The National Park Service (NPS) last week announced $25.7 million in Save America’s Treasures (SAT) grants to fund 59 projects that will preserve nationally significant sites and historic collections in 26 states and the District of Columbia.
NPS partners with the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services to award the grants, which will be matched by almost $50 million in private and public investment.
Dover Friends Meetinghouse, New Hampshire. Photo by magicpiano, Wikimedia Commons
Among this year’s grant recipients, the Dover Friends Meetinghouse, a historic Quaker edifice built in 1768, is the last 18th-century meetinghouse that remains in the entire state of New Hampshire. The two-story wood-frame structure will receive funding to stabilize and reinforce the roof system. Preservation of this building ensures that future generations continue to meet there and understand the Dover Friends’ critical role in establishing the foundation for religious freedom and non-violent civil disobedience.
St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue in Manhattan will receive close to $750,000 to restore parts of its celebrated triple portal. Designed by Stanford White, this main entrance—the defining feature for the design and construction of the new St. Bartholomew’s Church building in 1918—is composed of three sets of bas-relief cast bronze doors and carved stone iconographic sculpture by renowned artists of the early 20th century. The grant will focus on the preservation of the Cipollino marble columns, iconographic sculpture, the bronze doors and the limestone steps that have experienced deterioration from pollution and age.
St. Bartholomew's Church, Midtown Manhattan. Photo by Sergii Figurnyi, Shutterstock
One of Frank Furness’s best-known buildings, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, designed with George Hewitt and completed in 1876, will get an HVAC upgrade. Home to the nation’s first and oldest museum and art school, with one of the most important art collections in the country, the National Historic Landmark–listed building’s current system no longer provides sufficient temperature and humidity control in the galleries, art storage, and staff spaces.
Interior view of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Photo by Fernando Garcia Esteban, Shutterstock
Not only buildings will benefit from SAT grants. The National Building Museum in Washington D.C., has received money not for its vast 1887 brick structure, but to preserve the Northwestern Terra Cotta collection, which contains over 50,000 drawings gifted to the museum by the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company. Favored by such architectural luminaries as Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Albert Kahn, the firm’s draftsmen transformed architectural blueprints into comprehensive drawings that identified exactly where and how each puzzle-like piece of terra-cotta would be secured to its supporting structure.
The SAT grant program was established in 1998 to celebrate America's premier cultural resources in the new millennium. Since then, the program has provided over $405 million from the Historic Preservation Fund to more than 1,400 projects to provide preservation and conservation work on nationally significant collections, artifacts, structures, and sites. Previous awards have gone toward restoring the Park Inn Hotel, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright; the USS Intrepid, an Essex-class aircraft carrier on display in Manhattan; and the Saturn V Launch Vehicle, a three-stage rocket designed for a lunar landing mission.
A full list of the latest round of SAT grantees can be found here.
