Have You Seen This Urn?

Image courtesy of the Old Naval Hospital Foundation

Your typical good Samaritan may pick up an abandoned purse or wallet tossed after a mugging or even a child’s sippy cup or toy that’s been catapulted from a stroller, in hope of returning them, but it really takes an upstanding citizen to haul home a hundred pound urn and locate its proper owner years later. The volunteers in charge of restoring the Old Naval Hospital and transforming it into the historically-accurate Hill Center are hoping angels like that really do exist, and that urns will start coming out of the woodwork at any moment.

During the years the building sat mostly empty, and the grounds and the property looked like something out of a Edgar Allen Poe novel, pieces of the iron fence went missing. A number of the finials and flourishes that fell off were collected by concerned neighbors and have been recently returned to the Old Naval Hospital Foundation. It’s hoped the same sense of civic pride and concern motivated whomever made off with the large urns that graced the top of the fence posts. The decorative cast-iron pieces were several feet high and a foot and half wide, not the kind of thing one makes off with lightly, right? It’s time for those urns to come home, so should you have one in your garden or garage, save your back and contact the Foundation – they’ll be happy to pick them up.

If they’re not able to locate any of the original urns soon, the foundry in Baltimore that’s reconstructing the fence will use historic photographs as a model for the replacement pieces. Wouldn’t it be grand if they could recast from one of the original pieces?

Speaking of the fence, did you know that you could “own” a piece of it? Well, with your donation of $5,000 for a section of the monumental structure, or $2,000 for a post, not only will you help underwrite the preservation of the iconic property, but you or our organization’s name will be permanently recorded on name plates built into fence.  A number of the segments have been sold already, and Hill Center President Nicky Cymrot is encouraged by the outpouring of support for the project shown thus far. She said to date $9 million for construction funds have been raised for the $12 million dollar project. The $3.2 million capital campaign will ensure center and its variety of programs are not only up an running next year, but sustainable for many years into the future. Donors have the opportunity to put their stamp on rooms to be dedicated as meeting and event spaces as well as to classrooms for a host of activities from jewelry making to cooking demos to basic and advanced computer training.

Read more later this week about the status of construction, programming and space use planning and the search for the executive director at the Hill Center.