Preservation Officials Broaden Their Sights to Build New Image : History: The National Trust no longer confines itself to mansions of the rich and famous. It’s expanding its scope, listing such sites as Tiger Stadium in Detroit, a church in Seattle and the post office in Franklin, Tenn.

At Montpelier, the big house just outside this little town, the peach-colored stucco that James Madison added to the brick walls is flaking away. The enormous copper roof needs replacing.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has declared Montpelier endangered and is raising money to preserve and restore it.

Across the continent in Seattle, First Covenant Church also needs a new roof. The parishioners say they will fix it, and they want no interference from historic preservationists, who want the church to keep its landmark status.

Montpelier was the home of America’s fourth President and a playground for generations of Du Ponts. First Covenant opened its doors early in this century as a house of prayer for hard-working Swedish immigrant families.

Both in their way show how America’s premiere preservationist group has changed its ideas of what is history and how to preserve it.

When it was chartered by Congress 43 years ago, the trust focused almost exclusively on places such as the 268-year-old Montpelier--sites associated with the great events and figures of America’s early days.

Today, it is as likely to be fighting over places like the 80-year-old Seattle church or a 65-year-old post office in Franklin, Tenn., or Tiger Stadium in Detroit.

“We have sort of moved away from the mansions and country houses of the famous,” said J. Jackson Walter, a former Florida state official and aide to President Jimmy Carter who has been president of the trust since 1984.

That message doesn’t seem to be getting across in some quarters.

Robert D. Herman, a sociology professor at Pomona College and president of Claremont Heritage, a preservation group in Claremont, Calif., said: “We have never been able to get them interested in this rather small college town. They seem to be interested in big structures in the eastern part of the country mostly.”

Only five of the trust’s 17 historic properties open to the public are west of the Mississippi.

“That’s our image; that’s it, and we’ve got to change that. We’ve got to be interested in the adobe hut,” said Gerry Dunaway, a former Procter & Gamble Co. market researcher now with the trust’s headquarters in Washington.

So the trust has decided to expand its collection, seeking a better geographical distribution and a selection “representative of all the kinds of properties we should be interested in saving,” said Frank E. Sanchis, vice president and steward of historic properties.

The trust operates out of the beaux-arts former home of philanthropist Andrew Mellon on Washington’s Embassy Row. It also has regional offices in Philadelphia; Chicago; Boston; Charleston, S.C., Denver, Ft. Worth and San Francisco.

About $8 million of its $31 million-plus budget comes from grants, mostly from the federal government. President Bush has asked for $36 million for historic preservation in next year’s budget, a major change from the Ronald Reagan Administration, which for years earmarked no money for historic preservation.

Dues from the trust’s 255,000 members brought in about $3.5 million last year, donations accounted for $7.3 million. Other money came from sales in gift shops and investments.

An additional $2.2 million came in last year from admission charges and special events at trust properties.

Those properties include Belle Grove in Middletown, Va.; Brucemore in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Casa Amesti in Monterey, Calif.; Chesterwood in Stockbridge, Mass.; Cliveden in Philadelphia; Cooper-Molera Adobe in Monterey, Calif.; Decatur House in Washington; Drayton Hall in Charleston, S.C.; Filoli in Woodside, Calif.; the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio in Oak Park, Ill.; Lyndhurst in Tarrytown, N.Y.; Montpelier in Montpelier Station, Va.; Oatlands in Leesburg, Va.; The Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, La.; Woodlawn Plantation and Pope-Leighey House in Mt. Vernon, Va., and Woodrow Wilson House in Washington.

Every year, the trust issues a list of the most endangered historic sites in the country. Montpelier made the list this year, as did the Franklin, Tenn., post office, marked for closure by the U.S. Postal Service, and the Detroit stadium, which the city’s American League baseball team proposes to abandon.

The trust’s other activities include giving grants to help distressed older communities use preservation to attract private investment, suing to block highways from wiping out historic neighborhoods, working with farm families to adapt historic barns to new uses, and converting threatened or deteriorating neighborhoods into low-income housing.

All that means the trust, and the historic preservation movement it spearheads, are increasingly intersecting with the lives of ordinary Americans.

Sometimes, the ordinary Americans don’t like it.

First Covenant is one of a growing number of churches, for instance, that have resisted efforts of preservationists.

“We like the building; it’s not that,” said Richard Sundholm, the electrical contractor who is chairman of the Seattle church. “For the first time since 1910, we are re-covering the dome. The metal has just gotten so bad that you can’t even daub stuff on it any more. We are not a rich congregation. People are going to have to dig deep.”

But when the Seattle Landmarks Commission declared the church a historic landmark, restricting the church’s freedom to make alterations, First Covenant went to court. It had no plans for alterations but wanted to be free to make future decisions unhampered.

“The fact is the church isn’t a building,” Sundholm said. “The fact is the church is a congregation. The church, as we see it, has a mission. If the mission changes, and we need to do something different, we are incredibly hampered because we are a landmark.”

The trust, which entered the case as a friend of the court in support of the city, said exempting the building from landmark designation “would make landmark protection of church buildings virtually impossible.”

The church won the first round in the Washington Supreme Court, but the U.S. Supreme Court sent the case back for reconsideration, and the state court is expected to hear arguments again this fall.

Across the continent, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan sued to block the designation of its community house as a landmark. It wanted to tear down the building and replace it with a 47-story office tower. The church said that it needed the revenue it would gain from the tower to pay for social services, including a soup kitchen.

The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last fall that the New York City landmarks preservation law applies to St. Bartholomew’s and other houses of worship. In March, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the church’s appeal.

At Montpelier, the debate has not been about whether to restore the place as a national landmark, but what history it should commemorate.

The estate was the home of the Madison family from 1723 to 1836, when the widowed Dolley Madison had to sell it to pay her son’s gambling debts. After passing through the hands of six other owners, it was the country seat of the wealthy Du Ponts from 1902 to 1983.

They nearly doubled the size of the house, put a pool table in Madison’s dining room, built a steeplechase course, erected barns and turned a parlor for the fourth President’s parents into an Art Deco salon adorned with pictures of Marion Du Pont Scott’s horses. Scott willed the 55-room house and surrounding 2,780-acre estate to the trust.

Some thought the place should be strictly a Madison memorial.

“The (Du Pont) wings are a motel addition on the back,” said local civic activist Helen Marie Taylor. “That mess should go--you’ll never miss it, believe me.”

Others say the Du Ponts were history too.

“Current historic preservation philosophy leans heavily to not undoing later alterations to buildings when the later alterations have a significance in themselves,” said Sanchis, the trust’s vice president for stewardship of historic properties.

The issue was settled in 1989: The Madison rooms will be restored, after research to find out what they were like when the Madisons were there, and the Du Pont additions, including Scott’s horse pictures, will be kept.

It will not happen overnight. So these days, Montpelier is mostly an empty house, surrounded by archeological excavation sites.

Maintenance costs alone for the building and grounds are $1 million a year. The endowment left by Scott yields about $170,000. The Montpelier Property Council, a mostly local advisory group, is working on a national fund-raising campaign.

In 1966, Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act, establishing the National Register of Historic Places under the Park Service, setting up a network of federally approved state preservation offices and providing for federal grants.

Then followed a “long and sometimes painful” debate over trust policy, says Robert Stipe, a retired professor of design at North Carolina State University and a former trustee of the organization.

“Back in the 1970s, we had a board of trustees, half of whom were of the traditional mind-set, and then there was a group of us on the board who were regarded as sort of modernistic mavericks,” Stipe said.

As an outcome, he says, the preservation movement now “encompasses a lot of ethnic groups that once would have been totally excluded from the entire process.”

“Sometimes it gets a little crazy,” Stipe said. “There are people who want to save the first mobile home or a 1960s industrial building of some kind, but that’s fair game.”

“The anti-progress label is thrown at us much less now,” said Walter, the trust’s president. “But 25 years ago that was the deal: ‘You guys are standing in the way of progress. You just want to preserve that thing because it’s old.’ ”