Alexandra Vancko (left) and Jason Gray watch and take pictures of Gov. Tim Kaine as he tours the historic home Menokin. SUZANNE CARR ROSSI/THE FREE LANCE-STAR View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Menokin is protected

Easement will help preserve Francis Lightfoot Lee home site, provide $160,000 windfall to Menokin Foundation

Date published: 11/19/2008

BY FRANK DELANO

Gov. Tim Kaine lauded a new conservation easement yesterday that completes the legal protection of the 500 acres surrounding Menokin, the ruins near Warsaw of the home of Francis Lightfoot Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

"Menokin is the last home of a Virginia signer to be protected," Kaine said. "Even in its ruined state, it gives you the ability to see what was really going on inside that structure."

Built of brick and stone about 1769, the mansion and its surrounding fields and forests were a wedding present from the parents of Rebecca Tayloe, whom Lee married in 1772.

In the 20th century, the house was abandoned and fell into decay. Fortunately, all of the elaborate interior woodwork was removed for safekeeping before major portions of the structure collapsed into heaps of rubble.

In 1995, the owner of the property gave it to the newly formed Menokin Foundation. Under the leadership of the late Martin K. King, the foundation sought not to rebuild the house, but to protect the ruins and woodwork and use them as a laboratory to study colonial construction methods and ways to preserve historic buildings.

The new easement, which was recorded last week in the Richmond County Circuit Court, protects about 172 acres of the property from subdivision and development. It will also bring a $160,000 windfall for the foundation, the foundation's executive director said.

"It ensures that Menokin's 18th-century garden terraces and important archaeological sites remain intact for generations," said foundation President Helen T. Murphy.

The easement also allows the foundation to expand its campus for conservation studies where "a phenomenal amount of education will occur in the future," Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, director of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, said yesterday.

"Easements will be protected as long as there are courts," Kaine said.

The foundation gave the state an easement on 2 acres surrounding the house in 1997.

Francis Lightfoot Lee (1734-1797) was a signer of both the Westmoreland Resolves and the Declaration of Independence. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, first from Loudoun, and then from Richmond County. He was in Philadelphia in 1776 as a Virginia delegate to the second Continental Congress, returning to Virginia in 1779. He served briefly in the Virginia Senate after that. Find out more about Lee and his home at menokin.org.

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Date published: 11/19/2008