With the passing of William John Murtagh at the age of 95 in late October historic preservation in the United States lost the last of the lions who transformed the field into a potent national movement during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Some figures, such as Charles Peterson, Ernest Allen Connally, and Russell Keune worked at the national level, often behind the scenes, helping to craft policy and practice. Others such as Antoinette Downing and Leopold Adler redefined the scope, purpose, and value of preservation at the local level. Yet others, most notably James Marston Fitch, worked through the academy. Bill Murtagh’s contribution was foremost as a national advocate for the movement. Using his position as the first Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places (1967-78) as a bully pulpit, Murtagh “sold” the idea preservation to many thousands of Americans and made the Register the effective anchor for the nascent national historic preservation program. He succeeded in these major achievements through his intellectual acuity, his penchant for practicality, a gregarious personality, and an inherent ability to engage and persuade.
Administrating the National Register for the National Park Service could easily have become a pedestrian, bureaucratic task. Murtagh cast his role in an entirely different light. It was a voyage of discovery, of learning of the abundant historic resources that exist in the United States and its territories, emphasizing the importance of those resources to the country as a whole, and of sharing that wealth of information and insights with the public. The process brought an array of new perspectives on our physical heritage to the fore. And, contrary to practices in Europe and most other parts of the world, where historic resource inventories were conducted by central authorities, National Register listing should emanate from the local and state levels. Washington-based officials could never adequately determine what was historically significant in, say Burlington, Iowa, or San Luis Obispo, California; those judgments had to come from those who knew the territory. His decision was predicated on the concept of local significance, which had been outlined in the regulations following the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act. There was no hierarchy in assigning the level of significance; all levels were treated equally under the law. But local significance could still have been relegated to the back burner in the attention and respect it commanded. Murtagh put it front and center, embracing inclusivity rather than exclusivity. The National Register should include “anything worth preserving,” in his words, and those properties were primarily ones of local significance. To drive the point home he was fond of talking about the Vermont state historic preservation officer who remarked at a meeting in Washington that his constituents were not like most of those gathered in the room. Most Vermonters were born in the state; many seldom, if ever, left its borders or even those of the county in which they resided. For them local heritage was nearly synonymous with national heritage. Murtagh practiced what he preached, his tireless advocacy across the country decisively impacting outlooks toward preservation across the country. The concept of local significance became, in effect, a nationally significant phenomenon.
This was heady stuff at a time when most architectural historians continued to dismiss buildings that did not belong to an exceptional league and virtually no serious historian of any stripe studied bridges, lighthouses, highways, and many other components of the landscape. Murtagh’s approach was no less a rejection of the antiquarianism that still prevailed among devotees of local history. He was keeper of the National Register, and resources listed on it belonged to larger narratives as well as to local ones. If the concept of local significance was nationally significant, so was the collective inventory of listed sites. Murtagh’s approach was in part predicated on practicality. There would never be adequate funding to have federal employees conduct a national inventory; if the Register was to mean anything, those involved had to come from across the country. But Murtagh’s perspective was also informed by an extensive study, earning an architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1950, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the same institution in 1953 and 1963, respectively. An outgrowth of his dissertation, Moravian Architecture and Town Planning (University of North Carolina Press, 1967) remains the definitive work on the subject. Murtagh was captivated by the built environment, at home and abroad. He traveled widely and never ceased to embrace what he experienced.
After retiring from the Park Service in 1978, Murtagh remained active in the field as special assistant to the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation (a position he also held under Richard Hubbard Howland from 1958 to 1967). He then entered the academy, directing graduate preservation programs at Columbia, the University of Maryland, and the University of Hawaii. He long remained active in the U.S. Committee of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (US/ICOMOS), and organization he helped found. He set the tone not just for the National Register, but for the outlook of preservationists in the U.S. His example is no less a guidepost today than it was half a century ago.
