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  • Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon ed. by Carol Borchert Cadou
  • Anna Nau
Stewards of Memory: The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation at George Washington’s Mount Vernon. Edited by Carol Borchert Cadou, with Luke J. Pecoraro and Thomas A. Reinhart. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018.
ISBN: 9780813941516
Hardcover: 280 pages

Mount Vernon is known to most Americans as the historic home of the first president of the United States. It is also considered the birthplace of the historic preservation movement in the United States. The continuing legacy of the latter forms the central subject of Stewards of Memory. This diverse collection of eight concise, readable essays by respected scholars and preservation professionals uses Mount Vernon as a case study offering a cross-section of current theories and practices in historic site preservation and management. These include cultural landscape research, digital documentation tools, and the challenges of achieving more inclusive historic interpretation.

The book grew out of a 2013 symposium celebrating the 160th anniversary of the purchase of Mount Vernon by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA). As the oldest preservation organization in the United States, the MVLA’s contributions to preservation have been well established. The essays here succeed in presenting a window into the paradigms and practices of current work, as lead editor Carol Borchert Cadou, former Senior Vice-President for Historic Preservation and Collections at Mount Vernon, sets forth in the introduction. But the volume would have benefited from an organization that grouped the essays in such a way as to make those themes more apparent. This shortcoming, however, does not detract from the contribution made by each essay. Together, the essays offer enriching interdisciplinary insight into the challenges, needs, and opportunities facing America’s historic sites and house museums in the twenty-first century. This is facilitated by the contributing authors’ diverse backgrounds that include history, architectural history, historic preservation, architecture, archaeology, and collections management.

In the opening essay, “New History in Old Buildings,” Carl R. Lounsbury presents an engaging examination of how historic site research and interpretation has evolved over the last fifty years. The new social history methodologies of the 1960s and 1970s fostered broader definitions of historic and architectural value that moved beyond the early twentieth-century model of commemoration and antiquarianism. Drawing on his own experiences at Colonial Williamsburg and other sites in the southeast, Lounsbury traces how scholars have incorporated advances in archaeology and materials analysis along with more inclusive research and survey practices to reach new understandings of sites like Mount Vernon. This research has in turn revised concepts of early American society.

Expanded research methodologies are only one part of the preservationist’s toolbox, as George W. McDaniel demonstrates in his essay on “whole place preservation.” In “Stepping Up and Saving Places,” he examines five cases that illustrate varying degrees of success in the preservation of historic sites and their broader environments, including Mount Vernon and the Ashley River region around Drayton Hall in South Carolina, where McDaniel formerly served as director. He argues that effective preservation demands thoughtful management of change in the landscapes surrounding historic sites through proactive, widespread community support. That support requires strong partnerships and advocacy as well as an understanding of larger economic and social contexts.

In his essay entitled “’We Have Done Very Little Investigation There; There Is a Great Deal Yet to Do’,” Luke J. Pecoraro examines another aspect of cultural landscape preservation in a brief summary of past and current “Archaeology of George [End Page 43] Washington’s Mount Vernon.” He presents new efforts to understand and protect the larger cultural landscape of the site—the historic core and the original eight thousand acres—as a means to tell a broader history of its multiple generations of owners, occupants, and uses. This includes a program to document forgotten slave cemeteries using GIS (geographic information system) software to analyze historic maps and visitor accounts as well as continued efforts to protect Mount Vernon’s historic viewshed along the Potomac River.

Historians of the American preservation movement may find the essays by Lydia Mattice Brandt and Scott...

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