White House

I am Jennie Dotts, speaking on behalf of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, a nonprofit that works to preserve Richmond’s oldest neighborhoods—many of them in distress, but all of them essential to the identity of what is arguably America’s most historic city. Our position opposing the removal of the White House of the Confederacy centers on three points:

1)We are fighting to save not just a house, but a city –and the history essential to its identity. In the next five years, six landmark buildings in the historic heart of our city will be demolished for new offices, university buildings and parking. Without ongoing coordination, communication and respect between state and local government, the state will continue to run roughshod over the buildings, the history and the culture that distinguish Richmond from all other cities. To date, the MOC, which owns the White House has not applied to the City’s Commission of Architectural Review for approval of its proposed move and the state should not be allowed to trump the city’s authority in a decision concerning the survival of a landmark so essential to Richmond identity;

2)The primacy of the White House’s location to the State Capital must be preserved for all time. Major chapters of American and African-American history were made in Court End. This history warrants our best efforts at authentic and accurate interpretation for further generations; authenticity is this case means that we must preserve this National Historic Landmark not in a theme park re-creation but on the site where it has stood since 1818;

3)The Museum of the Confederacy and the White House are separable. If state expansion has rendered operation of the museum on this site impossible, it should assist in the relocation of the museum facility only while enhancing the historic setting of the White House to protect it from further encroachment

In the next five years, six landmark buildings in the historic heart of our city will be demolished for new offices, medical buildings and parking. Without a drastic change in direction the MCV campus will look more like yet another suburban office complex than the stormy center of American history that it is. Buildings that we think of when we think of Richmond are to be replaced with disposable architecture intended to meet the current but ever-changing needs of an ever-growing university. The preservation of historic architectural integrity and the creation of 21st century facilities are not mutually exclusive; however, they do require creative coordination, which is at the root of the problem here.

At A.C.O.R.N. we do not think that every building can—or should—be saved. But buildings are more than sticks and bricks to us; they are evidence of culture and continuity. And those buildings that mark the growth of our city over the centuries deserve better than to be driven out by a state government that makes no effort to coordinate its urban planning with the city in which it is located.

The Confederate White House is central to Richmond’s identity. The state’s uncontrolled fury of new construction threatens to obliterate it and sweep away key manifestations of our city’s history and culture in the political equivalent of a broken levee. Unless the Commonwealth adopts a policy of working with the city to achieve its building needs, another great Southern city may be washed away.

The White House of the Confederacy is irreversibly a place as well as a building, a site where lines of history far more numerous than that of the Confederacy cross. For African-Americans, for architectural historians, for students of cultural and national history the lot upon which John Brockenbrough built his home is an intrinsic part of the story. Over half a million American lives were lost in the Civil War in an effort to capture or retain this city and this building and its hillside site lay at the very center of that ocean of blood. To deny this fact by moving the White House of the Confederacy to some convenient site is to negate much of the history of this structure. To erase this location is to defile the memory of those who died to defend or occupy the corner of Clay and Twelfth streets.

In the historic Richmond neighborhood of Court End where the White House of the Confederacy stands, the Commonwealth has become a juggernaut, unbridled by oversight. Gettysburg is overrun with development, but within that historic site is Cemetery Ridge. It cannot be moved to any other hillside and still exist as hallowed ground. Similarly, the Alamo is surrounded by dreadful commercial structures, but imagine the reaction to an attempt to move that site so sacred to Texans. Though now dominated by undistinguished modernist monoliths, 12th and Clay remains the place where defining moments in American history occurred and like Gettysburg and the Alamo, the White House must stand its ground.

Here is Where Jefferson Davis lived and the Civil War planned. Here, overlooking the nation’s largest slave export center in Shockoe Bottom, an African American household servant conspired with a spymaster in nearby Church Hill to undermine the Confederacy; and here, in this spot, when Richmond fell and the war ended, Lincoln walked through the still smoldering city and saw the desolation of his countrymen. These events happened at the White House on Clay Street in the shadow of a state capitol designed by the author of America’s Declaration of Independence. They did not happen somewhere else.

We ask that you consider Richmonders’ interest in preserving a unique part of our nation’s past; a past shared by no other city and no other structure. The loss of a landmark of the highest significance will ease the destruction of every less important building in the area.

As John Ruskin wrote in the 19th century: “Old buildings are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them and partly to the generations of mankind who are to follow us.

The dead still have their right to them;

that which they labored for, we have no right to obliterate.”