“Even I am surprised when I meet people at a cocktail party at some occasion where I’m trying to explain myself, I usually say, `Did you ever hear of the National Register?’ And nine times out of ten, they’ll say, `Well, of course,’ said William J. Murtagh, Ph. D., this country’s first Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places. “It fascinates me. It means that we’ve really seeped into the consciousness of a broad segment of American society.”
Murtagh, 82, who recently completed revising the third edition of his book, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America, and who summers in a small old house in Penobscot overlooking his garden and the former working waterfront of Northern Bay, happened into the career that led him to become this country’s voice of historic preservation.
The ins and outs of Murtagh’s career illustrate the saying: Luck favors the prepared. If he hadn’t had a general working knowledge of German and if, just before leaving for Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1954, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1950, hadn’t first gone to Bethlehem, PA to help a former employer who was lecturing there, he might not have met the man who several years later hired him to be the director of a museum in Bethlehem that had an endowment and a collection, but that did not yet exist.
Along with the directorship of the Annie S. Kammerer Museum came the job of protecting a group of pre-Revolutionary Moravian buildings potentially endangered by nearby urban renewal. This job became Murtagh’s introduction to the world of historic preservation.
In addition to the Moravian buildings providing the subject for his first scholarly book, the museum directorship brought with it on-the-spot lessons in fundraising and the politics of working with a board of trustees in a city that housed the Bethlehem Steel Corporation.
In time Murtagh’s museum board, filled with important Bethlehem Steel people both Moravian and non-Moravian, helped the community protect the Moravian buildings. Later that year, Richard Hubbard Howland, then president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, invited Murtagh and his wife to move to Washington, D.C., so Murtagh could become Howland’s assistant.
At that time the National Trust, a private, nonprofit organization, had but one property, Murtagh was the fifth staff person and there were then only two to three hundred members. “Prior to 1966,” he said, “the preservation movement in the United States was a do-good thing of the affluent sector of society.”
He received his Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961.
When Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966, Murtagh said, “The Congress directed the Secretary of the Interior to create an official list of cultural property in the United States: sort of a What’s What to monuments as Who’s Who is to people.” The National Register of Historic Places consists of districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects significant in American history, architecture, archaeology and culture.
Before Murtagh entered government as the first Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places, though, the Secretary of the Interior asked each of the governors of the fifty states, six territories, and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands to appoint one person in their jurisdiction to carry out these responsibilities in his name. The appointees are referred to as State Historic Preservation Officers, or SHPOs. Earle Shettleworth was appointed and remains the SHPO from Maine.
Shettleworth, who is also the Director of the Maine State Historic Preservation Commission, met Murtagh in the early 1970s at one of the first state preservation meetings in Bangor.
“I think what stands out most,” Shettleworth said in a recent telephone conversation, is that Murtagh “combines three very important elements in his ability to promote preservation: good solid knowledge, good grounding in architectural history, which gives him the background for making daily decisions, and wonderful communications skills.” And on top of these qualities, Shettleworth spoke for many others when he noted Murtagh’s “infectious enthusiasm for what he believes in — that knowledge and expertise and enthusiasm continue to be drawn on by the federal government for the good of the country.”
Murtagh worked for the National Trust from 1957 to 1967. During those years he said he seldom unpacked his bags. He flew back and forth across the country and all over the world, time after time.
After taking on the duties of the first Keeper, Murtagh’s life, if possible, became more challenging. When he arrived at his desk each morning, his IN box would be full. By lunch he’d have whittled it down. When he returned to his desk after lunch, it would be full again. Day after day. He said, “If I went away for two days, it was awful.”
In 1971, Murtagh and a retired friend from Philadelphia, May O’Neil, bought Castine’s Abbott School, the town’s former high school. In a way, Murtagh and O’Neil saved that building, because the town had contemplated turning the first floor into a garage for the town refuse truck. Murtagh and O’Neil divided the building into two three-bedroom apartments. O’Neil planned to live there year round; Murtagh planned to get away when he could to hide and rest.
The Keeper did meet a few townspeople, though, and in so doing, pointed Candace Reed Stern in the direction of her career as an architectural historian after he came to see her father’s pre-Revolutionary Castine house in 1975. “As he walked around and talked about his work,” she said, “I said, `That is exactly what I want to do.’ So I called him in Washington and was accepted in his first class in Historic Preservation at George Washington University.”
After leaving the post of Keeper, in 1979, Murtagh spent the next two years at New York’s Columbia University teaching historic preservation. In teaching those courses, he influenced a whole generation of young preservationists, what his friend, neighbor, and former employee at the National Park Service, Walter Smalling, Jr., calls “the Murtagh mafia.” Smalling, an architectural photographer, met Murtagh in 1978 and started working for him at the National Park Service a year later.
After working for him and watching him all these years, Smalling calls Murtagh “The visible embodiment of historic preservation,” and said, “One of the things that separates him out is that he had a sort of larger-than-life style that made him really visible and memorable.”
Murtagh moved to Penobscot during the Ice Storm of 1998, where he continues to lead a peripatetic life lecturing, advising, consulting, and as of last fall, wintering in Sarasota, FL. He is on the advisory board of Woodlawn, The Black House, in Ellsworth, and the statewide organization, Maine Preservation. He is also a member of the Castine Historical Society and continues to take an active interest in the town.
“All of these towns, like Castine, or historic districts, like Alexandria, VA, they’ve all become golden ghettos. It’s happening in Stonington. Some of those fishermen’s houses along the waterfront: they have pots of flowers out, they look nice and cutesy, but you know a fisherman is no longer using them. It’s somebody from away. Look at the way they’ve taxed people in Castine if they have a view of the water.
“One of the things that the preservation movement has not paid enough attention to in trying to keep the sense of locality and place is the sociological makeup of the community: the displacement process. When the more affluent from away move in and buy up all the shoreline, etc., then taxes go up and then people who live there are displaced. They can no longer afford to live there and they get squeezed out. And that happens whether you’re a fisherman or whether you’re a black or white or purple or yellow in an inner city neighborhood. And, frankly, I have never seen or heard of any solution to this problem either in my country or abroad.”
Unlike most people his age, Murtagh is still in demand. He recently completed the third revision of his book, Keeping Time: the History and Theory of Preservation in America, the proceeds of which will be used to create scholarships given by the Keeper’s Preservation Education fund to students and young professionals in the field of historic preservation. The new edition, with a Smalling photograph of Penobscot on the cover, will be available in bookstores next month.