Fort Monroe, Virginia, looks across the lower Chesapeake Bay, over Hampton Roads harbor, deep into four centuries of America's past, and -- if America makes sensible post-Army use of it -- far into the coming centuries. A National Park Service map uses light green to indicate the two parts of the split national monument recently established there. But if it’s true that Fort Monroe saw American history’s greatest moment, that bifurcation is self-evidently preposterous. It’s like marring Monticello with hillside development. Here, red has been added to show the sense-of-place-defining bayfront space that needs to be incorporated into the national monument to transform it from fake to real. [more]
HOW YOU CAN HELP:
On the National Park Service’s survey, please ask for a REAL national park.
At the Fort Monroe Authority’s discussion site, please do the same – that is, please sign up (takes a couple of minutes; see the link at the upper right), and then please navigate through the six main discussion topics, making sure to click “second” wherever you see calls for unifying the national monument/park. (Maybe you’d also like to add comments of your own?)
See a brief video clip in which Tom Gear -- recently commended for seven years of Fort Monroe political leadership by Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park -- argues passionately for making the phony national park real by unifying its two separated parts
A Virginian-Pilot editorial has called for transforming the fake national park into a real one.
Why the map’s red area is so important: Think Outside the Moat
Three-minute YouTube tour: Cherish Fort Monroe
Article and online discussion at The Root, an online magazine of the Washington Post
Richmond Times-Dispatch op-ed from August 2011
Queries, comments, expressions of willingness to help by speaking out: SaveFortMonroe [[[at]]] gmail.com
Note: This Web site evolved from the former site of Citizens (with a capital C) for a Fort Monroe National Park -- a self-appointed, no-public-membership grassroots committee of about a dozen that I co-founded in 2006, my second year in the struggle to save Fort Monroe. With wonderful, hands-on technical leadership -- pro bono for six years now -- from the IT engineer David Gurganus, I also created, managed and controlled CFMNP’s Web site. (CFMNP now uses FortMonroeCitizens.org.) For various reasons -- and even though this public issue concerns a national treasure rather than the flawed but well-intentioned humans who are dedicated, in various ways, to defining its future -- the time has come to report publicly at least some of how and why things changed with CFMNP. [more]
Page maintained by FortMonroeNationalPark.org
Revised: 13 April 2012
