2
A Radical Idea for a New Park
August 22, 1978, was my second day on the job as chief ranger for legislation in the North Atlantic Region of the National Park Service when Peggy Lipson’s call came in. Peggy asked me what new national park proposals were wanted for my North Atlantic Region. Peggy was the legislative specialist in the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Park Service and assigned to work with my regional office in Boston. I could hardly wait to get back to her. First, I combed the legislative files in my office and found only a proposal concerning the home of a general my colleagues had never heard of. My new colleagues had no suggestions. But I had my idea, and I knew what I wanted. I wanted a new park interpreting women’s history. My new boss, Terry Savage, had just driven across the country from his former position with the Park Service in Denver but had not yet come into our office. Peggy wanted a quick answer, so I called Terry at his hotel. I said I wanted to propose a new park on women’s history. He said, “Cool, now go out and find one.”
Peggy was smart, bright-eyed, high energy, quick-witted, and, most critically, determined. She had worked in legislation in the Washington, DC, regional office before moving not far across town to the headquarters office. As the lone professional woman working with the Park Service directorate, she was fully aware of the meager representation of women in the national parks and immediately embraced the idea of a women’s history park. She advised me that to get my idea off the ground, the site for the new park would have to be a place already declared of national significance by the Park Service—at that time (and still) the primary requirement for a new national park. Otherwise, Peggy said, it was “dead in the water.”
My new boss, Terry Savage, was a seeker and visionary. Terry had developed a reputation for innovative planning and so was recruited to be the new chief of planning for the fast-expanding North Atlantic Region office, which prided itself on its wide range of historic sites. Because he had in previous positions planned projects in several different regions and traveled extensively to parks across the country, Terry was well aware of the lack of park sites telling the history of women. Later, in 2019, Terry told me while I was researching this book that his enthusiastic response to my proposal was grounded in at least two aspects of his experience: his awareness of the lack of focus on women’s history in existing parks, and his education as a landscape architect. He described his courses in school, and his work in practice, as looking ahead to uses of an area twenty years in the future, knowing that day would arrive and “wanting it to be good when we got there.” He especially wanted the future to “look good” for his young daughter. Visionaries like Terry plan and plant tiny trees, knowing someday they will grow to big trees.
I did not even have a place or person in mind. But I was on a mission. The day before Peggy’s phone call—my first day in my new position—the first thing I had done was read the new Bicentennial Index of National Parks, published in 1976. I was shocked, offended, and angry. The table of contents listed all the parks by categories: president’s homes, battlefield sites, recreation areas, and so on. At the bottom of the table of contents there was an asterisk and the statement, “African American history is interpreted in all the parks.” I knew that was not accurate. But there was not even an asterisk indicating that women’s history was of any interest to the National Park Service.
In 1978, out of over three hundred parks, only three parks were focused on women: the Clara Barton National Historic Site, the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, and the Maggie Walker National Historic Site. Only one of the three, the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site, was in my North Atlantic Region. That region included New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. My region was rich with historic parks but also included two major natural parks, Acadia National Park in Maine and the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.
This request for a possible new park was a dream come true for me. The passion to create a new women’s park came from my personal experiences, my desire to understand my life, and my hope to better the lives of others. I wanted the National Park Service to interpret a broad story addressing the history of women being treated differently and unfairly. I wanted to understand the history behind present-day discrimination. And I wanted to create a space where women could speak truth about their lives, ask questions, and share their stories with others.
My passion was in part fueled by the infuriating experience of a yearlong wait for my appointment as chief ranger for legislation in the Boston office. Even in my beloved Park Service there were obstacles. I had applied for the position, but it remained vacant as I waited a year for a decision. I was told several times that “no applicant was qualified,” though I had a master of arts in law degree, and while working for the state had drafted legislation, testified in favor of it, and was pleased to see new protections enacted for those being forced to relocate by government acquisition. Finally, I met with the equal employment officer in the regional office. That officer called a senior staff meeting and relayed to the regional director my interest, and qualifications, as well as the twelve-month delay in acting on this position. The regional director had been unaware of all this before the meeting and pronounced that he knew someone who was well qualified and directed I be hired immediately for the position. During my research for writing this book I was told an odd twist on affirmative action: my land acquisition boss refused for twelve months to allow my appointment to the legislative position because he was so proud of having recruited the only professional woman in land acquisition.
I was also inspired by two events etched in my memory. While I was working at a prestigious bank in Boston, my boss said during my evaluation that my work was exceptional, but he requested I wear lipstick and fishnet stockings to the office. I did not. This was 1964.
Later, I worked for the Bureau of Relocation for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts evaluating public acquisition projects. Massachusetts law required our determination of adequate safe housing for families to move to after the government acquired their homes. The bureau director moved on to a federal position. The Community Affairs Department deputy director took me to lunch to say how much he appreciated that I was on staff to train the new boss to be selected from their nationwide search. I was insulted and angry and decided on the spot to resign right there, over lunch. I enjoyed a bit of revenge watching the surprise and confusion on his face when I told him I would be gone in two weeks. After a tumultuous few weeks, I was selected to be the new bureau director.
Peggy invited me to come to her office for a week of orientation and training. I flew to Washington on September 11, 1978. My plane glided in over Georgetown and the Potomac River as it descended into National Airport (now Reagan Airport). Downtown Washington was a panorama beneath me off to the left. It was a clear morning. I could easily make out the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, the Washington Monument, and the Reflecting Pool. I had flown into Washington many times for my volunteer committee work with a relocation policies nonprofit. I always had goose bumps as the plane got closer to the city that to me emanated power, especially the power to accomplish good for those who needed support. The ability of laws to change society for the better had always been my basis for loving legislation and laws. I was intrigued by the possibilities for good that could be accomplished from laws. I was awestruck when I was on the ground: the grandeur of the architecture always inspired me as I considered what went on inside those imposing buildings.
This was my first visit to the Park Service headquarters, in the Main Interior Building, the headquarters for the Department of the Interior. The secretary of the interior and his staff, along with the heads of most agencies that are part of the department, were located here. I caught a cab, which pulled up to a broad expanse of stairs in front of the massive stone structure that covered two full city blocks from C Street to E Street Northwest, just one block west of the White House Ellipse. I climbed the stairs and walked through one of the five towering bronze double doors into the huge main lobby. In the middle of the gleaming polished stone floor was an enormous bas relief bronze plaque, the seal of the United States Department of the Interior, featuring the iconic buffalo in the center. Reverently, I stepped around the great seal. Off to my right was an impressive entry into the departmental auditorium. Off to the left I could see through the open door into a stately looking library. The grand scale and the beauty and the artistry took my breath away, and I was moved to tears.
I showed my Park Service identification card to a friendly uniformed guard who welcomed me with a smile and waved me past his reception desk. I entered the grand main hall, probably twenty-five feet wide and two blocks long, interrupted with a wide flight of stairs in its middle. The doors off the main hall were also bronze; one led to a small shop that sold exquisite Native American jewelry and fine baskets and intricate sand paintings. Another impressive door led to a small room that displayed the brochures of every national park, waiting for any interested visitor ready to set out on a journey. Across the hall was a museum with exhibits extolling the vast beauty and significance of the many sites owned and managed by the Bureau of Land Management. I stood transfixed and overwhelmed as I contemplated the history of my nation.
I walked through another bronze door into one of the several elevators. The building was intended to maximize windows and fresh air: there was one long central hall with wings off to either side. Peggy’s office was on the third floor, in the second wing off the main hall, next to the famed Hall of Heroes. The Hall of Heroes, which overlooked the main front entrance and little duck pond across the street, included the offices of the director of the National Park Service and the associate directors, along with their personal secretaries. Peggy’s office in the next hall over was large and graced with two enormous windows bespeaking her importance. But there was no personal secretary; she was not part of the directorate.
For that whirlwind week in September 1978, I shadowed Peggy as she briefed the director for an upcoming hearing before Congress and took part in a flurry of meetings in the building and on Capitol Hill. We ate our lunches in the cafeteria in the basement, where I observed the sacrosanct table of the Park Service directorate, every seat filled with men. Amid this nonstop work, always on the run, we talked about the idea of a new women’s park in my region.
During that week I had the opportunity to learn about this imposing Main Interior Building and fall in love with it. The Interior Department had been created by Congress in March 1849. Nearly a century later, Harold Ickes, who served as secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1946, decided to build the best office building in Washington to gather together the agencies of his growing department. The building was designed by renowned architect Waddy Butler Wood during the Great Depression and dedicated on April 16, 1936. It featured more Public Works Administration artwork than any other federal building in Washington; more than forty murals were painted by New Deal–era artists, including John Steuart Curry, Maynard Dixon, and William Gropper, and later several 1941–1942 photomurals by Ansel Adams were displayed.
Peggy was accomplishing an additional purpose by leading me all around the building and introducing me to many of the Park Service employees. There were so few professional women in the agency at the time that two women walking around the building would have attracted some attention. As the idea for the park moved through the building over a year later, folks could associate the idea with those two women who were seen around everywhere in September 1978. Thanks to my mother, who loved to take me shopping the day after Thanksgiving and again after Christmas and buy me elegant tailored outfits reduced in price, I was well dressed for any meeting with the director or associates, or members or staff on Capitol Hill. I was very conscious of symbols, and if my jackets had those huge shoulder pads popular in those days, I removed them: they looked too determinedly aggressive to me. Thankfully my mother had also passed on to me her skills of being gracious and listening and respecting everyone she met. Peggy made it a point for me to meet with the director, William Whalen, on about the third day in my new position. Thirteen months later he would become one of the most important figures in moving my proposal forward to Congress so that it could be authorized as a new national park. Whalen was from California, where he had been superintendent of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, one of two enormous National Park Service urban parks, the other being Gateway National Recreational Area including the waterfronts outside New York Harbor. He was finely attuned to the range of possibilities for national parks and not limited to focusing on the big natural parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone.
My last evening in Washington, Peggy and I sat down in her office and read through the National Park Service Directory of designated National Historic Landmarks. A landmark designation declares that site to be nationally significant; the designation is reserved for sites of national importance but not necessarily part of a national park. This recognition is significant but brings no action; it is just a listing. This was our gold mine for finding a site for women’s history—our best, and perhaps only, opportunity for a new women’s park in my region. I was eager but nervous—what if we found nothing in my region? National significance would be the single most important criteria for a new national park. We were excited and relieved to find two sites in my North Atlantic region: the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Seneca Falls and the home of Susan B. Anthony in Rochester, both in New York State. There were no designated landmarks related to women’s history in the other six states in my region.
At the end of that momentous week, I returned to my Boston office and shared our discoveries. I was greeted with surprise and cheers and immediate enthusiasm. My office was on the eleventh floor of the turn-of-the-century 15 State Street building that had been adapted for the National Park Service, including a first-floor visitor center for the Boston National Historical Park. The eleventh-floor staff was a tight community that routinely shared birthday parties in the office and potluck dinners in one another’s homes. We also shared a bond in that we had all come into the Park Service as full-grade professionals rather than working our way up from beginning ranger positions; all the professional staff on the floor had at least a master’s degree, and we all were passionately committed to saving the environment and preserving our national history. We also strengthened our camaraderie by sharing the dramas of whitewater canoeing, more leisurely kayaking, frigid tent camping, and an affection for LL Bean gear and casseroles made from the Ithaca, New York–based Moosewood Cookbook. It had surprised me that when Peggy first called for ideas, these highly educated folks in my office did not have suggestions for new national parks; but they made up for it in enthusiasm at the news of these possible women’s history sites that Peggy and I had found.
My enthusiasm was not dampened by the fact that I had never heard of Elizabeth Cady Stanton until Peggy and I found her home in the listing of national historic landmarks. I was not alone in my ignorance. I graduated in 1963 from the Arts College of Cornell University, just forty-three miles south of Seneca Falls, but I had never heard of Stanton’s work for women’s rights. I soon discovered that many of the people I worked with in the Park Service were unaware that women in America could not vote until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. And even fewer knew that in the 1848 convention in Seneca Falls women called for the right to vote, among other rights.
But learning Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s story, and the story of the 1848 convention, inspired me, and I believed it would inspire visitors.
Happily, Ross Holland, associate director for cultural affairs in Washington, had previously worked in my regional office and knew Nancy Dubner in Albany, who knew Lucille Povero in Seneca Falls. I telephoned Povero, who was part of a recently created group that wanted to preserve the Stanton house. I made a thrilling discovery: not only the Stanton house, but also the Wesleyan Chapel and the homes of Jane Hunt and Mary Ann M’Clintock were still standing. The Hunt house was the site of the meeting of five women who, over their teacups, decided to call a convention to publicly demand equal rights with men, including suffrage. In the M’Clintock house, Stanton, M’Clintock, and perhaps others had written the Declaration of Sentiments. And, best of all, the Wesleyan Chapel, where the convention took place, was still standing. My dream of a park was getting bigger.
The expanding plan was limited only by my next phone call to the nonprofit foundation that owned the Susan B. Anthony home in Rochester, the only other landmark property in my region. A nonprofit had been created to own and manage the home, and they were interpreting the home to the public. The manager said they preferred to continue their management control over the home and were not interested in turning control over to the Park Service. There was little purpose to pursuing the Anthony home, as it failed one of the three requirements for a new national park: it was not “suitable” because it was already protected and open to the public.
The next step was a reconnaissance visit to Seneca Falls and also Waterloo, several miles farther west, to determine if the sites fit the requirements for a new park, including national significance, suitability, and feasibility. National significance was in this case conferred for the Stanton house by the listing in the landmark directory. “Feasibility” was broadly interpreted but generally meant that the Park Service desired historic structures that retained their authenticity and needed no more than preservation or restoration, not reconstruction. The sites in Seneca Falls were promising, as they were not already protected and open to the public.
Terry assigned me to travel to north central New York, along with the planning team captain, landscape architect Shary Berg. We left December 4, 1978, for a three-day trip, which began with a flight to Rochester, where we met with the managers of the home of Susan B. Anthony to give them another opportunity to hear about our study in person, in spite of their initial negative response. But the group reaffirmed that they were not interested in releasing their control or ownership of the Anthony home to the National Park Service. After that meeting Shary and I planned to drive to Seneca Falls in the afternoon but were delayed by a whiteout snow squall that required an unplanned overnight stay in a truckers’ motel just off the interstate, whose exit sign we could not even read. We did not know where we were but were relieved to find lights on in a motel close to the exit. The clerk said only two rooms were still available, one of which was the honeymoon suite, though she said she would not charge us extra for the unexpected luxury. I volunteered to take the honeymoon suite and was delighted to find, instead of wallpaper, carpet samples of every color, design, and texture glued to the walls.
The skies and roads had cleared by the following morning, and we drove through snow-covered countryside into clear skies and no snow at the Stanton house. An enthusiastic crowd of supporters burst out of the home and swarmed our rental car. The group included professors from the local Eisenhower College and a reporter for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. It was a good omen, for a community must favor the idea of a new national park before Congress will create a park in its midst. In my earlier positions my team and I had been swarmed numerous times while working for the Relocation Bureau for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but the swarms had been angrily and loudly protesting the housing conditions we were working to improve. This joyous, appreciative swarm at the Stanton house was particularly heartwarming for me.
The Stanton house had been put up for sale in the spring of 1978. Lucille Povero had pulled together a committee to raise money to purchase the house; they hoped it could become a key part of a proposed New York State Urban Cultural Park program. This program, then under consideration by the state, would promote economic revitalization, historic preservation, and recreation in Seneca Falls. Our greeters were ecstatic at the prospect of the even bigger dream of a national park. After the high-energy greeting, we were given a tour of the house. We entered the living room, and two bedrooms were off to the left. One bedroom had a straight flight of stairs to the second floor, where there were two more bedrooms. There were modern additions, including a kitchen off the back of the living room, and a bathroom, but it seemed clear that the historic materials of the period were intact. Under the circumstances, however, we hardly got a good look at the house: the rooms were small, and the group filled whichever room we were in, excitedly telling us about the house, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Seneca Falls. It seemed plausible enough in that brief visit that we would make our three required findings of national significance, suitability, and feasibility. And it seemed highly likely we would be able to make the necessary reassurance that the community was supportive.
After a time, we got in our hosts’ cars and caravanned south down Washington Street, passing many houses built after 1945. We then turned west onto East Bayard Street and north across the Ovid Street bridge over the Cayuga–Seneca Canal connecting the two largest of the Finger Lakes. Then it was left onto Fall Street, the main street in Seneca Falls. I thought what a long walk for Elizabeth Cady Stanton with her ankle-length dresses and fourteen petticoats underneath, plus a corset. We rode past two blocks of Victorian brick storefronts two stories high, built to replace the earlier wood-frame storefronts destroyed by fires. We were charmed. Downtown was only three blocks long, and the third block, as we had been told by the group, included the Wesleyan Chapel.
We parked and got out of the cars. Shary and I looked around us for the chapel, having been told it was a huge building. I thought we had stopped where we did because there was room for all the cars to park; the chapel must be up or down the street. We did not realize that the building right in front of us with a red-and-white metal awning stretched across a bank of floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows was our destination. A large neon sign that read “Seneca Falls Laundromat” jutted out from the corner of the building. We had to be told that this was the historic Wesleyan Chapel. The historic fabric that our professional eyes sought was not visible. I had to stifle a laugh. I found it wonderfully ironic that the site of the first convention for women’s rights had become a laundromat. I did not share that with the group.
The building began its life as the Wesleyan Methodist Society Chapel. But in 1978 the plate-glass windows replaced the church front. Four sets of windows had been carved out of both the side walls, and three sets patched back in. An elevator shaft and a covered exterior stairway had been tacked onto the west side wall. Inside the rear of the building was a large open space once used for car repairs. There was no hint of a church.
The words “nationally significant, suitable and feasible” were swirling in my head as we looked at the building. I could hear Peggy Lipson saying that any grand plan was “dead in the water” if the site and structures were not already declared nationally significant. It was hard to apply any of these terms to the Seneca Falls laundromat. But I fervently wished to have the largest park possible in Seneca Falls, and that would have to somehow include the Wesleyan Chapel. The figurative distance between the laundromat building in need of repair and restoration (and possibly the prohibited reconstruction) and becoming the centerpiece of a new national park on women’s rights seemed daunting and improbable. Yet it never felt insurmountable to me. After all, the right to vote never seemed insurmountable to Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Seneca Falls was our only option for a park on women’s history in my region. I wanted a park that would stand out as significant and be noticed and visited and inspire as many visitors as possible. I also wanted a park big enough to be taken seriously by the National Park Service and appropriately funded and staffed. The Park Service, and at times Congress, were influenced by the number of visitors when determining funding. A negative downward spiral can happen: little funding, few exhibits, few programs, so fewer visitors, perhaps reduced funding, and so on, perilously downward. Larger historical parks have literally the space for large numbers of visitors, exhibits, staff, and programs, and can enjoy an upward spiral of funding, staffing, and programming. Women’s history had not been much honored by the Park Service, and I wanted the Park Service to take note of and honor this new park in a way appropriate to its significance. I refused to be daunted or discouraged by the laundromat. We could figure that out later. I wanted a big new national park.
My youth helped me. Growing up I had a hideaway that I imagined out of very large bushes in our backyard and which I determined had a few rooms to move around in. When we later moved to a new suburb, I spent my days playing in the houses under construction, deciding what spaces would be which rooms and how I would furnish and decorate them. Once, playing with a neighbor friend, I said to her that the bucket over there would be a table. She squinted a bit and tilted her head a little as she said, “But there is no bucket there.” I told her to imagine the bucket and then picture it as a table.
Shary and I got back in one of the cars of our hosts, and the caravan drove about four miles west to the M’Clintock house in Waterloo. Fall Street, or highways 5 and 20, follows the north bank of the Cayuga Seneca Canal and was the main east-west road before the New York State Thruway was built in the early 1950s. The Thruway had long ago siphoned much of the traffic off Routes 5 and 20, and I was intrigued and charmed to see another layer of history: buildings built in the first half of the twentieth century and scenes that remained largely unchanged since then. During my years at Cornell I did not have a car and had never explored the area beyond the campus. I was especially taken with a motel complex of tiny individual cabins; they looked like dollhouses, and anything in miniature always charmed me.
We arrived at the M’Clintock house on East Williams Street in the village of Waterloo and again were shocked by what we saw. The M’Clintocks were active Quakers and lived in a modest brick house just a block off the main street. The Declaration of Sentiments had been written in the house. But a church, much larger than the house, had since been built immediately next door on the east side, and the M’Clintock house was used as its parsonage. The church hovered only inches away from the historic house, and long boards had been bolted to the side of the church to prevent the bulging brick wall from collapsing onto the M’Clintock house. Shary and I stood together, taking in the scene, still surrounded with the enthusiastic greeters. There was no question of the significance of the site, but feasibility was very uncertain. The M’Clintock house could be obliterated at any moment by the collapse of the church. Given the constitutional separation of church and state, I also dreaded the challenge of working with an active church. I had earlier in 1978 spent long days trying to work out an agreeable compromise for the Park Service on another site in eastern New York with a structure still used for church services. I was not eager to tangle with that unsolvable problem again.
We got back in our car caravan and drove back east on Route 20 to our final site, still in Waterloo, the Hunt house at 401 East Main Street. Richard Hunt was a prosperous businessman who owned a woolen mill, and he and his wife, Jane, were active Quakers. We arrived to find a large, well-maintained two-story brick home with tall white Doric columns creating a handsome portico at the front. It was quite grand, and I breathed a sigh of relief to see something that looked like it might indeed be deemed nationally significant and a strong complement to the Stanton house. To me it looked like it might be part of a national park (I had my own Park Service bias I would later need to confront). I was so relieved to find something that looked historic, and significant, that I did not consider that a critical contribution to its imposing presence, the two-story columns and portico, had been added in 1929, as it was later confirmed, to what had been a simple Quaker home in 1848. The pillars actually negated and confused the historic appearance and integrity of the structure, making it look more like a Civil War–era southern plantation than a simple Quaker home. But that day in December, as I was still reeling after our visit to the laundromat chapel and the M’Clintock house, the beautiful, impressive, well-maintained Hunt house was reassuring.
Within the National Park Service the “integrity” of a building, defined as the degree to which it retains its historic appearance and structure, is a critical factor in determining its national significance. This was most clearly not the case for the Wesleyan Chapel; and the other buildings we saw were either altered or deteriorated. All the structures needed much more than the preferred “preservation”—they needed major “restoration.” Reconstruction, which was at that time essentially prohibited by Park Service policies, required a waiver signed by the director of the Park Service and was rarely granted. So, by the morning of December 6, only the Hunt house, at least to my eyes, looked like a reliable part of the plan for a larger park.
After our tour of the sites, we had lunch with the welcoming group and then were escorted to a meeting room upstairs in the Gould Hotel back in Seneca Falls. Shary and I sat on one side of a small table, with two chairs on the other side in the otherwise empty room. Then, one or two at a time, a parade of community members were introduced to us and would sit on the other side of the table. Every fifteen minutes another person or two would sit down and explain why they were enthusiastic about the Park Service coming to Seneca Falls. Members of the National Women’s Hall of Fame, the Seneca Falls Historical Society, professors from the private Eisenhower College in Seneca Falls, and others expressed their support. It was an exhilarating but exhausting day and ended with a group dinner.
Shary and I spent that night in the Gould Hotel, which had not yet been restored to its original grandeur. We met for breakfast in the diner car across the street and discovered that neither of us had been pleased with the trickle of cool water available for our morning showers. I was enchanted with the diner: it retained its original booths and seemingly its original fixtures and decor. We drove back to Rochester on a sunny December 6 and then flew home to Boston too weary to talk much.
Back in the Boston office, in a meeting with Terry Savage, Shary declared her judgment that there should never be a national park in Seneca Falls because it was “too cold.” Shary had gone to school at Wells College across Cayuga Lake from Seneca Falls and had personally experienced the famously long, cold, gray winters of upstate New York. She believed visitors would not come to Seneca Falls in the winter and therefore there would not be enough visitors overall to support the park. And it was true that Park Service funding formulas were at least partly based on the number of visitors to a park. I countered her, waxing enthusiastic over our trip, especially emphasizing the excitement of the community. I argued we should proceed to the next step, to see if a national park in Seneca Falls and Waterloo could meet the Park Service three-part test of national significance, feasibility, and suitability. I could not declare that the historic properties met those criteria, but I urgently argued that because the story was so significant, the buildings and the sites should be given a professional analysis and thoughtful consideration before we came to any conclusions. And we had no other candidate for a women’s history park in our region. It was Seneca Falls or bust. Terry had a broad view of the sites in the National Park Service and knew that very few told the story of women. He enthusiastically accepted my ideas and agreed that we should move the proposal forward to the next step: compiling a “New Area Study,” as required by the Park Service and Congress to evaluate a contender for a new national park.
It would have been much more challenging if not impossible to advance to the next phase but for the work of fifteen-year-old Hanns Kuttner. Hanns, a junior in high school at the time, had worked with the Seneca Falls Bicentennial Committee and then moved on to join the group that formed to work for preservation of the Stanton house. Decades later, in a 2020 interview, I asked him how he had come to be interested in this work. First, he said not many organizations accepted his desire to contribute his work as a fifteen-year-old prodigy, but these two groups welcomed his efforts. He also told me a story about the summer he was ten, when a salesman for the World Encyclopedia was making his way through town. Hanns persuaded his parents to buy a set of the books. When he discovered that his little village of Seneca Falls was the site of history worthy to be included in the encyclopedia, he was eager to add his work to further document the significance of the history of Seneca Falls. Without Hanns’s work, there might not be a national park in Seneca Falls, and surely not one larger than just the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Working alongside Anne Ackerson, director of the Seneca Falls Historical Society, Hanns prepared the nomination form for a Noncontiguous National Historic District in Seneca Falls and Waterloo. His imagination was not limited by Park Service policies. Historic districts had first referred to a unitary geography, but the idea of a noncontiguous district allowed considering historic structures linked by theme rather than by their immediate physical proximity. Individual buildings not in close proximity made up the “district.” The nomination was not yet approved, but a pending nomination for national significance was our best hope for continuing the quest for the largest possible park. The district included the Stanton house, the Wesleyan Chapel, and the M’Clintock and Hunt homes.
The first step for a new national park is the idea. The second step is a Reconnaissance Study: a trip out to the community and preliminary determination if the site meets the Park Service requirements. Shary was assigned to write up the Reconnaissance Study based on our December trip to Seneca Falls. She completed the report in early 1979. The third necessary step was the New Area Study for Seneca Falls and Waterloo. Terry asked for the team of planners in the Denver Service Center to complete the New Area Study. The Denver Service Center, however, refused the request. I recall distinctly that they stated the project was “too small.” Also, a study for Seneca Falls had not been funded. The initial reactions to my idea had been enthusiasm among most of my Park Service friends in Boston and Peggy in Washington, and often included “It’s about time”; and Terry had overruled the reservations of Shary Berg. So I was stunned when the Denver Service Center rejected the request. The rejection by his former friends and coworkers in Denver angered Terry. This rejection, if accepted, would have meant the death of the park proposal. We needed the study for Seneca Falls; we had no other candidate for a women’s park in the region. At best, the rejection meant “wait your turn” to get the funding for the study. Maybe someday.
With hindsight, had Terry waited for the project to rise on the priority list, and then be selected for funding, Seneca Falls would have missed the newly opened door to be submitted to Congress. A new law passed in 1976 dramatically changed the actions of the Park Service for a very few years and opened wide the door for the Seneca Falls proposal. Before 1976, new park proposals often came from the community or from Congress. But on October 7, 1976, Congress enacted Public Law 94–458, amending the National Park Service General Authorities Act. The Park Service was then required by law to complete resource surveys that would analyze “areas whose resources exhibit qualities of national significance and which may have potential for inclusion in the National Park System.” Also, the Park Service was directed to submit to the House and Senate every year twelve New Area Studies for sites that met the criteria for inclusion in the national park system. Historians, planners, landscape architects, architects, and archaeologists were gathered into a new team in the Denver Service Center to complete the recently mandated New Area Studies. But this door welcoming new national parks slammed shut in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. Funding for the Denver Service Center planning unit and its studies was reduced to zero and the team was broken apart and reassigned back out through the Park Service after the administration brought new priorities that emphasized maintenance of existing parks over creating new ones.
Fortunately, in 1979 Terry redirected his anger at the professionals in Denver into a solution. Never one to be constrained from following a good idea, Terry declared that we would do the New Area Study internally, at the Boston office. He assigned Shary as team captain and appointed me and several others to the planning team. There were frequent planning team meetings during those weeks of early 1979, and I always argued for the biggest possible park, including the chapel and the houses of Stanton, M’Clintock, and Hunt, and I added a preservation district to be managed by an independent commission also funded by the Park Service. This concept had been included in the recently enacted Lowell National Historical Park. Shary and I gathered frequently with Terry in his office at a small round table. Terry’s office had very large windows overlooking the historic and handsome Old State House just across the street, and his windows were at about the level of the spectacular carvings on the roof of the Old State House. Beyond that building was a sweeping view of Boston, which I would scan to calm myself during contentious moments of our many discussions. Shary repeatedly argued for just a house museum at the Stanton home, if it had to be a national park at all. But my more expansive view was continually supported by Terry, as well as the rest of the Park Service staff from the eleventh floor who had more focused roles supplementing the study. The final planning meeting was intense and rather raucous for this usually friendly group: Shary and I squared off over our opposing visions. Voices were raised. Terry let it all hang out. Eventually, Terry chose “alternative four” as the preferred park plan: the biggest park of all. After his final decision, Shary was assigned the task of writing the New Area Study.
Shary developed a fifty-three-page New Area Study including charming line drawings of the buildings and handsome maps of the proposed park and the region, prepared by another talented staff landscape architect, Carol Tanski. The line drawings did not show the deteriorated and altered states of the structures, as photographs would have. Even though the purpose of the study was to evaluate a proposed new site for national significance, suitability, and feasibility, the study did not include a deep or rigorous analysis of any of these three factors. The study did include a twenty-one-page history of women’s rights, and the Declaration of Sentiments.
All New Area Studies are required to have alternatives: the study recommends a preferred alternative, and the regional director submits the study to the director in Washington, accompanied with his preferred alternative recommendation.
The Women’s Rights study had four alternatives:
- taking no action
- restricting the park to only the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- including the Wesleyan Chapel and the homes of M’Clintock and Hunt
- including all the structures as well as a preservation district to preserve the historic context in Seneca Falls and a commission to manage the preservation district
The M’Clintock and Hunt houses in Waterloo were recognized in the study as part of the park but were limited to cooperative agreements for technical assistance. I had by then traveled to Seneca Falls a number of times and met with all the property owners. The Stanton committee, which had incorporated as a nonprofit and taken the name Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, was most eager to buy the Stanton home and then sell it to the Park Service. The owner of the laundromat was eager to sell to the Park Service and retire. However, the couple who owned the Hunt house had differing opinions: one wanted to sell and move to Florida, and the other wanted to stay in Waterloo. I had no time or ability or authority or willingness to resolve that, so the Hunt house was designated only for agreements with the owners for guidance with preservation. The M’Clintock house had the entanglement with the church still holding services immediately next door. I wanted no resistance to the proposal from the community or problems having anything to do with separation of church and state. It was critical to demonstrate local support. So the M’Clintock house was also designated for simple cooperative agreements for preservation.
There was no eminent domain (forced acquisition) authority suggested in the study, or later added to the legislation. There would be only willing sellers. In my opinion based on my talks with those who lived in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, forced acquisition by the federal government would have aroused intense ire in the communities and created resistance and possibly rejection of the whole idea of the park.
The New Area Study was completed in August 1979. The Denver Service Center did agree to print the report, and it carried the standard cover design of other studies actually completed by the planners in Denver. The printing, however, was limited: on August 10, a memo from the Denver Service Center transmitted just fifteen copies of the report to the Washington office. Acting regional director Gil Calhoun officially transmitted the study to the director of the Park Service in Washington on August 21. Calhoun recommended alternative four, which included acquisition of the Wesleyan Chapel and the Stanton house, and the preservation district.
“Other priorities!” “Wait your turn!” Fortunately, Terry Savage refused to be restrained by either.