Sunday, November 25, 2007

If Virginia somehow came to own Monticello and Mount Vernon, no one would dream of donating them to Charlottesville and Alexandria for narrowly envisioned exploitation. Yet in 2005, politicians, unhindered by the media, began planning just that fate for a comparable national treasure on the Chesapeake Bay: Fort Monroe.

That this Army post ranks with the estates of presidents was made clear by the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Robert Nieweg in the Norfolk PBS station's documentary (available online at http://www.whro.org) about the Tidewater area's passionate debate over Fort Monroe's future.

In 2011, the Army will leave the post, which occupies all 570 water-surrounded acres of Old Point Comfort, just east of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel's Hampton end. The site offers spectacular views across the harbor and over the bay. But more important, it is a window into four centuries of American history, including events at both the dawn and the demise of slavery.

The post also offers beaches, live oaks, fishing, biking, a deepwater marina, a windsurfing cove, fine old residences, a wealth of campus-like buildings, a Tiffany-windowed chapel, an 1802 lighthouse and a moated stone citadel that Lt. Robert E. Lee helped build. From Fort Monroe's seawall promenade, you can almost touch the passing aircraft carriers.

It also makes the developers who bankroll Virginia politics drool. That's why all the debate has done so little to secure for the public any of the power seized in 2005 by a handful of influential Hamptonians. They deftly exploited mindless federal base-closing processes that can't distinguish a national treasure from a Fort Drab.

And it's why the Civil War Preservation Trust and APVA Preservation Virginia list Fort Monroe as in danger of inappropriate development.

University of Pennsylvania professor Robert F. Engs, author of "Freedom's First Generation," calls Fort Monroe the place where freedom for all Americans finally and truly, if haltingly, began. Early in the Civil War, Frank Baker, Sheppard Mallory and James Townsend escaped enslavement and found sanctuary there. Thousands followed. Engs says the repercussions turned the conflict into a war for freedom.

If emancipation is merely what white politicians deigned belatedly to confer on helpless victims, maybe Nieweg ranks Fort Monroe too high. But given Americans' continually deepening understanding of slavery, perhaps the day will come when the courage and initiative of these self-emancipators will seem crucial to the history of liberty itself. Will today's estimation of the homes of slaveholders such as Washington and Jefferson then seem too high?

Four centuries ago, the first ship importing Africans landed at Old Point Comfort en route to Jamestown. A half-century ago, all of that land comprising Fort Monroe was designated a national historic landmark.

Yet a powerful handful in Hampton, so far supported by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, seeks to develop much of the post for narrow, parochial purposes. The absurdity of it calls to mind those threats that casinos would mar the Gettysburg battlefield.

Nieweg calls for everyone to come together "at the table." He specifically includes the "national park people," meaning those of us who advocate an innovatively structured, financially self-sustaining Fort Monroe National Park for general enrichment in several senses, starting with the economic one.

But we have no place at the table. Last winter in Richmond, the Kaine administration thwarted our lobbying in the General Assembly for a representative composition of Virginia's Fort Monroe planning panel, which remains dominated by the Hampton City Council.

That's why it's important to declare that by rights, Fort Monroe is really a national issue anyway. And that, in turn, is why it matters that under Section 106 of federal historic-preservation law, the Army must consider citizens' opinions in setting general guidelines for Virginia's planning panel.

This Thursday, Washington gets to have its say. Army officials will listen, starting at 6 p.m., at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1785 Massachusetts Ave. (You can also comment by e-mail: monr.106public@us.army.mil.) Citizens can empower the Army to instruct Kaine and the Virginia panel to respect all of Fort Monroe as what it is: a national historic landmark ranking with -- and maybe someday outranking -- Monticello and Mount Vernon.

-- Steven T. Corneliussen

Poquoson, Va.

The writer is co-founder of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park. His e-mail address iscontact@CFMNP.org.