Summer 2010 facelifts highlight ongoing Park need

Thursday, June 17 2010 @ 11:57 AM EDT

The Park's Orchard Knob Reservation in Chattanooga, Tennessee is closed to the public for visitor safety through August 6, 2010, as its largest monuments undergo what Park Cultural Resources Manager Jim Szyjkowski calls a "hundred year face lift." Orchard Knob, as well as Cravens House on Lookout Mountain, is getting attention this summer thanks to a one-time funding windfall. The Friends of the Park applaud the restoration efforts at both Park sites, but say that the 120 year-old National Park's $10-20 million restoration backlog shouldn't have to rely on occasional special funding and deserves a longer-term solution.

This summer, money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) is allowing the Park to accomplish long overdue preservation work on a few of its 600 grandest commemorative features. But the Park's 9,100 acres in the region include thousands more smaller monuments, markers, tablets, historic buildings and natural landscapes that are falling deeper and deeper into disrepair due to federal funding priorities.

CRAVENS HOUSE, ORCHARD KNOB GET ATTENTION THIS SUMMER

Thanks to ARRA money, the Park staff was able to obtain National Park Service Historic Preservation Training Center expertise and manpower last month to professionally clean and conduct conservation work on two monuments at Cravens House on Lookout Mountain. (The before and after difference was astounding.)

This month the Center's crew moved to Orchard Knob and began work on five large monuments there. Masons, metal conservators and exhibit specialists are cleaning stone and metal, re-pointing joints, and repairing or replacing the monuments' broken or missing commemorative components.

On the Knob, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has provided $155,000 to accomplish basic preservation work on monuments originally constructed by the states of New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Wisconsin to commemorate their citizens' Civil War contributions. Additional work on the Orchard Knob monument built by the state of Illinois, a feature with more serious structure problems, will be completed using $135,000 obtained through the Park's competitive application to the National Park Service Cultural Cyclic Maintenance fund.

ORCHARD KNOB IN 1863

Orchard Knob was the command post for General Ulysses S. Grant during the Battle of Missionary Ridge in November 1863. Federal troops had been trapped in Chattanooga since their September 1863 defeat at the Battle of Chickamauga. Grant's first step in breaking out of Chattanooga was to take the Knob, a small hill roughly halfway between the then-city limits and Missionary Ridge, where the bulk of Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee lay in wait.

Grant wanted his army's advance to be a spectacle for the Confederate soldiers on Missionary Ridge. Two of his divisions moved into attack position while other troops held the ground in trenches at Fort Wood and Fort Negley in the city. Another corps backed them up. Two more divisions lay in wait to support the Federal advance. Grant knew that, from Missionary Ridge, all this manpower would be painfully visible.

There was an intense struggle for the Knob and surrounding area, and the forward line of Confederates was forced to withdraw. The capture of Orchard Knob moved the Union Army a mile closer to the entrenched Confederate Army on top of Missionary Ridge. It gave Grant a place of relative safety from which to view the battle of Missionary Ridge and it forced the Confederate army to keep to the center of the Ridge while Federal troops attacked its flanks.

FRIENDS PUSH FOR PERMANENT PARK RESTORATION FUND

"Americans can best understand and appreciate what happened here almost 150 years ago when the National Park's landscapes, monuments and historic structures look as much as possible like they did during the Civil War or during the late 19th century when the Park was established," said Kay Parish, Executive Director of Friends of the Park. "Too many parts of our Park have been altered or degraded by more than a century of weather, urban change and, sadly, even human vandalism. Keeping the Park meaningful demands a financial investment in preservation and restoration."

Parish says that, like all National Parks, Chickamauga & Chattanooga has operated under decades of inadequate federal funding. Preserving the features of its 9,100 acres is a task that demands $1.5 million annually, but the Park receives less than a third of that each year. Chickamauga & Chattanooga's backlog of restoration projects is estimated to be between $10 and $20 million. The restoration work that Cravens House and Orchard Knob are getting this summer is badly needed, and Parish says that the Friends laud the efforts of the Park staff to locate and secure occasional special funding like the stimulus money it is currently using. But the Friends know that a permanent and consistent solution is the real answer to the Park's ongoing restoration needs.

"We know that the solution to every major problem hast to start somewhere," says Parish. In 2009, the Friends received a five-year, $50,000 grant from the Jewell Foundation in North Georgia. The grant, made in memory of Thomas W. Jewell, is being used to establish, publicize and grow a permanent fund that the Friends hope will eventually generate substantial annual income for Park restoration. The Restoration Fund is gathering growing support from local donors and Civil War enthusiasts in some of the states that sent soldiers to the 1863 battles commemorated by the Park. The coming sesquicentennial observation of the Civil War is fueling some of this interest, say the Friends.

For more information on the Friends' park Restoration Fund or to make a tax-deductible donation, see Joining & Giving here at www.chickchatt.org

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