It's possible that some list members will want to see this Fort Monroe 
update from Sunday, August 30. Thanks.
Steve Corneliussen

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The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot has joined the National Parks Conservation 
Association and the Civil War Trust in endorsing Gov. Terry McAuliffe's 
effort to unify the split national monument (national park) on Fort Monroe’s 
east side.

In that way, the Pilot opinion editors renewed their past advocacy for 
unification in an editorial today at 
http://hamptonroads.com/2015/08/preserve-more-fort-monroe .

The governor, going against predecessors from both political parties, seeks 
to extend federal stewardship to the Fort Monroe land that previous Virginia 
leaders, kowtowing to developers, deliberately omitted from the national 
park. The missing land appears in red at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ (the original website of Citizens for 
a Fort Monroe National Park).

The editorial makes clear that far from saving public money, overdevelopment 
of this national treasure would cost us dearly. When that land gets saved 
from those who seek to misuse it, the fake, split national monument will 
become real. Then it can also become the fourth node of a Historic Diamond 
elevating Virginia's present Historic Triangle.

Maybe the Pilot opinion editors' news colleagues will now themselves report 
on the governor's effort. Meanwhile, readers can see Civil War News's 
report: 
http://www.civilwarnews.com/archive/articles/2015/febmar/mcaulffie-021506.htm

Unfortunately, the Newport News Daily Press sides emphatically with 
parochialism, overdevelopment, Hampton insiders, and Hampton University 
president Bill Harvey. It even commits factual blunders about the issue. 
(See, for example, 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/DailyPress_Factual_Blunders.htm .) The 
Daily Press’s editors regularly take the developers’ side on Virginia’s only 
political issue having thousand-year implications, yet don’t even bother to 
find out what they’re talking about.

Today’s Pilot editorial mentions Virginia’s leaders’ failure to plan for 
flooding in their officially envisioned condo-construction area at 
low-lying, ocean-facing Fort Monroe, where Hurricane Isabel did a tenth of a 
billion dollars in damage. Wetlands Watch has formally criticized that 
failure and has publicly called it “stupid.” A Daily Press editorial today 
calls for wiser planning for flooding in Virginia—for limiting “new 
development on impermeable and threatened land”—but yet again leaves the 
Fort Monroe flood-planning failure unaddressed.

Possibly from timidity given the influence of the economically powerful, 
Tidewater’s NPR and PBS stations also avoid discussing the “stupid” condo 
plan in frequent broadcasts on Virignia’s supposed flood-planning 
forehandedness. And the national-monument unification issue has almost never 
come up on either of the local noontime NPR talk shows.

Oddly, the Friday noontime show, which targets African-Americans, carefully 
avoids the central historical question about Fort Monroe: Was it really a 
white general who changed history there, or was he merely reacting to the 
profoundly meaningful initiative of brave black self-emancipators 
forthrightly asserting the inevitable?

Maybe this Pilot editorial will inspire Virginia journalists to resume—or to 
start—paying attention. You might even dream that some real coverage will 
come at last from the nearly oblivious Washington Post, which has always 
merely transcribed official press-release nonsense about post-Army Fort 
Monroe.

Media inattention in recent years concerning Fort Monroe is all the more 
troubling during a time when the country is reassessing the Confederacy and 
when Fort Monroe—the site of what the Civil War historian Edward Ayers once 
called “the greatest moment in American history”—represents an emerging 
clearer understanding of historical facts:
* Henry Louis Gates’s essay on those Fort Monroe self-emancipators: 
http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2014/05/how_did_fort_monroe_become_freedom_s_fort.html
* "How Slavery Really Ended in America": 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/magazine/mag-03CivilWar-t.html
* Three-minute YouTube summary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27e_85dm8s4

Fort Monroe also represents those emerging “Historic Diamond” opportunities. 
Even the National Park Service, belatedly but blessedly, has begun 
officially using that term. Today’s Pilot editorial’s closing paragraph 
repeats the key verb—“squander”—that the Pilot editors made famous in the 
past about those opportunities:
QUOTE
The historical value of Fort Monroe is only starting to be realized, and the 
opportunities to promote the monument—and the region—are legion. It would be 
a shame to squander those opportunities by pursuing development that 
jeopardizes the monument's purpose.
UNQUOTE

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
(for the highly informal Save Fort Monroe network, now numbering nearly 1000 
true friends of Fort Monroe; please see 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ and please “like” and promote the 
Save Fort Monroe Facebook page at 
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Save-Fort-Monroe/195557853805992 ) 

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