This week, a group of people who own many of Columbus’ antebellum homes, have announced their intentions to take over operations of the 79-year-old Pilgrimage, which is currently the domain of the Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation and primarily funded by the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The homeowners have formed a new group — Preservation Society of Columbus — with the goal of restoring operations of the Pilgrimage to themselves, which was how the Pilgrimage operated in its early days.
The group believes it can be more successful in not only staging Pilgrimage but raising funds to extend preservation efforts far beyond its current scope.
“Pilgrimage can’t just be about a few rich white people and their homes,” is how one group member put it.
Indeed, the survival of the Pilgrimage may rely heavily on telling a fuller, more inclusive story of the history of Columbus.
The homeowners are requesting the money provided to the CCHF from the CVB for Pilgrimage each year will go to their group. Based on estimates by the group, about one-third of the money provided to the CCHF goes toward administrative costs, largely salaries.
Preservation Society of Columbus believes those administrative costs can be reduced and used instead to expand preservation beyond antebellum homes.
“We want to preserve all cultures, not just what you might call antebellum culture,” said the group’s president, Dick Leike, who owns two historic Columbus homes.
The group’s plans call for an ambitious approach to the Pilgrimage, which it believes can help raise money for preservation of many historic places in the community which have never quite fit into the old idea of what should be preserved and protected. That includes efforts to preserve the remaining history of our city’s black community, which has largely been ignored.
We applaud the group’s mission and encourage the CVB and CCHF to open a dialogue with the homeowners group. The new preservation group says the decision by antebellum homeowners to take over Pilgrimage operations was unanimous. This need not be a fight between the homeowners and the CCHF over the control of the Pilgrimage, but rather, a partnership.
As a practical matter, there can be a Pilgrimage without the CCHF, but there can be no Pilgrimage without the homeowners. It makes sense that the homeowners have operational control of this event if they want it. They are the ones with skin in the game.
In getting back to the roots of how the Pilgrimage began, the homeowners are also presenting a vision of preserving not just a portion of our city’s rich history, but all of it.
We strongly support this holistic approach to preservation.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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