GOVERNOR AND FIRST LADY TO ATTEND HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONFERENCE

~Correction: First Lady's name is Lori Holden.

STE. GENEVIEVE, Mo. -- Missouri's governor and first lady will attend when the Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation holds its annual conference in Ste. Genevieve for the first time in decades.

The Missouri Preservation Conference that begins Friday and continues through Sunday will announce the group's annual 10 Most Endangered Properties list. The list of threatened historic buildings will be made public Sunday morning during the general session.

The conference will be held at various historic sites around Ste. Genevieve, the first settlement west of the Mississippi River in the Upper Louisiana Territory. First lady Laura Holden and Gov. Bob Holden will attend a reception Saturday on the grounds of the nearly 200-year-old Old Louisiana Academy. That night they are invited to a performance of the musical "Yankee Doodle Dandy" by a gifted class from the Ste. Genevieve schools.

The conference is expected to attract up to 175 people from around the state and beyond. Missouri Preservation works with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the State Historic Preservation Program to support local preservation activities. Attendees will include people who run major museums, average citizens interested in preservation and people who own historic houses elsewhere in the state and want to see what is being done in Ste. Genevieve.

Ste. Genevieve is a problematic location for the conference because of the limited number of places to stay, says Tim Conley, a member of the Historic Preservation board.

For information about attending the conference, call (573) 445-4504.

Dating by tree rings

One of the speakers will be Dr. Richard Guyette, one of the world's foremost dendrochronologists. Dendrochronologists date buildings by analyzing the tree rings of the wood in the building. Because each ring is as distinctive as a fingerprint, scientists can compare the rings to those in trees whose age is known.

Guyette, a professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia, says the technique can prove or disprove a historic claim. "A lot of places have been verified. And there have been some dramatic disappointments."

Another speaker, Daryl Cimaglia, is a horticulturist at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. Speaker Marsha Mullin is the chief curator at The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson's home in Nashville, Tenn. Speaker F. Terry Norris is the district archaeologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Other speakers will discuss tax credits available for historic preservation.

Local speakers

A number of Ste. Genevieve-based preservationists also are scheduled to give talks, including Jim Baker, site administrator at the Felix Valle House State Historic Site, metalsmith Stan Winkler and Mike Ward, chief of maintenance at the Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. Ward's company currently is rehabilitating the Greentree Tavern in Ste. Genevieve.

Tim Conley, who owns and restored the Old Louisiana Academy, says those who attend the conference will have an opportunity to see a number of restored historic houses that usually are not open to the public, including his own. It was the first school established by the United States outside the original 13 colonies.

The academy was built in 1808 for the purpose of teaching children in the Upper Louisiana Territory to speak English. "No one spoke English," Conley says. "They thought it would be better equipped to become part of the United States."

The school fell apart from lack of funding but was reopened by King Louis XVIII and operated by the Christian Brothers. The building eventually was purchased by the Rozier family, who owned about one-tenth of Ste. Genevieve at the Civil War. Gen. Rozier's descendants kept the building until 1934, when the school district took it over.

Conley bought the building in 1994 and has spent hundreds of thousand of dollars restoring it.

The group also will present an award to U.S Rep. Richard Gephardt for spearheading the move to build the levee in Ste. Genevieve after the 1993 flood. The project is the first federal levee ever constructed for the purpose of historic preservation -- to save not people but the city's French heritage.