SITKA Administrative History

Chapter 4:
SITKA NATIONAL MONUMENT, MIDDLE YEARS (continued)

Preservation Professionalism and Sitka

National Park Service efforts to deal with the blockhouse issues at Sitka, and indeed with other archeological and historical issues at Sitka reflected the growth of preservation expertise in the service as a whole.

It was only in 1931 that the service was able to add its first professional historian to the staff despite the personal interest of leaders such as Albright and Mather in history and historic sites. This came in the midst of efforts to transfer cultural parks managed by other federal agencies to the National Park Service and only four years after restoration efforts began at what was to become Colonial Williamsburg. [286] On the heels of these essentially internal developments came the infusion of expertise provided by park service administration Civilian Conservation Corps work forces that preserved and developed historic sites and of the Historic American Buildings Survey.i [287]

This increasing staff expertise about historic sites probably influenced Frank T. Been's 1939 comments on Sitka's "antithetical" relationship to National Park Service purposes. It certainly made it possible for Ben C. Miller to seek advice from regional historians about the historical studies he was encouraged to undertake and resulted in recognition by senior service officials such as Ronald F. Lee and O.A. Tomlinson of the historical values in Sitka that lay outside monument boundaries.

The results of this evolution of events at Sitka National Monument were reflected in efforts to systematically define Sitka's interpretive focus, the injunction from Washington to preserve the original totem poles for which replicas were being created, the appointment of historians to the staff at Sitka, and in creased use of contractors and regional office professionals in solving monument problems The blockhouse reconstruction and later events demonstrated the difficulty, however, of adequately controlling such projects from afar.