by Douglas A. Fisher

Rochester's 175th birthday this year connects us with the 1834 flour-milling community that drove Rochester's early economy, facilitated by the new Erie Canal and populated by the new Greek Revival style of architecture.

Yet this very birthday is witnessing the possible removal of community access to our beloved Corn Hill landmark museum the Campbell-Whittlesey House, a structure which embodies key elements of our 175 years of history. Trustees of the Landmark Society are seeking private development of this pristine 1830s gem, with all the period furnishings - lovingly contributed - to be sold. This sad event would be a betrayal to all of Rochester, and to the history of the Landmark Society itself.

When people say that 2009 is economically a difficult time to maintain landmarks, we must remember that this house museum was created in 1937 in the middle of the Great Depression. With proper marketing, sources exist to enhance funding today far beyond what Depression-era sources could provide.

Measuring cultural benefit by numbers alone is a slippery slope. Greater attendance would be wonderful in terms of wider distribution of the many messages the museum provides, yet the 1830s fabric of the house would inevitably suffer accelerated wear and tear. A proper balance is needed, but modern adaptive reuse would accelerate damage way beyond what the historic house should bear, as demonstrated by all-too-numerous local examples of insensitive such adaptations.

It is important to note just why the Campbell-Whittlesey House is so very important to Rochester and its 175 years of history.

Benjamin Campbell and other Rochester flour millers in the 1830s took in wheat in late summer, ground it into flour, and either shipped it out on the Erie Canal right away, or stored it in downtown warehouses for spring shipment. Erie Canal boats transported milled flour to New York City and the world, with the heightened financial opportunities drawing to Rochester a dramatic population increase in the 1820s and 1830s.

At that very historical moment, Andrew Jackson's government emphasizing the common folk philosophically fortified use of an architectural style inspired by Greece, the world's first democracy. Greek Revival building styles proliferated locally in civic structures, in mansions, and in more modest homes.

These currents found expression in a tastefully-splendid Rochester landmark mansion, completed in 1836 for flour miller Benjamin Campbell. His brick home, at the corner of Troup Street and South Fitzhugh Street, was a close walk from his mill and the Erie Canal. It was an individualistic Greek Revival home, with direct inspiration from an influential young American architect named Minard Lafever. Design details inside Campbell's home directly reflect Lafever's 1835 pattern book "The Beauties of Modern Architecture," as do details at the Rose Hill mansion along Seneca Lake south of Geneva.

Benjamin Campbell built his mansion with flour milling profits, when the price of his milled flour was high. As a commodity, flour had to be placed carefully for sale. Limiting the flour available would raise the price, while flooding the market would depress the market price.

When an overabundance of flour appeared on the market, depressing prices, Campbell was stuck with a large supply of devalued flour in which he had made a large investment. He reluctantly sold his distinguished home to Rochester lawyer Frederick Whittlesey, whose family then owned it for many decades to come.

The imminent risk of the building's destruction in 1937 led directly to Helen Ellwanger, Elizabeth Holahan, and others founding the Society for the Preservation of Landmarks in Western New York, primarily to save and preserve the Campbell-Whittlesey House. This was a nationally-pioneering historic-preservation project, with careful analysis made to determine the most authentic manner of evoking the first decade of the home and of Rochester's history as a city.

Visitors to the Campbell-Whittlesey House received an education in early Rochester history, together with the social history depiction of how leading local pioneer entrepreneurs lived. Marjorie Ward Selden wrote a monograph describing her authentication of the home's original interior paint colors. This careful approach to preservation also provided architectural education, such that modern owners of Greek Revival homes throughout the Rochester region would have a scholarly exemplar as a benchmark for their own design treatments.

All this might have been lost in the 1950s, as the original Inner Loop design threatened demolition of that distinguished brick structure located right where highway engineers had targeted placing an expressway, planned to facilitate fast movement of automobiles coming onto the Troup-Howell Bridge then under design. Strong preservationist protest forced the highway people to move the expressway a few feet to the north, and the house museum was saved.

But the brick mansion on the corner of Troup and South Fitzhugh Streets was becoming increasingly isolated physically from its urban past. The sprawling Civic Center and Inner Loop projects together destroyed a large swath of landmark-quality houses between Broad Street (formerly the Erie Canal route) and Benjamin Campbell's old home.

The house endured nonetheless, and was a shining star in the middle of major demolition of the neighborhood for the campus then there of the Rochester Institute of Technology, which had demolished numerous landmarks, including the brick home of Nathaniel Rochester.

Massive demolition by the city's urban renewal program almost destroyed all that was left there, which was largely a collection of fine, but derelict, houses from the city's first decades. No matter how decrepit those surviving early homes were, though, the restored Campbell-Whittlesey House showed the 1970s doubters a role model to which they could aspire in buying and restoring their own homes of that same era. Urban pioneers, often using little more than sweat equity, renovated wrecks into genuine showplaces.

In design concepts, they were not working in ignorance. These new homeowners had a good prototype in Greek Revival house museums nationally, with one of the finest right in their own neighborhood. Books alone are no substitute for the three-dimensional education of a properly-restored historic building itself. The very existence and public availability of this good prototype has done incalculable good to the urban fabric of Rochester 175 years after its creation.

The Landmark Society is now re-evaluating its mission. Originally named the Society for the Preservation of Landmarks in Western New York, halfway through its history the word "preservation" was dropped from its name. Now we have only the "Landmark Society of Western New York." With today's mission re-evaluation, its newsletter reports that now the society would "protect the unique architectural heritage of our region and promote preservation."

Historic preservation? Even though the society proclaims its mission as protecting our architectural heritage, the society will not do it itself. The Landmark Society is moving toward delegating that function to others, whether or not anyone else takes up that important cause.

In other words, the mission is no longer historic preservation which the society will do themselves as an exemplar and inspiration to others. Instead, the society's high-tone house museum cum educational prototype would be withdrawn from public view, and be privatized as perhaps office space.

The Stone-Tolan house, Rochester's oldest home, would still be a house museum, but how long would it be until that survivor suffers the same re-evaluation?

How would we like it if every applicant to the Rochester Preservation Board were to echo that attitude, and say that historic preservation is only for others to do? Who is to set the good example?

The new Landmark Society focus is to have a sustainable community, which is a worthy goal. But the society would be there only as a cheerleader, not as a central participant. Such abdication of its 70 years of leadership would leave a vacuum that would permit untold "dumbing down" of historic preservation in Rochester.

Fisher is a Rochester lawyer and longtime area historian and preservationist.