Confederate landmark could move

RICHMOND, Va. – The White House of the Confederacy, a symbol of the South shrinking in the shadow of urban development, will cost more than $4.7 million to relocate, specialists told state officials meeting to discuss the landmark’s fate Monday.

The meeting was the third of four concerning the Richmond site, where a museum also stands. The joint subcommittee studying the cost and feasibility of relocating the buildings is expected to release a final report by Jan. 11, the first day of the 2006 legislative session.

Museum leaders initially identified three options for long-term survival, including keeping the museum and White House in place. That would require an annual state grant of some $761,000, Rawls said.

“Our forecast for the size of the necessary subsidy is three-quarters of a million dollars per year, forever,” he said. “This is a forecast of financial failure.”

They now hope to move both buildings to the former site of Camp Lee, a Civil War era training ground along modern day Broad Street. Science and children’s museums already are on site.

“It was the major training and mobilization spot during the war,” Rawls said. “It is an extraordinarily appropriate spot from a historical point of view.”

But as early as the 1970s, longtime neighbor Virginia Commonwealth University began sprawling around the site. Now museum officials complain the building is nearly impossible to find amid looming VCU highrises, and that the din of jackhammers ruins the experience for visitors.

“Nobody wants to move the house,” Rawls said. “(But) the fact is the house, where it is, is so hard to visit that people don’t come.”

Moving the museum from its 12th and Clay Street perch could take two weeks, Virginia Beach house moving specialist Jim Matyiko told the 11-member committee.

It would mean the loss of several trees and traffic signals as well as the closure of busy thoroughfares while the building creeps along on a system of braces, he said.

Cracks in the building are a risk and the in-ground basement portions would have to stay behind, he added.

Most troubling is what it means to move a historic site from its original spot, said Brag Bowling, a national spokesman for the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The 4,500-member Virginia division adopted a resolution against the move at a Sept. 18 meeting.

“Once you take a historic landmark off its foundation and move it somewhere, it really loses its significance,” Bowling said. “It’s not the same place.”