What did McIntire really want?

No land in Charlottesville has received more attention or been the subject of as many public arguments in recent times than a swath of green bearing the name of the city’s largest benefactor.

With a YMCA and part of the 2-mile Meadowcreek Parkway set to take over undeveloped parkland, and bulldozers inching ever closer, the arguments to preserve McIntire Park have become more heated and more forceful as the landscape verges on changing drastically.

Signs with “Save McIntire Park” dot the city’s terrain. A lawsuit has been filed to stop the parkway from rolling through the eastern side’s pristine scenery.

A City Council candidate has based a sizable portion of his campaign on the park’s preservation and council meetings have filled with protesters.

For as much as park activists are concerned with the present, they have also used history to provide weight to their preservation pleas by invoking the memory of Paul Goodloe McIntire, saying the park he made possible was meant to be used “in perpetuity” as just that — a park — and nothing else.

Those who believe that city officials have acted against legal restrictions and McIntire’s wishes have relentlessly quoted the phrase, which came from a land deed, to try to reverse their decisions.

“He DONATED either the land or the money to buy the land which is now McIntire Park,” wrote independent City Council candidate Bob Fenwick on his Web site, www.

savemcintire.com. “And with his donation he specifically stated McIntire Park was left ‘… to the people of Charlottesville, in perpetuity, as a park and a playground.’ It seems perpetuity has come to an end a little sooner than expected.”

Yet a recent investigation of all the deeds documenting McIntire Park’s creation over nearly four decades shows that it is far less clear whether “perpetuity” can be applied to the entire park, if at all.

The words can be found in a deed from 1926 between McIntire’s trustee, W.O. Watson, and the city, for when one of McIntire’s park contributions was made. It states, “Said property shall be held and used in perpetuity by the said City for a public park and play ground for the white people of the City of Charlottesville but the authorities of the said City shall at all times have the right and power to control, regulate and restrict the use of said property.”

It is unclear whether McIntire requested such wording be included.

“We have quoted it extensively,” Fenwick, a member of the Coalition to Save McIntire Park, said in an interview. “We felt comfortable using it until challenged. And it never has been challenged.”

Mayor Dave Norris and Piedmont Family YMCA Board Chairman Kurt Krueger said taking a statement from one deed where McIntire is mentioned and applying it to the entire park is misleading and unfair.

“He had nothing to do with the land where the Y will be located,” Norris said of McIntire.

“It’s unfair for anybody to say, well, Paul McIntire would have wanted this, or Paul McIntire would have wanted that,” Norris said. “It’s a little presumptuous for any of us to speak for Paul McIntire.”

Yet there are no indications that the protests will abate — two softball benefit tournaments, whose proceeds will go toward park preservation efforts, were held Saturday, and residents have been invited to stand hand-in-hand in one week in the path of the parkway to protest it.

Restrictions are scant

McIntire’s contributions to the city to create a park, while ample, were only the first of many to be made, with each subsequent land transfer adding a few or dozens more acres.

McIntire, and the “perpetuity” phrase that activists have used as a historical basis for why the park should be left alone, is only explicitly brought up in one deed from Jan. 18, 1926, which says property was purchased through his beneficence to be presented to the city.

Seven other property owners’ land created the entire park, but restrictions on land use are scant. Only one other, the deed that documents the transfer of 2.3 acres by J.E. Shepherd in 1931, says the city “will use the property herein conveyed as a part of its Recreational Development and Park Scheme and for no other purpose.”

Regardless of what McIntire intended, there is very little record of his wishes even with the land transfers in which he was involved.

City officials in 1926 thanked McIntire for enabling them to obtain a total of 92 acres, the start of McIntire Park, which came from two property owners. McIntire first provided $16,000 for the city government to condemn about 89 acres — which now comprises the park’s eastern side and a small part of the western side — owned by Lena Brice.

He purchased a second, adjacent piece of property from T.E. Powers, and the deed that conveys that land to the city contains the “perpetuity” phrase.

City Attorney Craig Brown said the city has researched for decades how McIntire Park was put together, and it has never questioned what it can do inside the park based on the 1926 deed’s “perpetuity” condition.

“Mr. McIntire was obviously a very generous person,” Brown said. “It almost feels like we’re putting words in his mouth.”

In a resolution dated from Oct. 15, 1925, the City Council authorized condemnation proceedings to seize Brice’s property — where the Meadowcreek Parkway will be built — and have it “be condemned for use by white people as a park and playground.”

“When it was built, it’s not clear that the city needed a public park,” said Daniel Bluestone, a coalition member and a professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia. “He was looking ahead generations to the time that those natural things wouldn’t be as readily available.”

Of keeping the park completely undeveloped, Brown said, “I could not sit here and tell you that that wasn’t Mr. McIntire’s intent.” But, he said, “Things were not done with the same formality” as they are now in terms of government rulings and land restrictions.

What was intended?

City officials have divined that the land with the perpetual park use condition tied to it sits at the U.S. 250 Bypass and Rugby Avenue interchange, which Krueger said does not go against McIntire’s wishes because the road provides access into the park. Krueger said if a city decision “violated public policy, it would not be upheld.”

Land records show that no such “perpetuity” restriction was written for the land where the Piedmont Family YMCA will build its new aquatic and fitness center. According to the deed, 55 acres located west of Rugby Avenue were taken from Theodore Baker for $7,000 on Dec. 26, 1941, through another eminent domain proceeding.

Others have more difficulty pinpointing the exact intentions of the philanthropist. Councilor David Brown said a better question would be to figure out what the city is looking for in an urban park.

“I don’t know one way or the other what was intended,” he said.

Margaret O’Bryant, the librarian at the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, said her impression was that it was fairly easy to outline particular land requests, especially when it was being given as a gift. The same might have not been true for monetary donations because it was not something tangible, she said, but agreements to restrict land use for one particular race were seen regularly in deeds from the early 20th century.

Activists say the lack of documentation of McIntire’s wishes does not change anything. Bluestone said applying the perpetuity clause to only one small piece of the entire park is a very “lawyerly argument” that he does not believe is right.

“He intended that for the whole park,” Bluestone said of McIntire. “I think that any judge that looked at this would clearly say, the restrictions that were placed on the piece of land he gave would be applied to the ones that he paid for.”

Fenwick said he still believes McIntire had something very specific in mind.

The argument has been repeated for decades. A letter written in 1988 by Stephen Campbell, a past treasurer of the North Downtown Residents Association, said a section of the park given by McIntire in 1926 was to “be held and used in perpetuity by the said city for a public park and playground for the … people of the city of Charlottesville.”

“In spite of these restrictions, assaults have continually been made on the park to have it used for purposes other than those intended,” Campbell wrote.

Fenwick agreed that using the perpetuity phrase for just one part of the park just “doesn’t make sense.”

“I think it was obvious and clear from his intent of what he wanted to do with it,” he said.