A preservation fight over Muir's birthplace

Thursday, July 26, 2001

A plan to convert John Muir's Scottish birthplace to a virtual reality museum has ignited an outcry from his California descendants, environmentalists and history buffs against what they consider an act of cultural vandalism.

What began as a strictly local dispute in the coastal town of Dunbar, 30 miles east of Edinburgh, has morphed into an international cause celebre.

The East Lothian Council, which has jurisdiction over the three-story stone building at 128 High Street, is being bombarded with protest letters from both sides of the Atlantic exhorting them to reject the plan.

"What is being proposed would be like the National Park Service coming  in and taking the Muir historical site (in Martinez) and gutting it and putting on a laser show on the inside," said John Muir's great-grandson Bill Hanna, a Napa Valley grape grower. "If they're going to gut the building, there'll be no birthplace, so they'll be eliminating the very reason for preserving the site in the first place."

Muir, the father of modern environmentalism, founder of the Sierra Club and the driving force for the creation of the national park system, was born in 1838 on the top floor of 128 High Street.

The controversy over the fate of his birthplace is rocking the quiet town of 6,500 on the North Sea coast.

"Nothing quite so dramatic has happened in that part of the world since the Bristol Beaufighters used to take off from East Fortune RAF airfield to strafe Nazi U-boats," said a report in the Scotsman, Scotland's major daily newspaper.

Muir, who wrote 10 passionate books and 300 articles extolling the wilderness of the West, died in 1914 at age 76. He has become an American icon.

April 21, his birthday, is John Muir Day in California. Muir's 14-room home in Martinez is a national historic site and receives a million visitors every year.

It was only in the late 1970s that Scotland, prodded by Muir's California bibliographers Maymie Kimes and her late husband, Bill, of Santa Rosa, started paying attention to its native son, who emigrated to the United States with his family at age 11.

Muir's memory has been enthusiastically embraced since the Kimes' consciousness-raising. The Earl of Haddington leased 1,600 acres of Dunbar seashore for a John Muir Country Park. The national John Muir Trust has grown to 8,000 paying members and raised some $30 million to purchase wildland in the British Isles. The John Muir birthplace museum has become Dunbar's No. 1 tourist attraction.

From 1981 until 1999, when the building was sold to the John Muir Birthplace Trust -- a local organization -- the museum was operated by Daisy Hawryluk, who with the help of family and friends stocked it with the furniture, utensils and crockery of Muir's time to give it an authentic feel.

The current imbroglio began after the Birthplace Trust, which is composed of the local council, the national John Muir Trust and Dunbar activists, won a lottery grant of nearly $500,000 to renovate and refurbish the museum.  

In April, it approved a design that would gut the entire interior of the building and construct a wooden tower within the walls, from which visitors peering through apertures could view virtual reality scenes from Muir's era and interactive videos as well as period artifacts and photographs.

Environmental writer Graham White of Dunbar, founder of the Edinburgh Environment Center and a member of the national John Muir Trust, took one look at the plan, hollered foul and immediately began a campaign to reverse the decision.

The Birthplace Trust acted in virtual secrecy and didn't give Dunbar residents and other Scots who revere Muir a chance to comment, White said. Bill Hanna, who has been named a patron of the Birthplace Trust, said that the announcement of the plan to gut the building took him by surprise.

Daisy Hawryluk, in a letter to the local Dunbar newspaper, wrote that in selling the building, "we never, in our worst nightmares, thought they would go for a scheme that involved destroying Muir's actual birthplace -- but the house is to (be) gutted like a haddock. . . . It will never again be a house or John Muir's birthplace."

In large part because of the storm of protest White's campaign has raised, the East Lothian Council extended the comment period on the plan from July 5 to Aug. 27.

White's campaign has drawn an outpouring of letters from Californians.

From Tehachapi (Kern County), Joe Fontaine, past president of the Sierra Club, called the plans for Muir's birthplace "inconsistent with the respect citizens of the U.K. traditionally show for their architectural and historic heritage."

In response to the criticism, East Lothian Council official Margaret O'Connor told The Scotsman that "what's in the museum now is all mock heritage, as we just don't know how the building was when John Muir lived there."

Besides, she said, "on top of that, the whole building's interior was completely renovated in 1970 -- there's not one plank of wood that dates back to the 18th century."

And Jim Thompson, president of Dunbar's John Muir Association, said that "the internal structure has no historic or other merit." In fact, he said in a letter to the Scotsman, "when Muir returned to Dunbar in 1893, he sought out not the place of his birth, but the house next door, where he spent nine years before emigrating to America."

Graham White said that O'Connor "is absolutely wrong, and she's going to rue the day she said that." White said that while the ground and middle floors were ripped out, the third floor was treated "like it was a jewel," with the beams, walls and partitions carefully restored.

White is convinced that had he not sounded the alarm "they'd have gutted the building and had it done by Aug. 1. Now I think we've got them beaten."

E-mail Eric Brazil at ebrazil@sfchronicle.com.
Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle