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Nov 21, 2024 Editor, The News-Gazette: VMI’s proposal to obliterate two historic houses on Letcher Avenue and erect a gargantuan administration structure is an abdication of VMI’s responsibility to the wider community of Lexington.
I once had a family connection with the house at 306 Letcher Ave. but my protest is not personal sentiment. The 1880 Archer house, renamed Cabell, has many social connections with Lexington; a superintendent once owned it. The Archer family donated it to VMI in 1974. My father, Fred Hadsel, when Marshall Foundation director, and with my mother, Winifred Hadsel, worked with VMI to oversee its refurbishment. Hundreds of people from Lexington and afar were welcomed and made future connections there. Houses foster the living and when we know that people before us lived in a house and envisage future lives there, the world is richer for knowing the history.
Objectors (News-Gazette, Nov. 13, 2024) explained the significance of the Archer house in the Letcher Hyphen. At the end of the article, VMI’s response was, “While the disappearance of familiar buildings can be bittersweet, it has frequently happened on post.”
VMI has funds (also supported by tax dollars) and hired staff to blitz this 140-year-old piece of lived-in fabric of Lexington to make way for a massively intrusive building, “a top-flight facility for a variety of events,” which disrespects what it would replace. VMI calls this a “transition.” To what? What would this be like in 140 years?
VMI should do better and consider what it leaves behind in this proposed wake of destruction. If they will not rethink the scale, why not move the house/houses in an intelligent way to a Lexington residential location, and thereby enable that the house(s) may become again a home? JANE HADSEL London, U.K.
