Why Is Preservation Of Our Historic Buildings & Lighthouses Important?

Preservation strengthens the perpetual partnership between the past, the present and the future. Preservation encourages each generation to utilize the best of contemporary thought and technology without rejecting the history, culture, traditions, or the values on which our lives and our futures are built. This partnership shapes the sense of continuity that the art historian Sigfried Giedion considered to be "part of the very backbone of human dignity."

The noted architect, John Ruskin, makes the point that we save old buildings because we need to preserve the marks left on our national landscape by the many people who have shaped it. It is as if historic architecture affords us our "collective memory".

Similarly, in a recent best-seller, novelist Anne Rivers Siddons wrote: "There should be, in every life, a place ... where you could come and visit your past, and the past of your people, and know that whatever happened outside, here timelessness lives. All of us need a place like that - a place where we can have our history close at hand, where we can see it, touch it, learn from it. Preservation helps that timelessness live in every community in America." Click here to read the rest.