By Mark Wolfe, Texas State Historic Preservation Officer; President, National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers
Just over a year ago, the Texas Historical Commission experienced one of the most heartbreaking events in our organization’s history. On April 13, 2019, an F3 tornado struck the community of Alto, in Cherokee County in east Texas. Ground Zero for the storm was our own Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, where members of the Caddo Nation and other celebrants had gathered for the site’s biggest annual event, Caddo Culture Days. Dozens of people were injured, some severely. One person was killed. And the visitor center was destroyed along with a recently-completed Caddo grass house.
Our agency quickly learned how a normal day can transform into tragedy. I’d like to say that the shock of this event somehow prepared us for the crisis of COVID-19. But in truth nothing could ready us for the trauma of shuttering all our state historic sites to the public while our employees, friends, and families seek the safety of their homes to avoid exposure to a deadly virus.
In this time of isolation, I would like to offer a few thoughts on how we, as operators of the nation’s historic places, and you, as members of the public, can help to support historic sites both now and after COVID-19 is nothing more than another chapter in the history of the places we love.
For those who operate historic sites, the most pressing issue will be the restoration of public confidence in the very concept of travel and visitation. This will be tough, but we have many partners with whom to share best practices and ideas. For now, my feeling is that in many parts of the nation, sites will be able to open their grounds to visitors in the near term, but a quick solution to the spread of COVID-19 in enclosed spaces may elude us for some time. Larger sites with gates and online registration systems have the upper hand, with the ability to control how many people visit at any given time. Smaller, enclosed places may have to wait until things are a little more stable.
If a full re-opening is not an option, be prepared to investigate alternative programming and interpretation. Can educational presentations be done outside or online? Can your gift shop support “retail to go” or online sales? These and other questions may need to be answered immediately if your site is to avoid the most disastrous financial scenarios. Use social media to reach out to new audiences. Repurpose digital products and information you have been sharing over the past several years. Refresh things a little and send them out again. Stay in the public’s eye and don’t let them forget about you. And on the public end of things, comment on social media posts from your favorite sites. Share their information with your family and friends. Words and pictures can send powerful messages, and there are millions of potential visitors sitting in front of their computers searching for the kinds of stories you have to tell.
By way of example, here in Texas we are offering a curated resource of online learning tools through our THC History@Home initiative. While no substitute for an in-person visit, the enormous captive audience across the country offers a small silver lining amidst the dark clouds of COVID-19. We have seen increases in traffic and subscribers to our websites, social media platforms, and email newsletters. We will certainly emerge from this with more engaged and numerous social followers, who are more knowledgeable of the agency’s mission and program offerings.
As a historic site operator, one of the most powerful tools we have is the creativity and vision of our staff. Here in Texas, our site managers and education specialists have come up with wonderful ideas. They have adapted widely popular memes and hashtags from social media and repurposed them to promote our sites and their history. And they’ve created webinars and livestreaming presentations that attract hundreds of participants. As a fan of history and historic places, you can help to support such efforts by sharing them with people you know, and by signing up and “attending” webinars yourself. Many are free. Some do charge a fee, but that is another way you can help support your favorite sites.
One big problem our historic sites face is our reliance on volunteers, many of whom are members of high-risk groups who are being told to stay home. If you fall into this category, please know that although we miss you, you are too important to us for you to venture out. Please stay safe. Ask the site manager if there is anything you can do to help from home. It is possible that this time can be used productively to do online research into facets of your site’s history that have gone uninterpreted. Or the site where you volunteer might have a cache of records that need to be transcribed. You never know until you ask. And if that’s not an option, look into some of the great online volunteer opportunities offered by such agencies as the National Archives. Their Citizen Archivist program can easily keep you busy for days, helping to transcribe FDR’s speeches, inventory reports from WWII internment camps, or tag historic photographs of roadside architecture from the Bureau of Public Roads. The Smithsonian has a similar program, and you might even be able to find one in your home state.
There might also be options for volunteers to work virtual phone banks, and some not-for-profits are organizing online telethons. Of course your cash donations are always welcome, but the time you spend helping to solicit donations from others is also time well spent. There might also be opportunities to serve on advisory committees or on boards of directors, playing a more active role in the future of an important historic place.
When the sites reopen, it seems likely that we will see reluctance from some groups to return, at least at first. This too may offer opportunities. While some members of our traditional audience may tend toward higher-risk demographics, we also offer very attractive recreational and educational opportunities for college students, millennials, and young families. From most accounts, these groups find the burdens of the quarantine especially onerous. While older retirees and grandparents with grandkids in tow may take a break from our sites, we are confident that younger audiences will enthusiastically visit in numbers greater than before. Ideally, this will inspire even more people to become lifelong fans of historic preservation.
We have already been directed to reopen our 31 state historic sites over the next several days. Our staff is rethinking how we deliver our programs and experiences to reduce visitor density and physical contact without diminishing engagement and storytelling. We are considering everything from staggered or non-traditional opening hours to more autonomous visitor experiences, and more staff-facilitation at larger public events. “Open” may look different, but the heart of what we do will be the same. As a member of the visiting public, watch for these new and very special opportunities to see the places you thought you knew, in new and different ways. Each site is unique, so we expect our reopening plan to allow for a wide variety of distinctive approaches. We had already ordered cleaning supplies and other materials that should enable us to keep things safe for our employees and visitors. We won’t be reopening facilities with interactive displays, at least not yet. Those just beg to be touched, and that’s simply not safe.
The day after the tornado at Caddo Mounds, I traveled from Austin to visit the site and do what little I could to help. I truly cannot imagine what it must have been like to be there during the storm. It was our largest and most celebratory event of the year, and it ended in tragedy. People were still trying to salvage property from the twisted wrecks of cars in the parking lot and from the ruins of the visitor center itself. The grass house was gone, just a circle on the ground. But looking out, past the rubble, I could see the place itself. The mounds, constructed by the Caddo nearly 1,000 years ago, were still there, and still intact. This place will continue to be a tribute to the Caddo culture, a place of respect for their achievements. Another layer of the story has been added. It includes sorrow for what was lost, and that will never be forgotten. But it also includes the story of survival and renewal. The grass is growing tall in Texas this year, and it will soon be ready to harvest for the next Caddo grass house.
With respect to regulatory reviews under the National Historic Preservation Act, there are as many different responses among State Historic Preservation Offices (SHPOs) as there are states and territories. Many, if not most, states have accommodated fairly easily to “work from home” models, having had no choice but to make it work. SHPOs with electronic submittal systems have obviously found it easier to continue to process requests than the offices still dependent on processing paper. Travel restrictions make it difficult if not impossible to actually visit a site, and although there are virtual alternatives, as preservationists we all know that there’s no substitute for being in the place itself. Many states report what appears to be a steady decline in submittals from federal agencies. But an increase in the number of survey reports from contractors (the kind of work that often gets put off until a rainy day) easily fills any “free” time. So all in all, things keep moving through the process. But we anticipate that this might not last much longer. As more states consider both the short- and long-term impact of COVID-19 on their operating budgets, hiring freezes, furloughs, and staff reductions will almost certainly take their toll. Such reductions, coming at the same time as massive congressional spending on capital projects, create a perfect storm.
The current crisis may rob us of much, but unlike a flood or a hurricane, the virus itself cannot harm the sites we cherish. They have seen it all before–pandemics, war, hurricanes, tornados, and more. They will survive and continue to inspire us. Our historic places often tell stories of how adversity inspires greatness. That message has never been more important than it is today. So let’s get back to work, using the places we care about to tell the stories that will help us heal.