Bob Carter, director of the community services division of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, will be working at Sweet Briar for the next two years on the Tusculum project. Here, Carter stands at the proposed recontruction site for Tusculum, located between Sweet Briar House and the field hockey field.

Who’s Bob Carter and what’s he doing at Sweet Briar?

SUZANNE RAMSEY
College relations staff writer

Tusculum, prior to deconstruction.

Over the summer, a state government employee named Bob Carter set up shop on the second floor of Alumnae House. For the next two years, he will split his time between the Virginia Department of Historic Resources and Sweet Briar, where he’ll be working on the Tusculum project.

In an effort to find out more about Bob Carter and why he’s at Sweet Briar, @sbc sent him a list of questions. Here’s what he had to say:

What is your title at DHR?

My title is director of the community services division. I also serve as the agency’s deputy for community services and partnerships. My main job is to supervise the work of our agency’s five regional field offices and to direct DHR’s financial and technical assistance services to local governments and private preservation organizations.

By education and training, I am a historian, holding degrees in history from Princeton University and the University of Edinburgh and a doctorate in American history from the University of Virginia.

How did the partnership between DHR and Sweet Briar develop?

The DHR-Sweet Briar partnership developed naturally as a cooperative venture to save and preserve Tusculum, the ancestral home of Maria Antoinette Crawford Fletcher, mother of the founder of Sweet Briar College, Indiana Fletcher Williams.

More than six years ago, members of the Crawford family came to DHR with concerns that the latest owners of Tusculum, the Martins, had plans to tear down the historic building to make way for construction of a new family dwelling and for development of a new residential subdivision nearby.

The Martins met with DHR director Kathleen Kilpatrick (Sweet Briar Class of 1974) in October 2001 but could not be persuaded to preserve the house in place. The Martins did come to agree to allow the house to be moved off site before development of their property proceeded and were willing to wait as DHR, the APVA Preservation Virginia and the College came up with a strategy to make that happen.

In 2003, the APVA Preservation Virginia’s property committee, at Kilpatrick’s urging, agreed to apply funds from Virginia’s Statewide Revolving Fund to purchase the endangered house for eventual resale to a sympathetic new owner.

With both the property owner and APVA Preservation Virginia on board, Kilpatrick then proposed, and Sweet Briar College President Elisabeth Muhlenfeld agreed to accept, the relocation of Tusculum to the Sweet Briar campus as soon as funds could be secured for its removal and transfer.

Sweet Briar and DHR also agreed on an appropriate campus location for Tusculum adjacent to Sweet Briar House after archaeological testing of the site by DHR and the College revealed that no archaeological remains were present.

The partnership took root in 2004 when DHR nominated Tusculum to the Virginia Landmarks Register and National Register of Historic Places and Sweet Briar formulated a logistical plan for moving Tusculum to Sweet Briar and storing it in one of the unused dairy barns not slated to be renovated as part of the Arts Barn complex.

DHR’s boards and the National Park Service responded positively to the Tusculum nomination, not only by approving Tusculum for listing on the state and national registers but also by giving pre-approval to Tusculum’s removal to Sweet Briar and subsequent reconstruction.

The boards thus affirmed the worthiness of saving Tusculum as a Virginia historic landmark and the soundness of Muhlenfeld’s plan to reconstruct the building on campus, once funds could be secured to complete the reconstruction.

The pending move of Tusculum to Sweet Briar spurred the College and DHR to focus on Tusculum’s future use. What did the Sweet Briar campus need? How would the College and the surrounding community benefit from its preservation?

An idea began to emerge that the new purpose of Tusculum had to do with education and community building, and it had to be about encouraging a sense of responsibility and stewardship

By February 2006, fulfillment of pledges to Sweet Briar by a number of generous individuals made possible the purchase of Tusculum House from APVA Preservation Virginia and its deconstruction.

Accordingly, Tim Robinson of Heartland Restorations, working under contract to Sweet Briar, and with the patient cooperation of the Martins, completed the work of recordation and dismantling by August of 2006.

Soon thereafter, the historic fabric of Tusculum was carefully moved to Sweet Briar for storage and safekeeping.

In May 2006, Sweet Briar and DHR jointly held a successful “Teaching with Historic Places” regional workshop at Sweet Briar for area educators and historic sites. The workshop not only demonstrated the potential for a stronger Sweet Briar-DHR partnership but also Sweet Briar’s many advantages as a regional center for preservation education and outreach:

• Degree programs in education that are already preparing classroom teachers to teach history, social studies, art and other subjects in the arts and humanities.
• A demonstrated service commitment to the community.
• Talented faculty members already active in service to the wider community.
• Faculty members already using Sweet Briar and its resources as a field school for teaching art history, anthropology, architectural history, environmental studies and museum and museum staff development.
• An outstanding, well-established, internship program.
• Outstanding historic resources that have much to teach about history, architecture, environmental stewardship, archaeology and cultural diversity to young people, educators and the community at large.
• A strategic location in the region.
• Excellent facilities for education, outreach and training.

In the wake of that workshop, Kilpatrick presented Muhlenfeld with a white paper on the future use of Tusculum showing the range of opportunities and benefits that its new residence at Sweet Briar could serve.

Most important, Kilpatrick suggested that DHR could partner with Sweet Briar in creating a regional preservation resource center on the campus and that the new center could be symbolically housed in Tusculum.

With the successful close of a major capital campaign for the College in 2006, Muhlenfeld decided the time was ripe to convene a meeting of community and college stakeholders to discuss the DHR white paper.

That meeting, held last April, resulted in a general consensus on the importance of reconstructing and adapting Tusculum as a regional center for education and outreach, on the value of using Tusculum’s reconstruction as an educational laboratory, and on the advantages of doing this in partnership with the Commonwealth of Virginia through the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. It also issued in a strong pledge by DHR of substantial and continuing support.

That pledge was formalized one month later in a two-year, renewable, memorandum of agreement between Sweet Briar College and DHR, signed by Muhlenfeld and Kilpatrick, whereby both parties pledged to create a regional, public-private, preservation resource center on the Sweet Briar campus, to be known as the Tusculum Institute.

How did you become involved?

Kilpatrick is my boss. So I became familiar with the efforts of DHR and the College to save Tusculum from their inception. However, I did not become personally involved in the project until 2006 when I worked with Sweet Briar Museum director and assistant professor Christian Carr to help plan and organize the “Teaching with Historic Places” workshop at Sweet Briar.

Following the teachers workshop, Kilpatrick consulted with me in producing the white paper for Muhlenfeld’s consideration. Last April, I joined Muhlenfeld and Kilpatrick for a memorable dinner at Sweet Briar House to discuss the white paper. 

After seeing and hearing how warmly DHR’s ideas were embraced, I volunteered to take the lead in establishing a DHR satellite office on the Sweet Briar campus. The subsequent transfer of my position from Richmond to Sweet Briar accorded perfectly with the previous decision of my wife and me to build a house and reside in Nelson County, 26 miles from Sweet Briar.

The College gave me temporary quarters in the Sweet Briar Museum before offering me ample and convenient office space over the next two years in Alumnae House. Since June, I have been devoting about 20 percent of my time and effort to support the Tusculum Initiative.

What do you hope to accomplish over the next two years?

During the next two years, my work on the Tusculum project will focus on five key initiatives:

• Development of an advisory board to provide guidance and direction to the College and DHR on matters related to Tusculum and the Tusculum Institute.
• Development of strategic plans for the Institute’s development and perpetuation and for the reconstruction and adaptive use of Tusculum.
• Program development for the Institute with priority given to organization, promotion and presentation of a major regional conference at Sweet Briar to explore the nexus between historic preservation and sustainability. We plan to hold it early in 2009.
• Building bridges of support for the Institute among College faculty, regional educators, regional historic sites, DHR staff, APVA Preservation Virginia and its regional branches, National Trust for Historic Preservation, National Park Service, AIA and alumnae.
• Development of a team-taught, interdisciplinary graduate course at Sweet Briar teaching the inquiry method of learning through course readings and hands-on projects related to sustainability, historic preservation and community history.

What exactly is the Tusculum Institute?

The best description I can give is contained in the draft mission statement for the Institute that an internal working group here at the College cobbled together for review by the College faculty, administration and the Board of Trustees:

“Tusculum Institute is an historic preservation resource center on the campus of Sweet Briar College providing education and outreach to students, faculty, and the wider community and region.

“Using the rich historic and intellectual resources of the College, and working in partnership with the Department of Historic Resources for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Institute supports the preservation of the region’s historic assets in a context of environmental stewardship, and promotes the use of the Commonwealth’s historic legacy as a learning resource.

“Tusculum Institute serves as a catalyst and partner for College faculty across a wide range of academic disciplines in finding resources and developing courses and programs that deepen understanding of Virginia’s historic places and encourage their sustainable use.”

What will the formation of the Tusculum Institute mean to Sweet Briar and the surrounding community?

As the mission statement implies, the Institute will bring new resources to the College and its faculty for the support and enhancement of its existing programs, across a wide range of academic disciplines.

It will build on Sweet Briar’s existing strengths and resources without competing with the mission of the College or competing with the freedom, curriculum and programs of its faculty. It will help the College look outward more confidently in service to the larger community outside its walls.

As a center for education and outreach, the Institute will address important niches in the market of historic preservation, education and community history that are not being filled in the region or in the Commonwealth, but that Sweet Briar is uniquely poised to fill.

For example, it will provide a hub for networking, information sharing, on-going teacher training, recruiting speakers, organizing and facilitating field trips and providing practical guidance on how to teach with historic places and how to tap the resources of agencies and institutions outside the region to teach with the College’s and the community’s historic places.

It will provide a public forum on emerging issues on the frontier of historic preservation and sustainability that need discussion and resolution. It will provide training for local historical societies and schools that are interested in undertaking oral history projects.

It will help to build bridges between the preservation community and the design community to foster greater visual literacy. And it could help to provide a regional program for training in the traditional preservation trades such as masonry and plastering.

Where do you see Tusculum five years from now? Ten years from now?

Five years from now, funding for the reconstruction of Tusculum will be secured, a plan for its reconstruction and adaptive use will be completed, and reconstruction of Tusculum will be well under way. We want the project to be exemplary in every sense of the word.

We see the process of Tusculum’s reconstruction as a laboratory for learning about historic buildings and historic building techniques, historic building materials, the traditional preservation trades, adaptive reuse, and the application of green design principles to historic rehabilitation and restoration work.

Five years from now, the Tusculum Institute will be firmly established as a going concern.

The Institute will have secured funding for its operations and development. It will be professionally staffed. It will be recruiting interns from the College for schools and historic sites and historic preservation organizations, organizing field trips and bringing professionals from the College and from historic sites into classrooms in the region.

It will be offering annual certified summer teacher training workshops and special one-day training workshops for area educators on teaching with historic places, archaeology and community history. It will regularly be recruiting speakers and developing programs for an ongoing preservation and sustainability issues forum at the College.

It will be providing grants writing services for College faculty members who seek professional development or curriculum development in fields related to the Institute’s broad mission.

As a service to area schools, it will be providing scholarships/funding/transportation for school field trips to historic sites. It will be sponsoring an annual conference and regional workshops for local historical societies in the region, offering regular training and workshops on oral history for historical societies, schools and educators, and promoting Sweet Briar College as the preferred depository for oral history records in the region.

Ten years from now, the reconstruction of Tusculum and its adaptive use as a regional preservation resource center will be complete. The building will continue to be listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places, individually and as part of the Sweet Briar College National Historic Landmark Historic District.

Tours of the Sweet Briar campus will begin at Tusculum with the story of the ancestral home of the mother of the founder of the College and the story of how Tusculum was saved from permanent loss through the foresight of Muhlenfeld and Kilpatrick and through the generosity of Sweet Briar’s many alumnae and friends.

Tour guides also will explain the mission of the Tusculum Institute and the programs housed within it.

Ten years from now I envision the Institute to be working in partnership not only with DHR and the College and area schools and area historic sites and historical societies but also with such organizations as the National Park Service, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the American Institute of Architects, the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia Association of Museums, the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions, and the Preservation Trades Network to support the fine work of Sweet Briar’s outstanding faculty and to provide critical education, training and outreach to a wide range of citizens and organizations in this region and beyond.

Of course it is hard for anyone to look 10 years into the future, but with the interest and support of alumnae and friends of the College, Tusculum and the Tusculum Institute will be gifts that keep on giving to Sweet Briar and to the community, for many years to come.