Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103100075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's a far cry from the $185 million living-history state park, with a bustling frontier town, a sprawling outdoor collection of North American animals and an outdoor museum dedicated to Native Americans, that was envisioned in the project's master plan.
It's even a long way from the $15 million first phase Explore hopes to open in 1994, which calls for small versions of the town and the zoo, along with an environmental center to host conferences, mediate disputes and teach visitors about the environment.
By itself, an old farmhouse - with exotic Old World breeds of cows, pigs and chickens that frontier families might have kept, and guides in period costumes - isn't particularly unusual. The Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College has one open each summer. The Museum of American Frontier Culture in Staunton has two such farmsteads already open year-round and two more on the way.
But for Explore, the homestead will represent the first tangible sign that the much-discussed project is getting off the drawing board. Even now, it marks a major change in the way Explore planners see the project developing.
Explore won't open all at once, project director Bern Ewert says, but likely will evolve one element at a time over the coming years.
"The economy is much different today than it was in '85-'86" when the project was proposed, Ewert says. "What's happened at the North Carolina Zoo and the Minnesota Zoo, where they all at once were built, that's probably not going to happen. In today's economic climate, it'll be incremental. . . . We can feel comfortable with that."
That revelation came to Ewert on a nameless creek in Bedford County so beautiful, and so crucial to Explore's revised timetables, he now calls it "an in-kind gift from God."
Walk in the woods
It was a snowy Saturday in February 1990, and Bern Ewert was bored.
Perhaps just a little depressed, too. He had been looking forward to that winter for a long time. Gov. Gerald Baliles, a friend of Explore, was leaving office, but he had one last budget to submit. In it, Ewert was counting on the governor and the General Assembly to ante up millions - perhaps as much as $16 million - in funding so the park could finally start construction.
Ewert counted wrong.
With the economy softening and state revenues slipping, Baliles axed Explore funding entirely.
It was nothing personal, Baliles aides said; Explore was just one of many projects cut out of the budget. Nevertheless, Ewert says, "It was interpreted as a lack of confidence from the state. That's what potential contributors said to us."
In response, prospective donors started to back off, Ewert says. "We had to weather that perception," he says, until it was clear that the state was cutting out funding for other groups, too.
So on this February weekend, with nothing else to do, Ewert went to the park site along the Roanoke River to mull things over. He had often tramped over the south side of the property, where Explore plans to reconstruct its town.
From there, Ewert had often looked across the river and wondered what lay on the other side. Explore consultants, working from U.S. Geological Survey topographical maps, had drawn up plans for the park before they had been able to buy the land. The maps couldn't always convey the feel of the terrain, though, but since the state board governing Explore had started buying the land, Ewert hadn't had time to inspect all the property first-hand.
On this day, he poked through the snow-covered woods on the Bedford County side of the river, and descended into what the maps showed only as a ravine with a small creek. What he found astonished him. This was no mere ravine, but an undiscovered jewel - a mountain stream winding past huge boulders, and then cascading down a series of waterfalls toward the river.
"I was just overwhelmed by its beauty," Ewert says. "I thought, `I bet we can do something with this.'"
Before long, he had brought longtime zoo consultant Dick Binford - the former No. 2 man at the San Diego Zoo - east to study the ravine. Binford also was impressed. To recreate this creek-side environment, as many state-of-the-art naturalistic zoos try, would cost $100 million, Binford told Ewert.
"Even though there was a lot of bad news with funding, this was good news," he says. "It was an in-kind gift from God."
Explore planners had been expecting it would cost $40 million to build the zoo. But by making use of the ravine's rugged beauty, and starting on a much smaller scale, "I realized we could do something for $1 million," Ewert says. "What a nice surprise."
From that snowy walk, and Explore's fund-raising troubles, emerged the revised time line announced in August - Explore '94, using the wooded ravine and a nearby open field as the inexpensive beginnings of the project's zoo.
Even the discovery that the stream is clogged with silt from eroding farmlands upstream was a bonus for Explore, Ewert says, because it offers the chance to make the stream a model for water clean-up - emphasizing the project's environmental mission.
But more than anything else, that walk in the woods led to a new philosophy among Explore planners - of build-as-you-go.
'91 a better year
The past year has been unkind to many non-profit groups. When the economy goe goes sour, contributions are one of the first things to be cut. The Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge, and the Roanoke Symphony have all laid off employees.
The River Foundation, the non-profit group raising money for Explore, hasn't been spared. In February 1990, the foundation announced it had raised its first $1 million toward construction and hoped to make similar announcements every six months or so.
It hasn't.
"We've been affected by the economy the same as everyone else," Ewert says.
Last September, instead of waiting until it had raised enough to build the entire park at once, Explore planners decided to take $250,000 of what they had raised and use it to reconstruct the old Day farmstead they had moved from Colonial Avenue in Roanoke County. They hope to have it back up by this fall so they can give tours to school groups.
Last week, Explore also announced it had worked out a deal with Mill Mountain Zoo that calls for the zoo's staff to care for the animals Explore acquires.
That means as early as this summer, Ewert says, Explore could start some high-profile breeding programs with endangered species.
Within three months, Ewert and new environmental director Rupert Cutler also plan to announce a list of a half-dozen other environmental programs Explore will start work on right away.
The point, they say, is to show that Explore doesn't have to wait until its hoped-for opening in 1994 to get its educational and environmental mission under way.
Having programs already in place should give Explore more credibility with prospective donors, Ewert says, but he emphasizes that they're not "artificial" programs created simply to show progress. Instead, Ewert says, they fulfill part of the project's original environmental aims, which haven't attracted much attention.
In a way, Explore has always been a "green" project. It's just that when first proposed, the green that got the attention was the money - from the high price tag to proponents' claims about how Explore would put Roanoke on the map and revitalize the region's economy.
Lost in the fine print was any discussion of Explore's goals to educate visitors about the environment.
"When we said `zoo,' that's all people heard," Ewert says. Many considered a zoo - and such an expensive one at that - a frivolous expenditure, so proponents had to emphasize how a major tourist attraction would help Roanoke's economy, Ewert says.
At the same time, he says, the environment "wasn't really in vogue."
Now it is.
The scaled-down first phase that Explore hopes to open in 1994 may take the edge off the economic development sales pitch, but Ewert hopes the step-by-step approach between now and 1994 will help people better understand what the project wants to be.
"The idea must be so ethereal to the general public," he says. "They're not able to go out on the site. They're not able to see it." By having something for people to go see, even if it's nothing more than a farmhouse and a breeding program, "it gets people out on the site so they're able to internalize what we internalize," Ewert says. "It'll bring it to life."
Because of that, and prospects for a rebounding economy, he says, "I think '91 is going to be a lot better than '90 was."
by CNB