Moorefield Charade Marches On!

From the Connection Newspaper this week comes:

"The long-contested fate of the one-time home of Jeremiah Moore, commonly known as the Moorefield House, finally appears to be settled. The building, which has been dismantled and put in storage, is expected to be reconstructed and restored on the site of the Eagle Eyrie Baptist Conference Center about 12 miles southeast of Lynchburg, where it will become a history museum. "It's going to be used for the same purpose we had intended for it," said Jerry Duane of the Jeremiah Moore Historical and Educational Association, who now resides in Gainesville. He added, "Quite honestly, all of us would have much preferred to see the house rebuilt in the Vienna area." The house was built around 1790, near what is now the eastern border of Nottoway Park, by Jeremiah Moore, a leader of the Baptist movement in Virginia and several surrounding states. Until it was torn down about three years ago, it was the oldest building in Vienna. ... "He really paved the way for a substantial middle class," said Town Council member Maud Robinson, who worked through Historic Vienna Inc. to preserve the house. She also noted that it represented a different slice of history than most other local historic sites. "It was a very important house because it represented a planter's house, a yeoman's house," said Robinson, adding that there are very few such houses left in Virginia. ....When they proposed moving the house to Nottoway Park, which used to be part of Moorefield Plantation, "the Park Authority just wasn't interested at all," he said. They considered moving it to the site of the nearby dog park, "but we didn't get any encouragement from the mayor or Town Council." Robinson, who now sits on the council and whose husband, the late Charlie Robinson, had been Vienna's mayor when it was decided in the 1990s that the town would not be able to restore the building, noted that such a project would have cost at least $500,000, and she added that it was difficult to arouse a lot of widespread interest in the history of the building and the story of its original owner. "When you tried to tell people about this, their eyes kind of glazed over," she said. Robinson said she and others in Historic Vienna Inc. had a study done on the life of Jeremiah Moore and applied for grants from the county and state for preservation of the building, but to little avail. Monahan, also a member of Historic Vienna, said the organization also funded the removal of asbestos tiles, as well as the removal of the small addition on the back of the house, and also raised money for an architecture study, archeological digs in the backyard and a restoration feasibility study. NEIGHBORS of the house wanted to know what would be done with it. "Nobody would want to have a derelict building sitting in their neighborhood," said Monahan. The town eventually decided to have the building demolished, but the Jeremiah Moore Association raised $25,000 to have the building dismantled by a professional, said Duane, and the town pitched in the money it had set aside for demolition. The Moorefield House was taken down in the summer of 2003 and now sits in pieces in Culpeper on the property of the specialist who dismantled it and will rebuild it at Eagle Eyrie...

This article almost sounds like it was paid for by Maud!

Question. Are Vienna tax dollars, through the government owned 'Historic Vienna, Inc.', going to be used to put this pile of junk back together again in Lynchburg? Everyone will always remember Maud Robinson as the premier preservationist of our time. She has achieved so much when it comes to talking about things - who cares if it is only talk! Hey, maybe Vienna historic groupies promoting 'fake' history can set up a shop in Lynchburg to promote Vienna history?