Roque Tudesqui House - Historic Santa Fe Foundation

Preservation
Q & A
Corinne P Sze
With this edition of the Bulletin we make available space for
questions about historic preservation which may be suggested by the
Foundation s work or, in the future, by our readers. To get things
rolling, we offer a skeletal account of preservation history in the
United States, and then try to answer a question suggested by the
"Tudesqui" House research reported elsewhere in this issue.
Historic preservation, as it is understood today, means the protection
of the built as opposed to the natural environment. In the past 150
years, the scope of preservation has broadened from individual landmark
properties of national significance to a much wider range of resources of
local and state import. Today's preservationists worry about not only individual
buildings and their associated open spaces, but also neighborhoods,
structures other than buildings, objects, landscapes, and sites historic
and prehistoric.
This idea of preserving the built environment began in the nineteenth
century as a way of commemorating
the major events and actors in
the history of a still young republic, in effect turning individual landmarks
into quasi-shrines to a common national heritage. In this spirit, the Tennessee
Legislature in 1856 authorized the purchase ofthe Hermitage, US
President Andrew Jackson's home. Two years later the Mount Vernon
Ladies Association was chartered "to purchase, hold, and improve" 200
acres of Mount Vernon, George Washington's
estate.
Many of these early efforts were the result oflocal or private
initiatives. However, in the twentieth century the federal govemment's role
grew, beginning with the Antiquities Act passed by Congress in 1906 to
protect archaeological sites on federa11and. Ten years later the National
Park Service (NPS), newly established within the Department ofthe Interior,
took over the administration of nine existing national monuments.
From this beginning the NPS role in historic preservation has expanded to
oversee the entire federal program.
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