Ebey's Landing Administrative History

Chapter Nine:
MANAGING RESOURCES

The act establishing Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve emphasized that the reserve was created to "preserve and protect a rural community which provides an unbroken historical record" of exploration and settlement in the Puget Sound. This language raises interesting questions. Implicit in the legislation was the understanding that the EBLA partners would support efforts to retain the present balance of urban development and open space or farmland. Yet the act specifies that the reserve represents a continuum of human use and activity. Does this continuum extend into the future? Does the wording of the act pit the historical and the natural against the future development of the community? The future challenge may be to define the realm to be protected, to decide whether to draw a line at some historical moment after which the NPS has no interest in preserving developments on lands not already protected with easements. An additional consideration is that, while protection of natural and cultural resources seems on the surface to be a straightforward goal, in a farming community these categories often overlap and sometimes compete. The traditional National Park Service unit is maintained either in its historical condition (for example, a battlefield or a historic home), or in a natural condition (as close as possible to how it might have appeared prior to human intervention, although this is difficult to determine). As a cultural landscape, EBLA is both of these and more. What seems evident is that the idea of managing the area as a historical continuum may raise debate, yet permit flexibility in management decisions.

On the approximately ninety percent of Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve that is privately owned, natural resource protection falls primarily to local agencies. Most of the publicly owned land belongs to Island County or the state. However, the NPS and the EBLA trust board do advise on natural and historical landscape issues. The EBLA trust board works with town and county historic advisory committees, established when central Whidbey Island became a historic district in 1972, to protect historic structures. It also monitors scenic easements to protect NPS development rights. The National Park Service provides technical and monetary assistance on a variety of historical and natural resource issues. This chapter will discuss historic, archeological, and natural resource protection in Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve, as well as the guardianship of scenic easements purchased by the National Park Service.

Soon after the formation of the Central Whidbey Island Historic District, it became clear that the National Register listing could be made into a stronger tool for local preservation. Jimmie Jean Cook's National Register nomination for the large historic district frequently described individual structures only minimally, and many were not tied directly to the major themes of the central Whidbey area in a manner that would clearly define their position as a contributing element of the historic district. [1] The nomination was also limited in that it only identified historic structures from the nineteenth century. The nomination defined the district as a collection of nineteenth- century structures representing a variety of styles and the early development of central Whidbey Island. When the state historic preservation officer rejected an application for a historic twentieth-century bungalow that was undergoing rehabilitation to take advantage of preservation tax incentives, the community and the NPS quickly realized that they had a problem. A gap existed between the historic district nomination and the enabling legislation of the reserve. The legislation recognized the historical record of the area "to the present time." Since the National Register required most historic structures to be at least fifty years old, a number of buildings not identified in the 1973 nomination could be added to the list. T. Allan Comp, the NPS regional chief of cultural resources at the time, recognized that the Service needed to find out what significant cultural resources existed in the reserve and update the historic district nomination. [2]

In 1983, Comp sent a team, supervised by NPS historian Gretchen Luxenberg, to inventory all buildings constructed in the reserve before World War II. The team inventoried sites, such as farm complexes, as well as individual buildings. Using a new inventory system developed by team member Cathy Gilbert, a landscape architect, they also documented the cultural landscape. The first such NPS inventory of its kind in the region, it involved segmenting the reserve into ten distinct character areas according to natural patterns, such as ridges and woodlands, and cultural patterns, such as roads and political boundaries. The result was a three-volume set of inventory cards. From this baseline documentation, Gilbert and Luxenberg compiled The Land, The People, The Place: An Introduction to the Inventory in 1984. Written for the general public, this study provided a summary of the reserve's important natural and cultural resources. [3]

Favorable response to the publication from the local citizenry led to another publication in 1985, Design Considerations for Historic Properties, by architect Beth McGreevy and historical architect Hank Florence. Written as a tool for preserving cultural resources, the newspaper-style publication was designed as a guide for reserve property owners. It was intended to increase community awareness of the variety of structures that contribute to the cultural landscape. The newspaper stressed that simple, vernacular structures were as important to the landscape as ornate homes. [4]

Finally, a third publication, Reading the Cultural Landscape, by Cathy Gilbert, identified in more detail the cultural resources of the reserve. Gilbert wrote it specifically for the use of the trust board, and it suggested guidelines and principles for conservation of significant cultural landscape elements, buildings as well as hedgerows.

The landscape inventory provided a comprehensive data base from which change within the reserve could be measured and evaluated. Of the 338 buildings surveyed, 175 were recommended as contributing to the reserve's history when evaluated against National Register criteria. [5]