(Photo courtesy of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park.)
Two-century-old Fort Monroe in Tidewater Virginia is a national historic, cultural, and recreational treasure with views across Hampton Roads harbor, up the Chesapeake Bay, and into America's past.
Fort Monroe occupies 570 acres at Old Point Comfort, the site of fortifications going back to the Jamestown period when Captain John Smith proclaimed it "fit for a Castle".
During the Civil War, the Union used Fort Monroe to control the southern seaboard and to launch attacks against the Confederates. Fort Monroe's history also involves Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Chief Black Hawk, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, who was confined there after leading the Confederacy.
Most importantly, Fort Monroe (aka "Freedom's Fortress") is where slavery began to crumble. Shortly after the Civil War began, three Virginians took a huge risk, left enslavement and sought sanctuary at Fort Monroe. Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory, and James Townsend were declared contraband of war and taken in.
Their actions started a cascade of self-emancipation by initiating "the first mass freedom incident of the war," numbering 20,000 by war's end. Across the South, tens of thousands followed their example and crossed Union lines. The growing self-emancipation movement, touched off at Fort Monroe, laid the political groundwork for the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 2011, the Army will leave Fort Monroe, and as the land will revert to the Commonwealth , Virginia is taking a lead role in planning its reuse. Once again, Fort Monroe gives new meaning to the expression "If you build it, they will come".
In April 2008, a reuse plan was presented and while it is a marked improvement over the 2006 plan, it still presents a level of development that comes at too high a cost.
The Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority (FADA) continues to propose residential development where the largest cost drivers are those public services that support that development. Water system improvements are estimated at $4 million. Wastewater and stormwater collection and retention systems will run $1.2 million each. Public schools shoot to almost $2.2 million with maximum development.
The Army estimates it spends up to $15 million a year keeping up buildings, plumbing and infrastructure. Depending on the level of redevelopment, the reuse plan estimates annual operating and maintenance costs to run between $4 and $4.7 million. Those estimates assume private ownership of most of the buildings, many of which aren't of any historical significance, are deteriorating, and/or are likely to be razed and replaced with new construction.
Fort Monroe lies almost entirely in a designated 100-year floodplain. The Fort is a National Historic Landmark and many of the buildings have not been elevated or altered since their con-¼struction, making them especially prone to flood damage. The reuse plan also takes note that there is increased flooding potential created by long term sea level rise caused by climate change. Understandably, flood protection comes in with a whopping $13.8 million price tag and no assurances that flood damage can be ultimately mitigated.
A key principle in the Fort Monroe reuse plan is that the reuse be economically self-sustaining, avoiding financial burdens to any one jurisdiction. The rationale behind new home construction is the property tax revenue in Hampton's coffers, for instance. Almost every revenue source suggestion (retail, office park, etc.) is however predicated on new home construction that need not be there in the first place.
The FADA reuse plan needs to focus instead on more cost effective open space development and concentrate instead on "eco-tourism" as its revenue sources for maintaining exclusively those elements of Fort Monroe that warranted its National Historic Landmark status in the first place.
Realistically, while FADA consultants are only mildly confident with regards to Fort Monroe as a potential commercial revenue source, they are glowing as to its tourism potential. The consultants predict that Fort Monroe's history could attract 100,000 to 150,000 visitors annually and that its beachfront another 115,000 to 125,000. It's not hard to envision a "Historic Quadrangle" instead of the now "Historic Triangle" whereby Fort Monroe appropriately joins Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown as major attractions.
Many groups including the Sierra Club have been calling for a Fort Monroe National Park. Doing so would lend the "National Park" brand which translates to greater marketing potential. However, the cash-strapped National Park Service, fed only the Army's $15 million operating cost figure and a reuse plan still too high with redevelopment costs, has instead decided to wait and see.
When it comes to a site as historically significant and as environmentally vulnerable as Fort Monroe, open space development and eco-tourism is the most cost efficient and is best lending to its economic sustainability. Not only does the reuse plan not reflect that approach, but it makes absolutely no mention with regards to any type of potential partnership with the National Park Service. Creating a Fort Monroe National Park is essential to the viability of Fort Monroe. Thus, the FADA reuse plan must reflect that fact, and the National Park Service provided a seat at the planning table.
Let's give yet another meaning to the expression "if you build it, they will come." Let's together build a Fort Monroe National Park. Submit to the FMFADA your public comment by clicking here. Deadline is June 15, 2008.
At Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, formed in 2006, we advocate a revenue-generating, self-sustaining, innovatively structured national park akin to the one at San Francisco's Presidio.
We invite readers to explore our Web site, http://www.cfmnp.org/ -- the source for much of what Eileen has reported here. Want to see the Virginian-Pilot editorial that recently promoted a Fort Monroe National Park, or what congressional candidates Nye and Hummel have said, or what hundreds of citizens told the Army earlier this year about Fort Monroe's future? There are links about all of that on our "What's New" page (http://www.cfmnp.org/whatsnew.htm). We especially hope you'll vote for the national park option -- which really means a self-sustaining national park -- in the informal poll that's linked from the top of that page.
If you're interested in the threats to Fort Monroe, please see the materials on the top half of our home page, http://www.cfmnp.org/. For an overview summary of what's at stake and what the issues are, the rest of the home page provides a good bit of information. There's a link, for instance, to a copy of a brief but crucial paragraph in Virginia's Fort Monroe law, http://www.cfmnp.org/national_... . There's a link to a June 2007 op-ed about the Historic Quadrangle idea, http://www.cfmnp.org/Juneteent... . At the "Articles & op-eds" link (http://www.cfmnp.org/news.htm), you can review much of what has appeared in the news about all of this. I recommend searching for the name "Butler" on that page and reading Dr. Scott Butler's various letters to the editor and op-eds. And most importantly, we hope people will sign up for our e-mail updates via the Subscribe link, http://www.createfortmonroenat... .
Thanks very much.
Steven T. (Steve) Corneliussen
Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park
You know happened to those escaped slaves after they got to Fort Monroe? I mean, the emancipation proclamation hadn't been issued yet. All of those escaped slaves who got in there under the 'Fort Monroe Doctrine' were put into what amounted to a concentration camp in crowded, filthy conditions, fed starvation rations and forced to do hard labor.
We have a word for treating people that way. It's called 'slavery.' The Union Army was using slave labor, just as the southern plantations were. Slavery was not crumbling under these circumstances. Rather, it was arguably coming dangerously close to turning into almost as useful an institution for the Union cause as for the Confederates.
But I would ask you to reconsider what the underlying meaning was -- and is -- in the Contraband story.
The Declaration of Independence invoked the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God. It seems to me that when Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory, and James Townsend stood up and took a huge risk to escape from slavery to Fort Monroe to ask for sanctuary, they were validating a founding ideal in a country that is founded not on ethnicity, but on ideas.
And it seems to me that the hundreds and thousands who followed them, and the tens of thousands who then followed all across the South, were doing that validating too. Professor Bob Engs of the University of Pennsylvania says that in removing their labor from the southern cause, and in adding their labor and their service as soldiers to the Union cause, these self-emancipators -- or call them would-be self-emancipators, if you like, Mr. Landers -- helped determine the war's outcome.
Yes, sure, they were treated badly, and the whole story is highly imperfect. So is much of the rest of American history, but that doesn't change the beauty in the founding ideals.
Mr. Landers, can you take away the spirit in what these Americans were doing when they stood up for their freedom? Doesn't their effort mean something profound, even despite the undeniable realities that you're calling attention to?
Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen
Poquoson and
Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park
And somehow the idea of putting a bunch of new housing in a floodplain does not sound like terribly wise to me. Have we already forgotten what happened to New Orleans?