Moorefield: Dirty Underbelly of Historic Vienna, Inc.

Maud and Laine, You Can't Keep Pulling Wool Over Eyes

Over 20 years the Town of Vienna and its tax-payer funded club Historic Vienna, Inc. spent significant money on studies of historic Moorefield. Moorefield was the only Vienna house ever placed on a national historical register. What happened? Under Maud Robinson and Laine Hyde's leadership it was destroyed. Here are two detailed studies that were buried in file cabinets:

1. Moorefield Preservation Plan Study. Completed by Praful Shah and Associates. 42 pages. 1983. Part 1 (PDF) and Part 2 (PDF)
2. Moorefield Historic Structure Report. Completed by Nathaniel Palmer Neblett, AIA. 71 pages. 1991. Part 1 (PDF) and Part 2 (PDF)

Reflect on the irony here for a moment. There can be no greater supporters of the fraudulent Windover Heights Historic District than Robinson and Hyde. But these two historic pretenders had the two studies above in their hands and STILL voted to demolish the single most important historical landmark in Vienna. How can these people not be seen as hypocrites of the highest order? Are there documents like that for the Windover Heights Historic District? You must be kidding!

Where are the remnants of Moorefield now? While we have pictures of the demolition here, that doesn't stop the historic spin lobby from pretending Moorefield still exists. Read their brochure (PDF). The vast majority of that building in those pictures is in a landfill! More spin can be seen on the Jeremiah Moore web site.

We received feedback on this post so far:

Q1: The Moorefield PDFs and the Moorefield site both make claims that the house has been dismantled, tagged and parts of it are being stored for re-use. Yet you state that the house in the picture is now in a landfill. How do you know that the house components were taken to a landfill? Is it untrue that parts have been tagged and are in storage for possible future reassembly?

A1: This Town will say almost anything when comes to keeping up their historic ruse. However, consider pictures: 1, 2 and 3. We are sure some bricks and some planks exist somewhere in some crate. Where is that crate full of Moorefield? Who knows. Will they be able to reassemble the building as described in their two studies? No.

Q2: The way in which the house is being taken down is consistent with a 'deconstruction' process. Support beams have been left standing, and actually ARE marked with what looks like to me to be green paint in some spots. Bricks are stacked, piled and shrink wrapped, which would indicate to me that they are destined for storage, rather than a landfill. One of the brick piles is labeled 'WEST', which may be a locator for future rebuilding. There is a trim rack visible in one photo, and some wood is stacked there. Wood would be stacked there in order to protect it, not to prepare it to go to a dump. The staircase in all photos appears to have been preserved. It looks as if the walls themselves (other than the brick) were some type of plaster over lathe, and I would not expect those to have held up well enough to have had any integrity for restoration. Likely they could not be saved at all. Deconstruction can look even worse than demolition. With demolition, the house comes down in an hour or two, the debris is trucked away, and the ground is immediately smoothed and prepped for the new foundation. Deconstruction can take months and months. It looks awful. Usually, there are big blue tarps and time passes, and the rains come, debris piles up, grass grows. The whole thing just looks like there is no hope in sight. So, I hear you loud and clear, but I can't agree from your post about what happened to Moorefield. The pictures indicate to me that is was, in fact dismantled, at least in so far as was reasonable and practical to do so. But I don't know, I wasn't there. I do wonder if they did save enough of it to hope to 'rebuild' it, and if anyone will ever do so?

A2: This structure had no upkeep and no care for 25 years. It was allowed to rot and it did. Pulling some scraps together from a structure that was disintegrating from outright neglect is after the fact "spin" to make it look like these people were on the ball. Nothing can be further from the truth. If the Town thought there was any value to the venerable Moorefield pile...why not maintain ownership? Why not put it next to Freeman store? No, it was too far gone, so one last salvo of historic spin was fired with the so-called tagging and preservation effort. All of this was done to make it seem like they were not all incompetent. They were. Where is Moorefield today? Where are plans that show how to put the table scraps back together again? Does anyone care?