CHAPTER NINE:
The Siege of Valley Forge (continued)
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many Americans
became more politically aware as a result of America's involvement in
Vietnam, and Valley Forge began attracting people seeking a place to
make a political point. In 1969, park commissioners recorded no
objection to a request from a group that wanted to hold a patriotic
rally at Valley Forge. They replied that Valley Forge was at the
disposal of the people and merely asked that park regulations be
followed and confrontations avoided. [24]
However, the commission was called into special session when the Vietnam
Veterans Against the War asked to stage a demonstration in the park on
Labor Day of the following year, when they planned to march to Valley
Forge from Moorestown, New Jersey, and listen to speeches by peace
advocates. Although commissioners felt they could not deny access to the
park even though they found the group's beliefs distasteful, they were
chagrined to find themselves burdened with an extra potential problem on
a weekend when the park was normally mobbed. They offered the group
certain conditions, including the requirement that they obtain insurance
and provide their own toilets and parking attendants, and these
conditions set a precedent and were later applied to all groups that
wanted to stage demonstrations at Valley Forge, regardless of political
viewpoint. [25] Let 'em come, said
fundamentalist preacher and conservative spokesman Dr. Carl McIntire.
"The more they talk, the more people will turn from the defeat and
surrender they champion and demand that the Nation win the peace by
victory and honor." [26]
There was no violence at the Labor Day demonstration,
but the park superintendent did receive several anonymous threats to
bomb Washington's Headquarters and other Valley Forge landmarks. Park
police were issued shotguns and put on extra duty. That Saturday, when
one officer saw a car being driven in a erratic manner near Washington's
Headquarters, he repeatedly ordered the driver to halt, then fired on
the vehicle. The driver kept going until he reached the Valley Forge
Soda Shop about half a mile away, where he was intercepted by local
police. The terrified driver identified himself as a rabbi recently
transferred to the area who had become lost. Both the rabbi and his wife
had suffered injuries from shotgun pellets. [27]
The Montgomery County district attorney ordered an
investigation into the unpleasant encounter. The incident became more
unpleasant when the rabbi received two traffic tickets for swerving his
vehicle from side to side and going through a stop signafter he
had been wounded and while believing that he was fleeing for his life.
[28] On the recommendation of State
Attorney General Fred Speaker, the park guard responsible was finally
suspended. Quoting a state Justice Department report, Speaker said: "In
the opinion of this department, if the facts as described by the
shooting victims are ultimately established, they constitute a gross and
unprovoked attack by an employee of the Commonwealth." [29]
Fortunately, there were no problems in December 1971,
when 100 Vietnam veterans came back for "Operation Winter Soldier," even
though Dr. McIntire led his own followers to protest the protesters. [30]
Young people looking for a place to hang out were
more of a problem than political demonstrations. "Valley Forge bears too
honorable a name in our history to permit hoodlum gangs to disgrace it,"
stated a 1969 editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining
of the trash they left behind and the limbs they broke from the
flowering dogwoods. [31] Shortly
afterward, the park commission issued a press release firmly denying
"the possibility of marijuana growing in abundance in this park." [32] Philadelphia's other major daily
newspaper, the Philadelphia Bulletin, quoted a park
commissioner's allegation that "an army of young drifters, supplemented
by commando squads of older undesirables, has turned the historic park
into a No Man's land." This article told of young people riding
motorcycles across the grass, urinating on monuments, and romping about
unclothed, [33] The commissioner in
question later claimed that the reporter had exaggerated his
statements.
While such allegations were being made and denied,
the park commission launched an investigation by its new "Subcommittee
on Sex, Hippies, and Whiskey Swillers," which issued a report in 1969.
The investigation uncovered "no evidence of widespread violations of
park rules" but admitted, "There are scattered whiskey and beer
swillers, there are heated love scenes being enacted on blankets here
and there in view of the moving traffic and there are groups of
hippie-like characters who can be observed doing their 'things' (mostly
sitting around in circles)." [34] The park
commissioners proposed to solve what problems they admitted the park had
by printing and enforcing all park regulations and preventing parking or
stopping except in designated areas. Arrests would be made if warnings
were not heeded. [35]
Real trouble came with the real criminals who began
to make their way to Valley Forge. The Valley Forge Historical Society
reported a theft of guns and Washingtoniana in 1968. [36] About the same time, vandalism resulted
in $75,000 worth of damage when some young people camping near the
Washington Memorial filled a trash barrel with rocks and wedged it
between the rails of the train tracks, seriously damaging an oncoming
train. [37] A brazen scam was perpetrated
at the park in the early 1970s when people posing as "maintenance
volunteers" removed seventeen valuable mature walnut trees from forested
areas. [38]
The 1970s also brought confrontations and violence,
prompting S. K. Stevens of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum
Commission to write to an official of the Boy Scouts of America
discouraging the use of the park for a jamboree in 1973. Stevens
reported: "There most certainly has been a tremendous increase in urban
tensions in the Philadelphia area." [39]
He may have wanted to avoid incidents like one reported by a teacher who
took her eighth-graders to the park and had some of them confronted by
students from another school who beat two boys and demanded money from
some of the girls. [40]
In 1976, when Meade Jones had been president of the
Valley Forge Historical Society for just five days, she took a guest to
the historic house in the park known as "Maxwell's Quarters," where some
of the society's treasures had been on display, and was shocked to find
smashed cases and all the evidence of a major, professional heist. [41] About 100 items then valued at $250,000
were gone, including historic Blue Staffordshire china, lusterware china
pieces, oil paintings, pewter, and some tableware that had seen use in
the White House. The FBI was called in, making a total of eight federal,
state, county, and local law-enforcement agencies cooperating in the
recovery of these irreplaceable antiques. After six months of intensive
investigation in a three-county area, most of the objects were
recovered, having been found wrapped in newspaper in fifty-five-gallon
drums at the bottom of an embankment in a Phoenixville landfill. [42]
The increase in crime coincided with allegations of
corruption among Valley Forge employees. Robert Fowler, who had covered
the story of the accidental shooting of the visiting rabbi for a
Philadelphia newspaper, soon followed up with another story reporting
that state employees who conducted tours in the park were pocketing
tips while collecting state salaries. In an interview, the park
superintendent admitted to Fowler that he had been aware of what was
going on and that the practice was fairly widespread. He revealed that
some park employees had even complained of being deprived of this
moneymaking opportunity. The park commissioners and the park's then
parent organizationthe Pennsylvania Department of Forests and
Watersdenied knowledge of the practice, and one guard was ordered
to repay the state what money he had collected. [43]
About a month later, Fowler was back at the park
interviewing the superintendent about allegations that he had taken
kickbacks. It had been reported that the superintendent had paid a park
policeman for ten days' work during a period when the man had actually
worked only four days. When the officer returned the money, the
superintendent used it to create a kind of petty cash fund which enabled
him to bypass the inconvenient state requirement that he get bids even
for small purchases. [44] The
superintendent was suspended and later fired when he failed to appeal
his suspension. [45]
At the same time that the park commission was dealing
with this bad press, they were also getting used to a new parent
organization following a major reorganization of commonwealth government
offices. Since 1923, the independent park commission had operated under
the Department of Forests and Waters, which had acted as a kind of
middleman between the park commissioners and the state legislators. An
act signed by Pennsylvania's governor late in 1970 abolished this
department and transferred the park to the Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission (PHMC).
An ongoing controversy that quickly emerged between
the park commission and the PHMC centered on appropriate uses for the
park. By 1970, Valley Forge had evolved into a community greenspace:
most visitors came to pursue some recreational activity that had nothing
to do with the history of Valley Forge. The prevailing mission of the
PHMC was to preserve historic resources, and among its leaders there was
a distinct feeling that there was a right way and a wrong way to use
those resources. A new park superintendent appointed by the PHMC angered
commissioners who thought he had his own agenda and withheld support for
the projects they endorsed, such as the making of a film on Valley Forge
by the publisher of Screen News Digest. [46] Commissioners were equally annoyed when
they learned that the PHMC had contemplated adding the word "historical"
to the name "Valley Forge State Park" without so much as notifying them.
[47] Such incidents accounted for some
unpleasant language in the park commission minutes, including this
statement by one commissioner: "For too long has the Valley Forge State
Park been the mistreated child of the parent organization." [48]
The park commissioners considered breaking away from
the PHMC and operating as an independent state board. A committee was
formed, and early in 1974 its members issued a special report
complaining: "The role of the Park Commission has been greatly diluted
since the State Legislature transferred its direct Harrisburg
affiliation to the PHMC in 1970, . . . The Commission's status in this
setup has gone from the governing and policy making board of the Park to
that of an advisory unit. And, even the advice presently offered is
shunned or ignored." The report suggested that park commissioners
contact local legislators and initiate a bipartisan legislative study
"to resolve the current crisis at Valley Forge." [49]
Animosity deepened that year when the PHMC published
its "master plan" formally defining the park's problems as it saw them,
proposing solutions, and determining how the park would be developed and
used for the nation's Bicentennial and in the future. As the report
neared completion, the park commission minutes revealed the park
commissioners' "alarm" that the planners had spent so little time in the
park. [50] They were also miffed to learn
that Park Superintendent Horace Willcox had been working with the
planners, something they had decreed was not to interfere with the
regular duties of his position. [51]
The master plan, finally published in 1975, declared
the intent of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC)
to transform the park from a recreational area to a real historical
site, to "return the park to the mood, pace, spirit and appearance of
the eighteenth century." [52] The report
proposed that "vehicular intrusion" be curtailed by turning several
modem roads into dirt-road traces, including fairly busy Gulph Road and
Baptist Road. [53] These modern road
surfaces would be covered with a hard-packed soil mixture in which old
wheel ruts might even be simulated. [54]
New huts would be built, and Washington's Headquarters would be restored
one more time, its Colonial Revival landscaping finally replaced by the
kinds of plants and shrubs that would have grown in the area during the
eighteenth century. [55] There would be
"living history" programs at Artillery Park, near the blacksmith shop,
and eventually at one of the park farms, which would be developed as a
working farm of the appropriate era. [56]
Area residents who used the park as a place for picnics and recreation
could continue to so do, but primarily in the area north of the
Schuylkill River, which was not thought to have been part of the winter
encampment. [57]
The park commissioners believed that both the writers
of the master plan and the key members of the PHMC were ignoring many
nuts-and-bolts issues. In their minutes, they derided the master plan as
a "mini-plan" that did not go far enough and examine the park's needs up
to the year 2000. [58] One park
commissioner went on record saying, "The proposed master plan is a
public rip off. I have no doubt that the plan itself was honestly
writtenunder specific direction given to the Planners as to
substance and content. I do not believe Phase I was written with the
idea of serving the People of the Community or the State but rather, to
foster and further nurture the 'Ivory Tower' concept of its directors."
[59]
The commissioner went on to identify rest-room
facilities and drinking water as amenities that had not been given
adequate consideration. [60] Other notes
in the park commission minutes stressed the need for more police [61] and money to clean up the picnic areas,
[62] The park commissioners also voiced
concern over the deteriorating condition of Valley Forge's famous
dogwood groves, where dying trees were not being replaced. [63]
Other issues widened the rift between the park
commission and its parent organization. For literally as long as anyone
could remember, no admission fees had ever been charged at Valley Forge
State Park. In 1973 the PHMC proposed a 50-cent fee for entrance to the
historic buildings at Valley Forge. Annamaria Malloy, the park
commission's first female chairperson, immediately protested, noting
that if an entrance fee were imposed it should be a general park
entrance fee, because many visitors never entered the buildings. She was
also quoted as saying: "If we are going to charge, let's charge enough
to embarrass the legislature. Let's not put a charge on historical
buildings. Do you want me to put fifty cents in a box to look into my
mother's grave?" [64] The park
commissioners also wondered whether the funds collected would be used at
Valley Forge or would enter some slush fund and be spent at other sites.
[65] As if fees were not distasteful
enough to the park commissioners, they were coupled with the proposal to
close the park on Mondays, holidays, and Sunday afternoons.
|