This is a special appeal from the Fort Monroe National Park Foundation, a nonprofit educational foundation formed by leaders of the separate and earlier established Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park. Months ago, the foundation commissioned a Hampton Roads regional waterfront parkland study by the Trust for Public Land. These respected national experts are nearing completion. Their report will be out in late 2008. It will be vital for Fort Monroe's future, but it costs $15,000. With an initial stake contributed by foundation board members -- and with generous contributions from people like you in response to an earlier e-mail appeal -- as of October 2008, the foundation has paid $11,000 overall in the first two of three installments. Will you donate a tax-deductible $100 (or other amount) to help raise the remaining $4000? Not one cent of your contribution would go to overhead or staff. We cover overhead ourselves, and we have no paid staff. Additional information about this Trust for Public Land study as an important component of the effort to save Fort Monroe appears further below on this page. Please make checks payable to "Fort Monroe National Park Foundation" and mail to:
  Treasurer
  Fort Monroe National Park Foundation
  P.O. Box 097
  Fort Monroe
  VA 23651
 

Thank you very much.
Henry O. Malone, President, and Louis L. Guy, Jr., Treasurer

Fort Monroe National Park Foundation
 

Additional information:

 

Almost a half-century ago, our nation made a National Historic Landmark out of Fort Monroe, a peninsula nearly ten times the size of the moated fortress that it surrounds. We believe this entire Old Point Comfort peninsula, with four centuries in the public domain and going back to the origins of our nation, is precious in two fundamentally intertwined ways: historically and as a unique and scenic waterfront site lying exactly at the confluence of the Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads harbor in the geographic center of the region, featuring over three hundred acres of green space.

 

Others, however, perceive most of the open space of this National Historic Landmark as precious merely in a narrow, short-term financial sense. Virginia's 18-member Fort Monroe Authority (officially the Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority, often called the "FMFADA") has the power to sell off parts of Fort Monroe piecemeal, privatizing land that has been publicly owned for 400 years.

 

That's why an expert regional analysis is needed as to whether Virginia can afford to lose this precious open space, with its spectacular water views and two-mile promenade on the Chesapeake Bay. Public access to waterfront land is an important issue for the 1.6 million residents of Hampton Roads, and that issue intertwines in a fundamental way with the issue of preserving the National Historic Landmark for all Americans. 

 

Yet no one has actually looked at how Fort Monroe figures in the issue of waterfront park space in Hampton Roads. So we commissioned a formal study by the Trust for Public Land -- a "national, nonprofit, land conservation organization that conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, community gardens, historic sites, rural lands, and other natural places, ensuring livable communities for generations to come."

 

The completed study will be delivered to both Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Preston Bryant, who chairs Virginia's Fort Monroe Authority, and Governor Tim Kaine, who has the power to act on whatever the authority recommends concerning Fort Monroe's future.

 

All of the foundation's board members have spent substantial personal sums supporting efforts to educate the public regarding Fort Monroe's great value and potential. Despite that effort, we still need help from friends of Fort Monroe. 

 

The foundation has been licensed by the Commonwealth of Virginia to solicit funds and has been organized and operates in compliance with Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.  The foundation's application for recognition of its 501(c)(3) exemption was approved by the IRS in 2008, meaning your donations to the foundation are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law.

 

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