Blog #2 - Naper Settlement

I grew up in a city outside Chicago called Naperville, named for its founder Joe Naper. The Naperville I know is a sprawl of McMansions, SUV's, and chain restaurants. The reason the name Joe Naper is so familiar to me is because smack dab in the heart of downtown Naperville is Naper Settlement, a sort of outdoor living museum celebrating the history of its namesake. In middle school we went on a field trip to Naper Settlement where we were treated to a tour of the collection of preserved and restored buildings that had been picked up and dropped next door to each other.

Being an impudent middle-schooler, I wasn't very interested in many of the old buildings, except for the blacksmith's shop because there was an actual blacksmith at work in there. In fact, there was an entire cast of players populating Naper Settlement, all in period dress and ready to explain this or that about their fictitious old-timey lifestyle. At one point on the tour we discovered a man who admitted to being a runaway slave on his way to freedom via the underground railroad. I figured he was pretty safe having reached northern Illinois, but he pleaded with us not to tell anyone we had found him, so we agreed. He explained his hardships to us and spoke passionately of his dream to become free. He turned to me, stared me right in the eye, and asked, "What is freedom like?" I thought for a second, and paraphrasing Douglas Adams I told him, "Freedom is like a grapefruit. It's sort of orangy-yellow and dimpled on the outside, it's wet and squidgy in the middle, and lots of people have half of one for breakfast." He looked to my teacher and said, "This boy is touched, ain't he?"

I never grew out of being a smartass, but I did learn to appreciate having a slice of town that wasn't in constant danger of being turned into a Starbucks. Even if a lot of it seemed fakey, it was cool that the driving force behind it was saving some great old buildings and anchoring the city with a sense of history. There's something about being able to take a walk from a working blacksmith to the Apple store that really puts things in perspective.

It makes me appreciate Ann Pamela Cunningham and her quest to save Mount Vernon. While reading about her, it struck me as funny that the way she kicked off American preservationism with a group of women. I wondered why there were no men in her group. Were they not interested in preservation? Was she not interested in involving men? Was it the name of the group, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union, that made men assume that preservation was for women? Whatever the reason, according to Murtagh, Cunningham's group set assumptions in the preservation movement that would last until the late 19th century. Preservation was done by private parties to honor patriotic icons, and "women would assume a dominant role in the acquisition and management of such properties." Imagining the state of women's rights in this time period (before women could even vote) it's nice to know women could step in and dominate something this important.

Eventually men got in on preservation as well, and as assumptions about the field fell, the government became involved. According to Murtagh, "There was simply no nationwide organization which could respond to controversial preservation issues with greater alacrity and freedom than could government."    After looking up the word "alacrity," I couldn't really picture any government body acting with "brisk and cheerful readiness," but perhaps things were different back then. Nevertheless, the National Trust grew off of the National Park Service as a way to unify the nation's preservation efforts. The National Trust grew and took on a life of its own, establishing itself as an entity independent of the National Park Service. After battling its way through the political system, President Truman signed a bill in 1949 to create the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. The rest, as they say, is history.