They’d spent four days talking about community visioning, the influence of public land on the economy, sustainable tourism, building civic engagement. They’d spent four days learning about conservation and community character, identifying local cultural assets and designing implementation strategies for their individual county’s heritage plans.

But after those four days — and countless more hours spent since the Blue Ridge Mountains first received its designation as a national heritage area in November 2003 — conference participants had come up with a list of 19 ways to improve how things were going.

Marketing should reflect the grassroots conservation efforts, they said. A grant writer should be provided. Guidelines should be developed about how to and who could use heritage area logos.

Beyond that it was simple — clarify, communicate and publicize.

The requests get at the heart of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, a 25-county area spanning Western North Carolina from Cherokee to Surry counties and anointed by U.S. Congress as a place where “natural, cultural, historic and recreational resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography.”

The area is one of 27 of its kind across the country. It’s a designation we — as in AdvantageWest, Handmade in America and the National Heritage Area Commission — asked Congress for — as in Rep. Charles Taylor, R-Brevard — in June 2002. With the designation came a promise of money, up to $1 million per year for 10 years, to put toward conserving natural and cultural landscapes.

According to the timeline included in the feasibility report issued to Congress, the creation of the area is operating about two years behind schedule. While the designation is in place, and inventories have been made of the resources and assets in each of the 25 counties, there is little tangible to show.

“I think most people don’t know that this exists,” said Penn Dameron, BRNHA’s newly hired executive director.

But that’s about to change, organizers say.

By the end of the month, the new BRNHA logo should be unveiled. By August, a Web site that will serve as a central clearinghouse of travel information and attractions throughout WNC will be launched. Within a year, phase I of an interpretive signage project should be complete.

Yet the question remains — what does it all mean?

How to recognize a national heritage area

The concept of a national heritage area is intrinsically vague. It is a designation that can apply to any part of the country and does not fall under a uniform management plan.

“I’ve been trying to work up a good explanation, but it’s hard,” Dameron said.

In short, heritage areas are considered to be special and worth preserving. It’s a certificate of honor, a blue ribbon, a gold star on our foreheads. Heritage areas represent slices of America and the people who settled and developed it. For example, think California and you might get gold miners; think Maine and you might get lobster trappers.

No two heritage areas are alike, either in composition or implementation.

In Michigan, the MotorCities National Heritage Area celebrates pioneer auto manufacturers and the industry that has shaped Detroit, Lansing and Flint.

In Alabama, the Mississippi Gulf National Heritage Area mixes marine management with the history of the Native American, Spanish, French and English settlers that made their home in this the first capital of the Louisiana Territory.

However, certain rules do pertain. In order for an area to earn designation, a management entity must be named. In the BRNHA’s case, that entity is the economic development agency AdvantageWest. The entity’s responsibility is as a coordinator and facilitator of voluntary actions. Note the word voluntary — no party is mandated to participate in a heritage area.

The land in heritage areas remains in private hands — i.e. a county owned museum or locally owned farm — though existing park lands often are incorporated into heritage plans and are, of course, public.

Although no legislative criteria exist, there are 10 guidelines for determining whether an area contains the resources that make the region worthy of national recognition, ranging from a reflection of customs and a way of life important to the national story, to existence of a conceptual financial plan to support the area.

Where are we in the process?

The backbone of the BRHNA is a county-by-county inventory of resources, ongoing projects, planned projects and windows of opportunity.

“It puts those projects in a heritage area context so they’re on kind of an elevated level,” said Nell Leatherwood, director of strategic initiatives for Western Carolina University’s Center for Regional Development’s Local Government Training Program, who is contracted to help develop local heritage area plans.

Drawing largely from guidebooks created by Handmade in America, a networking and development group for the mountain’s arts community, as well as the Blue Ridge Music Trails and Cherokee Heritage Trails guidebooks, counties documented sites such as the Cataloochee Valley, Scottish Tartans Museum, Oconaluftee Village and Mountain Heritage Museum.

“All we really have to do is build on these books,” Dameron said.

The 25 county plans should be finished by the end of June, opening the door for BRHNA coordinators to begin work on regional plans, projected for completion in August, and a 10-year management plan for the area, to be completed in September.

“We’re two-thirds of the way,” Dameron said.

In addition, BRHNA has contracted with Western Carolina University and Appalachian State University to conduct a comprehensive tourism survey about where tourists are coming from, how long they stay, where, why and more. The survey will be placed on BRHNA’s Web site, www.blueridgeheritage.com, with extra features for heritage area members. A special pull out map of the heritage area will be a part of the 2006 State Transportation Map and approximately 80 sites — a quarter of which are in Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties — have been selected to receive interpretive signage.

You are here

The National Park Service — the federal arm of national heritage area designation, and an agency chosen for its role in preserving nationally significant natural and historic resources — says the benefits of establishing a national heritage area are intangible.

“Heritage conservation efforts are grounded in a community’s pride in its history and traditions, and in residents’ interest and involvement in retaining and interpreting the landscape for future generations,” states the NPS’s heritage area Web site.

If it sounds somewhat warm and fuzzy, it certainly can be. But the crux of the matter is conservation — conservation through land-use planning.

A movement to preserve historical, natural and cultural features is based largely on sitting down and deciding what’s important, what’s worth fighting to keep. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a matter of either/or, but of how to find a way for progress and history to coincide.

The most popular activities for heritage tourists are visiting historic sites or community buildings, visiting a museum, an art gallery or seeing live theater — all things that help give a community a distinctive sense of place.

Tourists don’t come to an area to go to T-shirt shops and putt-putt courses, that’s just stuff they happen to do while they’re here, said Ed McMahon, a senior resident fellow for sustainable development at the Urban Land Institute, during the recent four-day BRNHA conference. They come to feel like they’re somewhere else.

“You want to see a place,” McMahon said. “What brought them here in the first place is the authenticity of the place.”

The national heritage area designation consequently brings with it many of the same concepts as smart growth — multi-use neighborhoods, fewer signs, context-sensitive architecture.

Going through a series of slides, McMahon showed Anytown, U.S.A., highways flooded with billboard signs bearing routine company logos, each struggling to be seen.

“What does it say about us as a country when fast food and gas station signs are higher than the church steeples,” McMahon said.

The smallest sign in the photo? The one that said “Welcome to ...” Without it, the town was undistinguishable.

Or McMahon pointed to the case of Gettysburg, Penn., where the historic battlefields have been preserved but the cannons now point across the road to a Kentucky Fried Chicken in all its red and white striped glory.

“It’s one thing to save a historic building, it’s another thing to save the setting in which you find that building,” McMahon said.

In Mount Vernon, Va. — the home of George Washington’s private estate — preservationists not only saved the house and gardens, but through a conservation easement Washington’s unspoiled view across the Potomac River. The easement was a definitive move to force impending development to comply with the desires of the surrounding community.

“You have to ask, is the character of your community shaping the development, or is the development shaping the character of your community,” McMahon said.

If a tree falls ...

Designation of a national heritage area does not unequivocally relate to increased tourist visits and more dollars, and the NPS makes no claims as to such.

In general, heritage tourists tend to stay longer and spend more than regular travelers — an average of $623 per trip, excluding the cost of transportation, versus $457 for other U.S. travelers, according to a 2003 report by the Travel Industry Association of America. But the problem is getting them there in the first place.

In heritage area circles, Iowa’s Silos and Smokestacks Heritage Trail is known as one of the best. The 37-county area — one of the largest national heritage areas next to Tennessee, which managed to achieve designation for the entire state — was established in 1996 and covers more than 20,000 square miles.

But for those functioning within the heritage designation, the hard cash benefits have been slow to come, if at all.

“I have not seen any difference at all,” said Peggy Whitworth, executive director of Brucemore, a 21-room Queen-Anne style mansion. “(the designation) certainly has not turned around tourism in the Heartland.”

Brucemore is Iowa’s only National Trust Historic site. With its well-established reputation, the mansion didn’t need a heritage designation to attract visitors. If anything, Brucemore agreeing to be a heritage site lent more legitimacy to the heritage area than the heritage area did to Brucemore.

“The more professional and successful a particular entity is, the more others are going to turn to you for assistance,” Whitworth said. “But how much time do you have to work on other things, instead of your own?”

Other things like the Andrew-Jackson Demonstration Farm.

The farm, also known as the County Poor Farm and located on 360 acres that house the historic limestone insane asylum, just became a Silos and Smokestacks partner — the minimum buy-in for a historic site.

“At this point we haven’t had a lot of visitors,” said Michelle Turner, farm coordinator. “We have no verbage, we have no signs.”

With each heritage area designation comes a promise of up to $1 million in federal monies per year for 10 years. The funds cannot be used to buy land, cannot be used to issue debt and cannot be used as handouts. Grants made must be made to state and local governments, federally recognized Indian tribes, institutions of higher learning or 501c3s, and require that the grant recipient secure matching funds from another source.

So far the BRHNA has received about $2.2 million since earning its designation in 2003, all but $334,000 of which has been obligated via grants, contracts, or administrative costs. Those remaining funds are what’s available in this year’s grant cycle.

In South Carolina, a 14 county Heritage Corridor that stretches from the mountains to the sea, corridor administrators are capitalizing on individual sites’ strengths to draw visitors and developing niche marketing rather than relying on trails to move visitors through the corridor.

“It’s very hard to market the entire corridor,” said Devon Harris, the South Carolina corridor’s grants and marketing manager. “People aren’t going to get the whole corridor idea.”

Now, niche marketing has opened up agri-venture farm tours, spanning from dairy farms to berry farms with a few wineries in between.

The farmers involved have formed their own group called the Heritage Corridor Farmers Association, which has developed membership criteria, collects dues and goes after grants on its own. The farms have started cross-marketing each other’s products — like Lowcountry cheese at an Upstate winery — and as a result, more are getting noticed.

“It’s not seen as competition,” Harris said.

Looking ahead

The hope that lies within the creation of the BRHNA is that with it will come a unification of what has been a region that celebrates its uniqueness almost to a fault.

“By recognizing that we all have some common interests it may encourage this region to speak with a unified voice,” Dameron said. “We’ve been more competitors than we have partners.”

While heritage area officials are not allowed to take a lobbyist stance, the increased communication between counties may facilitate more work though state and federal representatives to address mountain-wide quality of life issues — pollution, land values, development.

As work progresses, the next major step is Congress’ approval of the BRHNA’s management plan, and then maintaining the momentum through implementation. Such was the problem Iowa’s Silos and Smokestacks Trail.

“Much of what this heritage corridor here has had is fits and starts,” said Peggy Whitworth, executive director of Brucemore. “Initially the guy in charge was good at taking credit for what other people did. I’m not really involved these days.”

And along South Carolina’s Heritage Corridor, where grant requests are at a record high, the corridor is still only halfway done with their interpretive signage project — eight signs per county, 14 counties, 112 signs.

Dameron, however, is undaunted.

“I think we’re going to have the best heritage area in the country, I really do,” he said.