World Monuments Fund Names 10 U.S. Historic Sites as Preservation Priorities
As the United States moves toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, World Monuments Fund has identified 10 historic sites across the country that it says are central to understanding the nation’s past. The list brings together colonial-era architecture, public health landmarks, early mission churches, and modernist civic buildings, all of them vulnerable to deterioration or development pressure without sustained care.
Among the most closely watched selections is Black Mountain College’s Studies Building in North Carolina. The former school remains one of the most influential laboratories in 20th-century American art, with alumni including Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, and Ruth Asawa. Its faculty and visitors also reflected the school’s unusually interdisciplinary spirit: Walter Gropius served on the advisory board, Josef and Anni Albers helped shape its curriculum, and John Cage and Merce Cunningham were among the artists-in-residence. Cunningham staged one of the earliest “Happenings” there in 1952, just five years before the college closed because of financial strain.
Today, the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center in Asheville preserves the school’s archives and continues its legacy through exhibitions, performances, and educational programs.
The other sites on WMF’s list point to different strains on the American built environment. The African Meeting House in Boston, described by the organization as the oldest surviving Black church building in the United States, stands as a landmark of abolitionist history. In Newport, Rhode Island, a concentration of colonial-era homes faces the growing threat of rising sea levels. In Dallas, City Hall — designed by I. M. Pei — is under pressure from private development and what WMF called inflated rehabilitation estimates.
The organization also gave special recognition to the 430 sites that make up the National Park System. In a statement, Bénédicte de Montlaur, WMF’s president and CEO, framed preservation as a record of the country’s layered identity, shaped by Indigenous nations, settlers, immigrant communities, and cultural exchange. The list suggests that, in the years leading up to the semiquincentennial, the question is not only what America remembers, but what it chooses to maintain.
