Why America’s National Parks need help
Growing up in southeastern Pennsylvania, David Ruth got hooked on history early.
It may have been hereditary: His father and grandfather were avid Civil War buffs whose dinner conversations often drifted back to the 1860s and the momentous battles that had raged nearby—Gettysburg, Harpers Ferry, Antietam. As a kid, Ruth remembers poring over American Heritage books about the Civil War, staring for hours at battle paintings and richly illustrated battlefield maps. It was, he says, “kind of an obsession.”
When Ruth was 10, his father, who was an Air National Guard officer, drove him to Virginia, where the two of them spent several days traipsing through Civil War battlefields in the rolling countryside around Richmond, the Confederate capital— from the earthworks of Cold Harbor, where Grant and Lee faced off in 1864, to the fortified landscapes of Petersburg, where a 10-month siege by Union forces finally broke through to Richmond in the spring of 1865.
Nearly five decades later, Ruth still walks these historic battlefields—now as superintendent of Richmond National Battlefield Park, an archipelago of 14 park units encompassing 3,600 acres of historic buildings, grounds, open lands, and park facilities, which collectively preserve and exhibit the bloodiest chapter in American history to nearly 100,000 visitors a year.
Ruth is proud of what the National Park Service (NPS) has done here—the public lectures, the living history programs, and the grass-roots and donor support for acquisitions such as Shelton House, an 18th-century farmhouse, still standing, where Patrick Henry, then 18, married his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Shelton, in 1754.
More than a century later, in 1864, the house was overrun by the Union Army moving on Richmond, and for a few days in May 1864, the two-story house was used as a Union field headquarters. General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate artillery, dug in at nearby Totopotomoy Creek, struck the house more than 50 times, but it never burned. Through it all, women and children of the Shelton family huddled in the basement.
“This house has an incredible story to tell about the Civil War and Virginia farm life in the 18th and 19th centuries,” says Ruth, gesturing to the collection of antique nails, ammunition, woodwork, letters, and other artifacts recovered from the site. “We have plenty of historical documentation, and we’ve even got rooms full of furniture that may date to the Civil War.”
No one doubts the value of properties such as the Shelton House, which remind us of who we are as a nation and inspire a younger generation to learn the lessons of the American past.
The challenge, however, is to preserve them. Ruth estimates that it will cost about $265,000 to stabilize and restore Shelton House and open it safely to the public.
That amount pales alongside the $13 million in other “deferred” maintenance (defined by the NPS as necessary work on roads, bridges, trails, campgrounds, buildings, and physical assets delayed for at least a year) that Richmond battlefield park has had to postpone over the past few decades. The long to-do list includes everything from building repair and expansion to the clearing of storm debris from trails and landscapes. The park doesn’t have the money to pay for it— any of it.
Yet compared with other units in the National Park System, Richmond has little to complain about. A hundred miles to the north, Shenandoah National Park is staring at a maintenance backlog of $90 million, half of it for road repairs, while the deferred maintenance at Great Smoky Mountains National Park has soared