The reality is Carter's Grove did not work as a business. Personally,
I am surprised the CW administration ever thought it would. That has
to be faced.  But I don't know that the sale need be seen as such a
bad thing, considering the financial realities.  I grew up in
Gloucester and knew Carter's Grove well as a child and young man when
it was still a private estate.  I suggest the real leverage point is
not will it remain a museum or not.  That's settled.  The real
leverage point for preservationist is to see that the sale is under
protective covenants apposite for such an historic property. Jurretta
makes some of those points. That the property can not be broken up,
must remain a private residence.  That the house will preserved.

 From a preservationist perspective it is not optimal, but whoever
buys that property will love it, that's why they will buy it.  For
most of my life Elmington, White Marsh, Toddsbury, Roaring Springs,
White Hall,  Auburn, and and all the rest were in private hands, and
were the much loved homes of families. They were living systems.
Named houses are love affairs.  Anyone who can afford $12-20 million,
and is precluded from commercializing it, is making such a decision
because they see themselves living on the property.  It is quite
possible that exploration of the property could still be continued.
And it is very conceivable that it could yet be a museum -- through a
second donation -- this time with the endowment the McCrea's could
never give it.

-- Stephan


On 5 Jan 2007, at 18:03, Jurretta Heckscher wrote:

> Correction to the reference in my last post to that NY Times article
> Suzanne Levy pointed out!  I searched the Times's archive for
> "Carter's
> Grove," and clicked without noticing the date on the most recent
> article--which turned out to be a rather upbeat report from September
> 2000 lauding, among other things, Williamsburg's commitment to "social
> history."
>
> I should have done the search Suzanne suggested, on "Colonial
> Williamsburg."  That of course turns up the right article, the
> December
> 31 account that is thoroughly depressing:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/us/31preserve.html.
>
> Notice, though, that the article--like Colonial Williamsburg,
> apparently?--sees the entire issue of Carter's Grove in terms of the
> predicament of "house museums."
>
> Carter's Grove should not be a "house museum."  It should be a
> plantation historical site that educates the public about the social,
> cultural, and economic foundations of eighteenth-century Williamsburg,
> colonial Virginia, and the nation--a site that happens to have an
> architecturally notable house on it.
>
> Carter's Grove, the house, is all but irrelevant to the history
> represented at Colonial Williamsburg.  Carter's Grove, the plantation,
> opens the complex historical understanding without which Colonial
> Williamsburg is nothing more than an ahistorical consumer fantasy.
>
> --Jurretta J. Heckscher
>
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