Watch out, Fort Monroe
Two threats against national memory at Point Comfort
During Trump 2.0, Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia—the preeminent landscape for public memory of both U.S. slavery’s start in early colonial days and the Civil War’s self-emancipating multitudes—faces two threats: possible closure of Fort Monroe National Monument and the consequent return of Virginia politicians’ parochial zeal for spirit-of-place-hobbling overdevelopment.
Advocacy handout, ca. 2017, for Fort Monroe at Point Comfort, Virginia—a flat Gibraltar that looks across the lower Chesapeake Bay, over Hampton Roads harbor, and back four centuries. Fort Monroe includes a majestic, moated stone citadel, mightiest in American history. Self-emancipating Civil War slavery escapees called it Freedom’s Fortress. When the Pentagon retired the full Army post in 2011, Virginia politically engineered a bizarrely split, severely limited Fort Monroe National Monument on Point Comfort’s Chesapeake Bay shoreline, sidelining calls for the more substantial national park that’s still possible. The handout shows how the split national monument could be unified and expanded for preserving spirit of place. The mayors of Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach endorsed unification and added a call for elevating Virginia’s Historic Triangle—Jamestown, Williamsburg, Yorktown—into the Historic Diamond by adding Fort Monroe. As of mid-2025 in Fort Monroe’s case, to return small National Park Service sites to states, as is threatened, would mean reawakening Virginia and Hampton politicians’ zeal for overdevelopment.
Threat 1: Presidential assault on national parks
Consider an excerpt—with italicized boldfacing added in two places—from the New York Times essay “Will America’s National Parks Survive Trump?”
[In 2023], the most recent [year] for which figures are available, the 325 million visitors to national parks, monuments and historic sites spent an estimated $26.4 billion in surrounding communities. Visits to the parks swelled last year to a record of nearly 332 million.
These figures should come as no surprise. Americans love their national parks and visit them avidly. Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.
Clearly, America’s national parks have been a golden goose. The question now is whether President Trump will gut them in his effort to slash federal spending. Even before he took office, the Park Service was running lean, on a slim operating budget of about $3 billion. But since January, an estimated 13 percent of its staff has departed through pressured buyouts, early retirements and deferred resignations.
And the outlook for the national parks next year is especially grim. Mr. Trump has proposed hacking the Park Service’s operating budget by roughly 30 percent, which would be catastrophic, and transferring less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states and tribal governments. Theresa Pierno, the president of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group, has warned that the system “would be completely decimated” should such cuts be imposed.
The group estimated that reducing the operating budget by $900 million, as the Trump administration wants to do, would require closing 350 of the 433 parks, monuments, historic sites and other locations overseen by the Park Service.
Should anything even remotely like that come to pass, we would be witnessing the dismantling of a century-old system that has protected majestic scenery and places of ecological or historical importance from development. It has been a model of stewardship of landscapes that belong to all Americans, and it has been emulated around the world.
The possible transferring of “less visited national parks and other Park Service locations to states” and the possible closing of 350 of 433 national parks, monuments, and historic sites calls to mind the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s report1 of what Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum told Congress. He said that “the federal government could shift responsibility for hundreds of historic sites and battlefields to states, foundations and private entities” and “suggested that many historic sites and battlefields ‘are just cost centers’ that the government could shift to states to run.”
There’s also this: The Times essay noted that “more than 100 parks in the 433-unit system are currently without permanent superintendents.” Will Fort Monroe National Monument become one of them, possibly en route to closure? Three days before the Times essay appeared, The Guardian ran the article “Turmoil, resignations and ‘psychological warfare’: How Trump is crippling US national parks.” It overlaps a lot with the Times piece. But consider as well The Guardian’s discussion of “facade management,” as introduced in this excerpt:
When the former national parks director Jonathan Jarvis2 surveys the current landscape, he is reminded of a trip to China he took more than two decades ago.
At the time, China was developing its first ever national park system and looked to the US as a shining example. Jarvis—who was then the superintendent of Alaska’s Wrangell-St Elias national park—found himself deep inside a cave that Chinese representatives wanted to show off. “I brought a flashlight,” he recalls, “so I could see what they weren’t showing me.”
While the environment of the main cavern had been restored to what appeared to be a healthy cave ecosystem, Jarvis’s flashlight beam revealed side caverns that were full of garbage. “They were taking all the human litter left by the visitors above ground and stuffing it below,” he says. “Their idea of a park was pure facade management.” . . . “We are headed toward facade management,” Jarvis says of the Doge-induced changes. . . . “There are ideologues who want to dismantle the federal government,” he says. “And the last thing they need is a highly popular federal agency that undermines their argument about how the government is dysfunctional.”
“So their approach is to make the agency fail,” he adds. “This is their chance to kill the golden goose.”
Maybe they know about what was quoted above from the Times: “Last year, the National Park Service received the highest rating of all federal agencies in a survey by the independent Pew Research Center, with 76 percent of respondents viewing the agency favorably.”
Threat 2: Return of Virginia’s parochial short-sightedness
Virginia's Fort Monroe Authority manages Fort Monroe with the city of Hampton and—to a token extent, as I see it—with the National Park Service. An official Virginia web page proclaims the vision that Virginia’s and Hampton’s leaders have consistently intended since the Army’s 2005 retirement announcement: “to redevelop this historic property into a vibrant, mixed-use community.” The page never even mentions the national monument or the National Park Service.
A sentence from Wikipedia further indicts Virginia’s longstanding parochial outlook on this national treasure, even though the statement is at least partly obsolete: “Several re-use plans for Fort Monroe are under development in the Hampton community.” During and beyond the half-decade of Fort Monroe politics that followed the 2005 announcement of the Army’s 2011 departure, Fort Monroe’s civic defenders would have condemned that statement as displaying the Hampton-owns-it presumption.
That presumption was all the more potent because Point Comfort is prime urban waterfront. And in 2006, Fort Monroe’s civic defenders found out what we were up against when Hampton purported to invite open public discussion and suggestions about post-Army Fort Monroe in citizen sessions in the city’s huge convention center.
At the public pre-meeting assembly the night before, I stood, asked for, and got confirmation that there’d be none of the rumored prohibition of national-park discussion. But in the morning, with participants ready at a multitude of tables, an official rose to the podium and bluntly rescinded the confirmation. Correspondingly, each table had an enforcer, though their success in forbidding national-park discussion was limited. Still, it all called to mind the warning I had heard from a neighbor: “Steve, you ain’t never gonna stop ’em developers.”
The Self-Emancipator post “Profiling the 1619 place: Point Comfort and Emancipation’s long arc” contains a section headed “Limited, split national monument” that summarizes the early politics of post-Army Fort Monroe. Don’t get me wrong, though. Hampton has a legitimate, unique, important stake. But Fort Monroe isn’t just another retired Fort Drab beside a cornfield, to be turned over to the nearest town for exploitation.
By rights it belongs to America, and for that matter to the world. My 2022 History News Network essay shows why Point Comfort should become the nation’s memorial landscape for Emancipation. Both Tidewater daily papers last Sunday ran my essay—here’s the gift link—responding to Virginia’s leaders’ chronic undervaluation of that landscape under a headline contradicting those leaders: “Fort Monroe is a world landmark, not merely a ‘regional’ one.” Hampton didn’t expand to include Point Comfort until 1952, after well more than three centuries of Point Comfort and Fort Monroe history that make this landscape an obvious candidate for World Heritage Site status.
So, what to do?
And that’s the answer I’d give if anyone said, OK, what should be done if the national monument does get canceled? We should go on offense. We should take the initiative to press
for World Heritage Site status,
for a substantial, presumably post-Trump, Freedom’s Fortress National Park, and
for designating Point Comfort with Fort Monroe as the national emancipation memorial.
Ken Burns’s documentary series on national parks as America’s best idea emphasized that various interests tend to oppose creation of national parks until those interests lose—and then find out how economically wrong they have been. Please see the first paragraph of the long New York Times excerpt quoted above.
Twenty years ago, in a Newport News Daily Press op-ed, I published what was, as far as I know, the first public challenge to Virginia’s and Hampton’s early plans to squander post-Army Fort Monroe. That outlook—calling to mind the spectacle of a subdivision on a Monticello hillside—could threaten again.
The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the Newport News Daily Press reprinted the Richmond article on their May 29 front pages, but not online.
Mr. Jarvis’s brother Destry served on Virginia’s Fort Monroe Authority’s board of trustees.
This article describes a good example of the grave damage to our National Park system that is being perpetrated by the Trump administration.