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Colonial Williamsburg announced this past Friday that it intends to sell Carter's Grove, the plantation that has been closed to the public since late 2003. The decision didn't really come as a surprise to anyone, but it was still a disappointment to those of us who hoped that management might come to their senses and realize what a valuable historical resource they were thoughtlessly tossing aside.

Supposedly, CW decided to close Carter's Grove because it cost too much money to run, only a fourth of our visitors ever went there, and because it was being interpreted as a 20th-century home (the tours of the house focused on the time when it was owned by Molly McCrae, prior to being acquired by CW), it wasn't central to our interpretive focus on the 18th century. Never mind that it was an 18th-century home, one owned by one of the most prominent political families in Virginia at that time, and that its history spanned four centuries, since the site also included the remains of Wolstenholme Towne, a 17th-century British settlement wiped out by an attack from a local Native American tribe. The mansion's closure allowed CW president Colin Campbell and other top executives to receive substantial pay raises (Campbell's income rose more than $50,000 between 2005 and 2006, and he currently makes more than the President of the U.S.), and contributed nothing to programming improvements within the Historic Area. (Remind me to rant about Revolutionary City sometime.) And there were also numerous other resources that were lost.

The Carter's Grove site was home to one of CW's finest interpretations of African-American life in colonial Virginia; the reconstructed slave quarters were home to many programs that brought the realities of slavery to life. Most importantly, it was an authentic recreation on an original site; whereas its replacement, Great Hopes Plantation, is a fictitious "representation" of an 18th-century farm, loosely based on the property of middle-class planter Benjamin Valentine but not on an original site. (It was formerly an overflow parking lot for the Visitor Center.) There's a significant difference between telling the stories of real people in the place where they were enslaved, and composite characters in a place where no one ever actually lived. But authenticity no longer seems to matter to the people in charge.

The other great loss is the archaeology museum. Not only did it have an unusual form-- it was underground, basically carved into a hillside a short distance from the mansion-- it also made archaeology compelling by weaving together the stories of the Wolstenholme Towne settlers and the process of excavating the site. It was a multimedia experience before that became an overused buzzword, combining movies, audio commentary from CW's greatest archaeologist, Ivor Noel Hume, and artifacts from the site. And when you exited the museum and visited the site itself, the commentaries continued in a form that's always amused and delighted me-- barrels were placed at key points at Wolstenholme Towne, and when you pressed a button, Noel Hume's voice came out of them and told you about what had been there in the 17th century. It was magnificent.

And now it's gone. Even though there are numerous conditions that any buyer of Carter's Grove must adhere to, conditions that ostensibly guarantee its preservation, it will never be the same however it's used in the future. Some of the artifacts from Wolstenholme will be displayed in the new, expanded Museums of Colonial Williamsburg; but the narrative, and that vital connection to the place where it happened, is lost forever. The story of slavery will continue to be told, but again, without that all-important connection to place, its telling will suffer as well. And a vital part of America's heritage will be sacrificed to the greed of a small group of wealthy men who have already proven they have no understanding of how to manage and promote the institution they command.