You can’t save it all

By Darrell Laurant

Published: June 6, 2008

There was nothing remarkable about the little house on Quinlan Avenue.

It was two stories: a kitchen, living room and dining room downstairs, three bedrooms upstairs, a finished basement.

It had a patio and a rear deck.

It had a history.

None of this, however, was enough to save it. The little house was demolished on Tuesday, and most of Lynchburg never noticed. Making you notice is part of my job, as the local columnist.

If there is one constant in life, as you’ll hear Barack Obama saying a lot this summer, it is change. You can’t save everything.

There are those who would envelop the existing world in shrink wrap, locking in everything that’s here now, but they are doomed to disappointment.

Things wear out. People die. Buildings get torn down, each with its own unique history.

What we can do — what I can do — is step in from time to time to acknowledge the passing of something significant, just as we publish obituaries for people.

The little house on Quinlan, right next to the Maier Museum, deserves such a mention.

If nothing else, it was a small monument to government folly — or, looked at another way, to government’s Quixotic efforts to do the right thing.

Back in the early 1950s, a chance meeting on a Florida beach between a Randolph-Macon Woman’s College board member and a government official sparked a daring (and, to my mind, somewhat loopy) plan.

This was the beginning of the Age of Paranoia, where we were led to believe that fingers quivered just above the nuclear trigger on both sides of the Cold War divide. This government official was worried about what would happen to the art treasures housed in Washington should that city be hit by nuclear missiles. The board member offered his college as a refuge.

Somehow, this became reality. The Maier Museum was built, with walls thick enough to repel a Sherman tank, as a repository for paintings from the National Gallery. The little two-story cottage was added to house the museum curator.

The fact that a public official would worry about art in such a dramatic (and expensive) way was admirable, but the plan seemed to have some flaws in it. For one thing, one wondered who the government would get to spend days loading all this art when missiles were preparing to fly. How many trucks would that take?

And if the whole point of bringing the art to Lynchburg was because we were such a backwater that the Russians would never bother bombing us, why make the walls so thick?

The scheme became known as “Project Y,” when “Project Why?” might have been more appropriate. Not long after the museum and the house were constructed, Babcock & Wilcox moved to town to build parts for nuclear submarines and we joined Washington on Moscow’s “hit list.”

In the end, though, it was a great deal for R-MWC. Previously, the college’s unique and valuable art collection had been scattered all over campus, paintings hung in dorms and the cafeteria. That was nice for the students, who enjoyed the interaction, but left the works vulnerable to theft. With the National Gallery art out of the picture, the Maier became the college’s alone.

As for the house, said former museum Director Karol Lawson, “No curator ever lived there, as far as I know. It became a place to house visiting professors. People lived there from China, India, all over the world.”

Gail Morrison wasn’t from an exotic place, but she raised four children in the little house, living there for a decade when she was married to a R-MWC professor.

“There were these little faculty cottages all up and down Quinlan,” she said. “We had a little neighborhood of our own, and it was wonderful. The other cottages were torn down a long time ago.”

In case you hadn’t heard, the Maier Museum has become a lightning rod for controversy. The college wants to sell off some of its high-end art treasures to beef up its endowment, and one painting by Rufino Tamayo has already gone for $7.5 million at Christie’s. A lot of other people question the legality of that path, and the issue has dragged through an ascending chain of courts.

Lawson quit over it. No replacement director has been hired.

So for some opponents of the art sale, taking down the little house was another shot fired in this war, a “statement.” Lawson said she approached the previous president, Ginger Worden, about making it into a museum and was rebuffed.

The other perspective is that the house sat near the brow of a hill that is being carved away to expand the school’s athletic fields, and would have become unstable and unusable.

Wrote Randolph College spokesperson Brenda Edson in an e-mail:

“We tried to save the house. We looked very hard for a way to avoid having to raze the building. But given its location, we were not able to keep it. The new field is being constructed just below the house. The house has been in use on and off through the years, but not on a consistent basis.

“We even looked into moving it somewhere else.”

Like the viability of making the Maier a National Gallery South, the point is now moot. The house is gone.

Somehow, I just thought you should know that.