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Following Sweet Briar President Elisabeth Muhlenfeld's decision last spring to retire in June 2009, the College's board of directors established a permanent fund in tribute to her legacy. At a dinner in her honor on Friday, May 1, the board announced that the Elisabeth Showalter Muhlenfeld Fund for Historic Preservation has raised $1.6 million.

In today's economy, the amount exceeded even the College's chief fundraiser's expectations. "One point six million is extraordinary and is a testament to the respect and love that the Sweet Briar community has for Betsy," said Heidi Hansen McCrory, vice president for development.

Tusculum as it looked before its deconstruction.

McCrory said the board created the fund to support a wide variety of projects related to historic preservation, including Sweet Briar House and the Tusculum Institute.

The former is the 19th-century plantation home of the College's founder that now serves as the president's residence. The latter is a recently established regional resource and education center whose mission is preserving and studying the area's historic assets within a context of environmental stewardship.

The institute eventually will be physically headquartered in the original Tusculum, the 18th-century childhood home of Sweet Briar founder Indiana Fletcher Williams' mother, Maria Crawford. Until 2006, the timber-framed, wood-sided house stood a few miles north of the College in Amherst County. Slated for demolition to make way for new development, it was instead carefully dismantled, inventoried and stored for later restoration on Sweet Briar's campus.

Muhlenfeld has been a "driving force" behind Tusculum, and the board saw the "Betsy Fund" — as many in the Sweet Briar community have begun to call it — as a good way to "pay tribute to her efforts in the past while continuing her legacy in the future," McCrory said.

Although the details of the fund's structure are still being determined, McCrory expects it to become a self-sustaining source of income for historic preservation campus wide.

Gray Hall is one of four buildings designed by Ralph Adams Cram that the College opened with in 1906.

When Muhlenfeld became president in 1996, one of the first contracts she entered into was with an architectural historian to inventory and assess the campus' original buildings so that appropriate maintenance could begin on the exteriors. This was necessary because the previous year the buildings, designed by Ralph Adams Cram and built in the early 1900s, were registered as a National Historic District.

Sweet Briar House, a slave cabin and a garden cottage on the house grounds also were added to the historic register.

Muhlenfeld said serving as president has enhanced her understanding of the issues associated with historic preservation, but the campus' inherent educational value has always been paramount to her. And with the addition of Tusculum, she sees an exciting new piece. She observed that it was built around 1750, Sweet Briar House acquired its current Italianate form in the mid 1850s and the Georgian-style main campus was built between 1906 and the 1930s.

"You really have a sweep of native American architecture, if you will, of a local character and high quality," she said. "To me, that's important."

Muhlenfeld further believes the institution's whole history as a working Southern plantation turned women's college is important. Its past also left behind a setting that is certainly unusual and maybe unique, she said, noting such contrasts as the great house and the slave cabin and the Fletcher family cemetery with its huge marble obelisk and the slave burial ground where fieldstones mark anonymous graves.

The slave cabin behind Sweet Briar House is one of the few remaining in Central Virginia.

"Preservation allows us to keep Sweet Briar whole for all of its constituencies, including alumnae," Muhlenfeld said. "But more important to me is the ability to use the history of the place — and the land — more effectively within the curriculum."

Moreover, her administration has taught her that when one takes proper care of the old, it's easier to make a case for the new, she said. The campus has expanded during her 13-year tenure but it hasn't always been through new construction.

Like many colleges, Sweet Briar has long recognized that adapting old buildings for new uses, though not necessarily cheaper, protects both the environment and architectural heritage. Muhlenfeld has led several such projects, including converting former dairy barns into a studio arts complex and turning a century-old water treatment plant into an environmental sciences lab and nature center.

In creating the Betsy Fund, Sweet Briar's board recognized that environmentally sound historic preservation has risen to the forefront of the College's initiatives under Muhlenfeld's leadership.