Tim Slavin is the executive director of the Fort DuPont Redevelopment and Preservation Corp.
Every May, National Preservation Month reminds us that historical places are not saved by accident. Places are saved because people decide they matter.
Downstate Delaware understands this well. At Cape Henlopen, the preservation and interpretation of Fort Miles shows what can happen when a former military site is treated not as a relic but as a public place with stories worth telling. Visitors may come for the beach, trails and views, but they also encounter a reminder that Delaware’s coast defended a nation.
Fort DuPont tells another part of that same Delaware story.
This year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation asks us to think about places that bring our nation’s most powerful promise to life: that all people are created equal. At Fort DuPont, that promise is not abstract.
For more than a century, this campus has served Delaware. Soldiers trained here. Patients were cared for here. Families lived here. State employees worked here. Generations of Delawareans walked these grounds and looked over the Delaware River and Branch Canal.
In Delaware City, people know Fort DuPont not as a planning document but as a place they have driven past, worked in, walked through, wondered about or hoped to see restored.
History is rarely simple. That is why places like Fort Miles and Fort DuPont matter. They help us remember honestly, preserve carefully and build something better with what we inherited.
Preservation is sometimes mistaken for sentimentality. It is not. Done well, preservation is public work. It makes sure important places do not disappear, their stories are not flattened and their future use serves more than a few.
That is the work underway at Fort DuPont.
We are preserving historical buildings not so they can sit empty but so they can be useful again. We are planning for a campus where the chapel can welcome people, where the theater can again support arts and culture, where the parade ground remains shared and where trails and open spaces reconnect people to the water and Delaware City.
A recent grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to the Fort DuPont Redevelopment and Preservation Corp. for accessibility planning at the chapel says something essential: If a historical building is going to serve the public, the public must be able to use it. Accessibility is not separate from preservation. It is part of preservation’s purpose.
This is what preservation asks of us.
Fort DuPont’s history is not finished. Its next chapter is being written through restoration, planning, investment and community care.
We know this place matters. We know it belongs to Delaware. If we do this work well, Fort DuPont will not simply be preserved. It will belong to people again.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
