September 14, 2002
National
Park Service Celebrates
Longfellow 30th Anniversary
An Official
Project of Save America's Treasures
WASHINGTON D.C. -- Longfellow
National Historic Site celebrated its 30th anniversary on September
14 with a festive gathering of hundreds
of friends and supporters including U. S. Senators Edward M.
Kennedyand
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Historian David McCullough, and NPS
Deputy Director Don Murphy. A ceremony of rededication was held
in the shadow of the 243-year-old Longfellow House where both
George Washington and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once made their
homes. Traditional music inspired by Longfellow's poetry was
performed by Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops, while Cambridge
schoolchildren recited "The Builders" with a decidedly
modern beat.
"This
is a great moment in the history of this great house,"
commented Park Superintendent Myra Harrison. "We celebrate
not only 30 years as a national park, but also our grand reopening
to the public following the major rehabilitation of our building
systems - fire, security, and environmental - and new museum
storage for a collection that includes hundreds of thousands
of papers, objects, and furnishings."
Guests of
the anniversary party were treated to special VIP tours of Longfellow
House where collections cataloged and conserved with more than
$1 million in funds generated through the "Save America's
Treasures" program were on display. Senator Clinton recalled
her first tour of Longfellow House as First Lady in 1998 shortly
after the site was named a "Save America's Treasures"
project: "We went down into the basement and saw boxes
and boxes of uncataloged documents next to the furnace. Our
hearts stopped!" Senators Clinton and Kennedy, both avid
supporters of recent preservation efforts, agreed that progress
has been phenomenal. State-of-the-art museum storage now occupies
much of the Longfellow House basement, together with new space
for researchers. Rehabilitation of the adjacent Longfellow Carriage
House also makes it possible for the site to provide the community
with education and public meeting space for the first time in
its history.
"Our
todays and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build,"
wrote Longfellow in 1846 -- words that provided just the right
scaffolding for last Saturday's celebration at Longfellow National
Historic Site.
Save America's Treasures is a public-private initiative
between the National Park Service and the National Trust for
Historic Preservation, dedicated to the celebration and preservation
of our nation's threatened cultural treasures. In the past 4
years, the program has designated over 800 official projects
and generated $53 million in public and private resources, that
augment $125 million in federal Save America's Treasures matching
grants, to help address the country's unmet preservation needs.
For more information, visit www.saveamericastreasures.org
or call 1-877-TREASURE.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a private,
nonprofit membership organization dedicated to protecting the
irreplaceable. With more than a quarter million members nationwide,
it provides leadership, education and advocacy to save America's
diverse historic places and revitalize communities. For more
information, visit the National Trust's Web site at www.nationaltrust.org
The National Park Service administers 379 areas covering
more than 83 million acres in 49 States, the District of Columbia,
American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, Saipan, and the Virgin Islands.
Since its creation in 1916, employees of the National Park Service
have worked to preserve and protect sites of natural and cultural
significance. The diversity of the parks is reflected in the
variety of titles given to them. These include such designations
as national park, national preserve, national monument, national
memorial, national historic site, national seashore and national
battlefield. For more information about the National Park Service
please visit Parknet on the Web at www.nps.gov.
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