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Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.483.0553  | M: 202.225.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org

���ұ���’s annual Landslide® report includes sites associated with desegregation, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and others

Washington, D.C. (November 12, 2018) – ���ұ��� (���ұ���) today released Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy, the foundation’s fifteenth annual thematic report of threatened and at-risk landscapes and landscape features.  The complete report is available on the dedicated Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy website. It features sites associated with civil and human rights, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, and others.  The threats to the sites include outright loss, inappropriate development, and lack of resources. ���ұ���’s Landside report, issued annually since 2003, is part of the foundation’s Landslide program, which focuses national attention on significant cultural landscapes that are threatened and at-risk.  The goal of Landslide is to draw immediate and lasting attention to these threatened and unique sites by making them visible, revealing their value, and promoting public engagement in the form of advocacy and stewardship.

Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy comes on the 50^th anniversary of the tumultuous events of 1968, when the struggle over civil and human rights, the catharsis of the Vietnam War, and assassinations exposed deep fault lines in the American democracy.  In 2018, fundamental questions about the nation’s identity are again being debated, and Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy provides historic context for that conversation.  ���ұ��� is working with local individuals, groups, and organizations to increase each site’s visibility and promote its long-term stewardship.

Here are the Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy followed by a statement by Charles A. Birnbaum, ���ұ���’s President & CEO:

Blair Mountain Battlefield in Logan County, West Virginia.  The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed uprising in American history since the Civil War, pitting some 10,000 coal miners against a system in which privately paid guards maintained order in “company towns” without elected officials or independent law enforcement. The Blair Mountain Battlefield is where miners fought for basic workers’ rights in 1921, including safe working conditions, a living wage, and even the right to congregate freely. The site is an archaeological treasure trove that has never been fully explored, and the secrets it holds could be wiped away by timbering and drilling.

Hog Hammock, Sapelo Island, Georgia. The community of Hog Hammock is one of the last surviving remnants of Gullah-Geechee culture, tracing its roots to enslaved West Africans brought to the island’s plantations in the 1700s to labor in captivity. During the period of Reconstruction, the freed slaves took collective ownership of the land they had formerly worked in bondage, creating a thriving and enduring agrarian community that represented an alternative African American experience in the postwar South. But after decades of sharply increasing tax assessments in the wake of new development, the fewer than 50 remaining permanent residents of this small enclave are struggling to keep their culture and community intact, even as the vernacular landscapes that support their way of life are disappearing.

Princeville, North Carolina. This was the first town in the United States incorporated by African Americans. Established by freed slaves on the spot where a Union soldier read aloud the Emancipation Proclamation, the town inhabits a low-lying, flood-prone plane beside the Tar River, the only land made available for sale to former slaves. After generations of building and rebuilding, a marked increase in flooding in recent decades may prove an insurmountable threat to the naturally susceptible landscape—and the rich history it embodies.  

Susan B. Anthony Childhood Home, Battenville, New York. On a small and unassuming plot of land sits a house on the verge of collapse, a two-lane highway passing uncomfortably close to its front door. An easy-to-miss placard suspended from a post in the yard is the only indication that this derelict property is the Susan B. Anthony Childhood Home, where, between 1832 and 1839, the future champion of women’s rights would first form her rebellious ideas about gender and racial equality. This significant piece of our nation’s history is also the lynchpin of a potential historic district integral to Susan B. Anthony’s story. Sadly, this site may soon be erased by long-term and continuing neglect. 

Lynching sites in Shelby County, Tennessee. The open lynching of African Americans during the Jim Crow era is perhaps the most gruesome chapter in the nation’s history, when crowds gathered in public to witness the cruel spectacle of torture and death dispensed with impunity. Supported by new documentary efforts, work is now underway to commemorate several lynching sites in Shelby County, Tennessee. These landscapes of racial terror and control are most often “invisible,” unmarked, nondescript places whose obscurity is complicit in concealing the inhumanity they represent. Only when these sites are acknowledged and memorialized will the deep and festering wounds that they evoke begin to heal.

Lincoln Memorial Park, Miami, Florida. For African Americans, the effects of racial segregation were felt even in death. Established in the early 1920s in the Brownsville neighborhood of Miami, Florida, Lincoln Memorial Park is one of the oldest African American cemeteries in Dade County. It is the final resting place of many soldiers who served their country, from the Civil War to Vietnam, as well as local luminaries and pioneers who shaped the history and culture of the region. But like innumerable African American cemeteries across the nation, Lincoln Memorial Park became an overgrown ruin of litter and desecrated graves. Now the local community is rallying to restore this historic landscape to its former glory.

Japanese American Confinement Sites in multiple states. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066 on February 19, 1942, the U.S. Army forcibly removed the entire population of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, confining them in perpetually guarded camps established in remote areas of California, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, and Arkansas. It is estimated that more than 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were rounded up and confined in the camps, many for the duration of World War II. Although funds have been allocated by Congress to preserve and interpret the history of the Japanese American Confinement Sites, an annual challenge to secure the already appropriated funds has been an unfortunate pattern in recent years. 

Lions Municipal Golf Course, Austin, Texas. Known affectionately as “Muny,” Lions Municipal Golf Course was built just two miles west of the State Capitol in Austin. Aside from its historic design, Muny is best known as the first desegregated municipal golf course in the South, thanks to the rebellious act of a young African American caddie in 1950. The University of Texas, Austin, which owns the land that Muny occupies and leases it to the City of Austin, decided in 2011 that it will not renew the lease beyond 2019, opting instead to destroy Muny to make way for a mixed-use development. 

Druid Heights, Muir Woods National Monument, California. North of San Francisco, near Muir Woods National Monument, is the wooded hillside tract that was the longtime home of poet and groundbreaking lesbian feminist Elsa Gidlow. Named Druid Heights by Gidlow, the site served as a haven of tolerance, social reform, and creative expression throughout her 30-year tenure, even as her loyalty to her country was publicly questioned. Now managed by the National Park Service, the once-vibrant bohemian enclave is largely vacant, its structures suffering from years of neglect. Without maintenance or, at least, the comprehensive documentation of its historic landscape, this LGBTQ landmark and incubator of important cultural and social movements will soon disappear.       

Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Bronx, New York. Located on the nationally landmarked Bronx Community College campus in New York City, the Hall of Fame for Great Americans is at once the birthplace of fame as an American democratic ideal and the backdrop for mid-century activism by persons of color. Designed by Stanford White of the renowned firm McKim, Mead & White, the Hall contains busts of great Americans, nationally nominated and then elected for inclusion, and was once a much visited site that garnered national media attention. As current debates about who and what should be the subject of public commemoration intensify, the Hall stands as a monument to another ideal: that there is one common, American concept of greatness. But it is in dire need of repairs if it is to survive to inspire a more inclusive image of that ideal.  [A preview of Landslide 2018 featuring this site appeared in the New York Times on Monday, November 5, 2018].  

“Our shared and fragile landscape legacy has a powerful role to play in helping us understand where we come from, especially in the current debates, conversations, and analyses of our national identity,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, ���ұ���’s President & CEO.

Landscape Architecture Magazine is the media partner for Landslide 2018: Grounds for Democracy.

About Landscape Architecture Magazine
Founded in 1910, Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) is the monthly magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects. It is the magazine of record for the landscape architecture profession in North America, reaching more than 60,000 readers who plan and design projects valued at more than $140 billion each year. LAM is available in both print and digital formats by subscription and may also be found each month in more than 700 bookstores across the United States and Canada.

About ���ұ���

���ұ��� (���ұ���) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit founded in 1998 to connect people to places.  ���ұ��� educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards.  Through its website, publishing, lectures and other events, ���ұ��� broadens support and understanding for cultural landscapes.

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