosterism.”

During the post-WWI “real-estate speculation boom of the 1920s, enterprising communities,” across the nation, “sought to attract business and tourism dollars or to develop their rural areas by forming groups devoted to publicity” now called community-destination marketing organizations.

Today there are several thousand community-destination marketing organizations worldwide, more than 1100 in North America alone, all pursuing visitor-centric economic and cultural development for the places they represent.

Outdoor billboard companies were quick to publish articles such as one in 1922 entitled “A Few Tips On Selling A City” describing, according to Gudis, how “marketing a place as a commodity entailed selling a packaged identity to potential businesses, visitors and residents including the pleasures of nature, history, commerce and climate.”

As they are often now, DMOs then were easily seduced by seeing the name of their community “up in lights” so to speak and quickly a co-dependency with billboards was formed even as this soon-to-be-obsolete form of advertising was serving to dissolve the distinctiveness of communities, deliberately fueling sprawl and substituting stereotypes for unique sense of place.

Gudis writes, “tourism became a means by which drivers could be made into consumers and the landscape into consumable merchandise.”  She also notes that the dominant themes of auto tourism were always contradictory – embrace of technology [auto and billboards] and a quest for pastoral, non-commercial world of the great outdoors.”

But today community-destination marketers can no longer afford this codependency.  Savvy marketers increasing realized that billboards no longer serve a purpose.

Highway signs, navigation technology (now used by nearly 60% of drivers,) the general decline in the effectiveness of advertising, standardized roadside exit logo advertising and non-destructive and more effective out-of-home advertising alternatives have made huge outdoor billboards redundant.

Community-destination marketing organizations as well as tourism related businesses such as restaurants, retail stores, theaters, sports facilities and lodging businesses can no longer afford or tolerate the blight, tree cutting and view obstruction outdoor billboards create.

A Nexus Of Roadside

The first day of my most recent 6,000 mile cross country trip included a drive north up the spectacular 105-mile Skyline Drive through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

In stark contrast to that parkway, my drive that day was punctuated by a 26 mile spur of West Virginia, which links Virginia to Maryland via I 81, where the forests of that state were blighted by huge back-to-back double-decked outdoor billboards towering above the forest.

While that may be marginally better than allowing billboard companies to clear cut huge swaths in either direction, like North Carolina recently has, it is still a jolting violation of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 revelation that no one owns the landscape or the “public right to view” nature.

Both stretches of that drive crossed my mind again last week on the anniversary of the warning given 109 years ago by a Republican President of the United States:

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children.

Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.

The world and the future and your very children shall judge you according as you deal with this sacred trust.”

Although dedicated and then replicated across the country during the 1930s by a Democratic President, the Skyline Drive parkway down the Shenandoah was initiated under another Republican President, Herbert Hoover, who had a cabin retreat in the valley below.

Although the first parkway had been launched only a decade earlier, the concept and the term had been coined 63 years earlier by the landscape architects Olmstead and Vaux of Central Park fame according to the book Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles and the American Landscape, by Dr. Catherine Gudis. 

The Parkways concept envisioned much that was carried over into the Interstate Highways System such as:

• “widely spaced and carefully controlled entrance and exit points”
• alternate routes for trucks,
• bridges and overpasses to avoid cross traffic
• screening of “objectionable sights”
• planting of “tens of thousands of trees and shrubs”
• integration of roadways with “surrounding landscape.”

But soon a war broke out within transportation agencies that persists today.  Some engineers couldn’t be bothered with roadsides, let alone treat them as parkland, preferring only the utility and function and efficiency of the roadbed.

Even today, engineers who champion the aesthetic, environmental and economic benefits of unfettered roadsides are either siloed away within these agencies or exiled completely to other agencies altogether.

Fortunately some highway engineers joined the roadside reform movement that arose in defense of the parkway movement even as the first federal-state efforts to fund motor vehicle roadways were launched before and after World War I.

While roadside reformers in the 1920s and 1930s didn’t have today’s data documenting the value of roadside trees to control water and air pollution, thanks to audits of roadways back then done in nearly two dozen states including North Carolina, they were armed with data that:

“transformed nature into scenery and codified it as a way to help audiences appreciate and savor experiences and, as Dr. Gudis notes, supported the view that …. ‘landscape offered lessons in national heritage, spiritual uplift and civic virtue,’ all selling points for tourism.”

The reformers were also beginning to understand something that research is only now documenting.  Trees and landscape in urban and non-urban areas alike can transform “the roadside into a domestic enclave where one learned, through nature and beauty, moral rectitude and civility.”

Durham, where I live, is an ironic nexus of sorts on this issue of roadside reform. It is the:

• headquarters of Scenic North Carolina, a statewide group dedicated to scenic preservation and current-day roadside reform
• home to The Forest History Society
• place that banned outdoor billboards in early in 1984 and then created a best practice overlay to protect the scenic character of I 40 along where it passes through but also,
• birthplace to the Bull Durham tobacco company  which in the 1880s famously hired four sets of painters to decorate rocks and barns along roadsides with outdoor advertising and now,
• home of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing Research and an archive of 16,000 digitalized images of outdoor billboard advertising at Duke University.

Durham is also home to several generations of a family central to the parkway movement.  Honored at Durham’s Annual Tribute Luncheon last month, the Teers began building roadways shortly after the founding of the Nello L. Teer Company in 1909 and the Federal Highway Act in 1921.

The Durham-based company was also awarded the first contract for the Blue Ridge Parkway to connect Skyline Drive and the Shenandoah down through North Carolina to the Great Smoky National Park.  The company completed an astonishing 17 segments of the 77 year old Parkway.

Now in his 90s, the son of the founder, Dillard Teer is still able to point out the locations of old WPA camps which served as an “employer of last resort” along the roadway during the Great Depression as the Blue Ridge Parkway was built.

Fittingly, what is called “America’s Favorite Drive” was only completed in 1987 when the spectacular Linn Cove Viaduct resolved a significant conservation issue related to the final segment.

Robb Teer continues his grandfather’s legacy by serving with me on the Durham Appearance Advocacy Group and as a member and former chair of the RDU Airport Authority, he is a strong advocate for appearance around the airport his grandfather help construct in 1939.

Maybe it is time to revisit that notion of roadsides as parkland!

Indexing Public Parkland

I hope officials did more than utter “cool” when a friend recently circulated a new benchmark analysis of city parkland by The Trust for Public Land. I know public servants such as Stacy Poston in special projects in General Services for Durham, one of the cities benchmarked, will be all over it.

The Trust was founded the same year that North Carolinians by a margin of of 7 to 1 voted to embed the policy to conserve and  protect “forests, wetlands, estuaries, beaches, historical sites, openlands, and places of beauty” into article XIV of the state constitution.

Judging by the overall maintenance of its parkland, Durham, North Carolina where I live needs to take that responsibility a lot more seriously especially when it comes to maintenance and upkeep.

The City of Durham appears to have only half the park acres as a percentage of overall land area that is the average for the 100 largest cities in the United States. Of North Carolina's urban areas all but Greensboro is below average and all rank in the lowest category.  Raleigh only appears to be higher because it is propped up by inclusion of a huge state Park that virtually doubles the parkland within its city limits.

There are several other benchmarks in the study including population density where Durham also ranks significantly below the median for acres of parkland per 1,000 residents and half that of its peer group.   The study provides the basis upon which Durham can pull an even tighter state and national analysis making sure not to include state parkland to make the benchmarks more “apples and apples.”

Time is ticking for Durham because while it may be the fifth largest city in the state it is shoehorned into the 17th smallest county in terms of land area and a third has been wisely set aside in watershed and/or very low density development.  Some see that as an excuse, but I think it should be motivation.

But before my adopted hometown considers adding to public parkland and open space I believe it needs to be held more accountable for funding and greatly improving the maintenance and upkeep of what it already has judging from the very popular park down the hill from where I live.

Unfortunately, it seems to be the nature of far too many people to fuss about something new while letting what they already have fall into neglect.  Maybe it feeds the need for a dopamine rush but I'm afraid it is more likely a form of community attention deficit.

If time was not so critical when it comes to protecting openlands and historical sites, I wonder if it might be a good idea to require cities and counties, and for that matter states, to index any ability to pursue new things to their track records for maintenance and upkeep of what they already have.

After all that's just part of conservation and preservation.