Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 8, 1994 TAG: 9409020011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN R. KERN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Tourists like to visit and spend money at places in Virginia that have preserved their history and interpreted it well. Heritage tourism brings people down the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Johnson Farm and to Mabry Mill, and brings people again and again to the Roanoke City Market Historic District.
The exciting challenge of Explore Park will be to interpret the history and cultural resources of Southwest Virginia so that the park will be the destination for thousands and hundreds of thousands of tourists. If the resources are well-preserved and well-interpreted, Explore can become a major tourist destination and serve as an important educational center for the study of regional cultural and natural history.
The focal challenge of Explore Park, as recognized by its mission statement, will be to provide its many visitors with a "quality educational and recreational experience." As a historian, a cultural-resource manager and a representative of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, I call on Explore Park to carry out its goals of historical documentation, preservation, interpretation and education with all due attention to authenticity and accuracy - not to emphasize education at the expense of recreation, but to make the educational experience accurate, site-specific and exciting.
A National Trust for Historic Preservation study of heritage tourism advises us to tell true stories of historic sites. Thus, for Explore, the 1840 Hofauger Farmstead from Roanoke County will have a different story from that of the 1800 Houtz Barn from Salem.
Explore also needs to tell the story of those who lived here before on the land of the park itself. Civil War maps show McGee's Ford on the Roanoke River in what is now Explore Park, and the 1850 census records Silas McGhee as a miller with wife Charlotte and six children. Perhaps it is his cabin that stands and the foundations of his mill works that survive today in Explore Park on the east side of the river.
Prehistoric archaeological sites recorded on the land of Explore Park perhaps can also be interpreted to tell us more about the first Americans who lived here.
Detailed land-use history of Explore Park and its immediate environs will tell us that Englishmen and African-American slaves, as well as Scotch-Irish and Germans, lived in the vicinity of Explore Park in the mid-19th century.
The exciting challenge of Explore Park will be to document appropriate research for the parkland and for the historic structures that have been moved here, to keep accumulating new information, and to use the information for accurate and interesting interpretation so that the educational stories will be clear and true and fun to learn.
Explore Park faces another considerable challenge in the recordation and conservation of the historic structures it has acquired, both those in storage and those reconstructed and on display. As specialists in vernacular architecture and historical archaeologists tell us, the buildings and their settings are artifacts themselves.
These buildings and their associated remains provide irreplaceable cultural information that is essential to the accurate interpretation of our past. The reconstructed buildings of Explore will require sustained maintenance and upkeep, especially if visitation reaches the projected 1 million annual total.
Explore Park has done a fine job of building strong heritage-tourism promotional ties and economic partnerships with local governments, with the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau, with businesspeople in the Roanoke Valley and throughout the state, with the General Assembly, and with Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop and Secretary of Commerce Robert Skunda.
In establishing these promotional ties and economic partnerships, Explore's message has been that regional cultural history and natural history, well-preserved and well-interpreted, will attract tourists and provide economic and social benefits to the people of Southwest Virginia.
I am confident Explore Park can meet the challenges I have outlined, and become a major center for the understanding and enjoyment of our wonderful regional history.
John R. Kern is director of the Roanoke Regional Office of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. This is adapted from his remarks at the opening last month of Explore Park.
by CNB