All that Preservation Creates: President and CEO Carol Quillen Reflects on One Year at the National Trust
A little over a year ago the National Trust for Historic Preservation welcomed its 10th President and CEO Carol Quillen. A historian, Quillen came to the National Trust after eleven years as the president of Davidson College. In addition to bringing that unique perspective to preservation, Quillen also traveled around the United States listening to preservationists, learning about how they do their work and what they see as the future needs of the field.
The resulting philosophy and vision for the organization and preservation as a field, is framed around a central ethos, that “preservation creates,” and an appreciation of preservation’s essential role in activating the power of historic places to serve the public good and enable a shared future.
photo by: Kelly Paras
Carol Quillen at the State Department as part of the 2024 announcement of the National Trust's list of America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
What is one highlight of your first year at the National Trust?
Over the last year I’ve had the opportunity to meet a wide range of individuals who all care about preservation, and I’ve learned that it is a field that people enter for different reasons.
Whether that entry point was from a passion for sustainability and economic vitality, or because they care about iconic architecture, or the belief that our commemorative and cultural landscape should reflect the history and the achievements of all Americans—I am grateful for all who took the time to speak with me.
These conversations pushed me to consider what holds all those different rationales together within this big idea of “preservation.”
The phrase I kept hearing over and over, and over again, was the power of place. That is, people working in the preservation field believe strongly that places hold power and that the stories that they hold are important.
photo by: Georgetown Main Street
Georgetown, Texas, a member of Main Street America.
How does “the Power of Place” encapsulate your thinking about the present and future of preservation?
When I arrived at the organization, I learned about not only the National Trust itself, but also the family of companies—Main Street America (MSA), the National Trust Community Investment Corporation (NTCIC), our hopes for what has become RePurpose Capital, our historic sites— and partners that fall within that umbrella. I asked myself, what is it that holds all of us together, and makes us one organization?
The answer was that in collaboration with the public, we activate the power of place to improve people's lives.
But here’s the next question I had to ask: if we're about the power of place, what's important about that?
Preservation has a reputation as the movement that says “no,” the movement that keeps things the same, the movement that asks people to maintain.
It’s an undeserved reputation, and so instead of just talking about the power of place, it is important to show all the ways that preservation creates.
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Can you give me some examples of what you mean by the phrase “preservation creates?”
I strongly believe in the importance of having a connection to the past. One of the things that preservation creates is an opportunity for each of us to develop a [grounding] along with an honest assessment of our own past, and then a capacity to imagine a shared future because we understand where we came from. Making that connection to the past is enabled by the places where history happened. What we save and activate should reflect the history and the achievements of all Americans, and so that part of the National Trust work is important.
To get into specifics, you walk into a Frank Lloyd Wright house and feel a sense of awe and curiosity – preservation creates that. Or think about how Main Street programs across the country create re-energized communities as they repurpose older buildings or direct capital to where it doesn't normally go. Not to mention the many ways in which preservation creates a more resilient environment as we advocate for adaptive use as a feature of sustainable practice.
In collaboration with the public, we activate the power of place to improve people's lives.
What is energizing you now about the work of the National Trust?
As a nonprofit organization, we exist to provide a public benefit. I believe the National Trust has the capacity to really serve the public in compelling and effective ways, focusing on how we can make a difference now, given where we are as a country, and the challenges and opportunities that we face.
More specifically, there are three things energizing me about the work of the organization: Sparking a new kind of civic engagement and dialogue across the country at places where our history happened, using preservation tools to repurpose and rehabilitate older buildings in smaller, rural, and underserved communities, and finally, making preservation approaches and tools more widely available so that more people can access them to address our shared challenges and goals.
When you say civic engagement what do you mean?
Historic sites across the country attract a diverse group of people: they have different beliefs, different convictions, different politics, they come from different areas, they have different occupations, and they're all primed to learn.
We have this huge opportunity at historic sites across the country, to engage people in conversations that we're unwilling to have anywhere else. We can do this in such a way that invites everybody in and that grounds our discussion in the shared experience of a meaningful place.
At a time when the American people are divided, where the debates we have are predictable and go nowhere, how do we revitalize our public sphere? How do we move from debate to true democratic deliberation, so that together we can imagine a shared future. Historic sites can create a context where we can make this collective shift.
photo by: National Trust for Historic Preservation
Carol Quillen with Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH) during the 2025 Preservation Advocacy Week. Rep. Turner is the co-chair of the Historic Preservation Caucus.
Take the Tenement Museum, an affiliate National Trust Historic Site in New York City, which is a museum that talks about the immigrant experience over generations through a very specific (set of) apartments in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. You can imagine how standing in that neighborhood, walking through those apartments, hearing about the lives of the people that lived there, you would have a very different conversation about issues relating to immigration and what it means to be an American than what you would have in a different place or setting.
I'm excited by that possibility that our historic sites and historic sites across the country, in communities large and small, are places where we can foster and spark conversations in a different register than the ones that we're familiar with now.
Our democratic republic gains a lot from what I'll just call democratic deliberation—very different from a debate where two people are taking positions and you decide who wins—which is people coming together to talk about hard questions, enabled by standing in a place where something relevant to that issue happened. New ideas might emerge from those conversations, so that everyone can recognize possibilities that no one saw before.
photo by: The Tenement Museum
Exterior of the Tenement Museum in New York City.
What are the ways in which we are tackling the investment piece of the puzzle?
I’m excited about the idea that we can drive investment dollars and impact investing to places where it doesn't normally go. My colleague David Clower, president and CEO at NTCIC likes to say that capital is lazy. Through our work at NTCIC and with our new partner RePurpose Capital, we have a way of attracting investment to communities and projects that have a really hard time receiving the capital needed to do good work.
For example, if you have an older vacant building in a small downtown where to repurpose that building would cost less than $5 million, it's hard to get a big lender interested in supporting that project. But we can do that now with RePurpose Capital, which will work with the communities to see these projects through.
Instead of just talking about the power of place, it is important to show all the ways that preservation creates.
How do you hope to attract a broader range of people to preservation?
Preservation tools have broad applicability. They are helpful in a lot of situations, and if people continue to hear the word no whenever we say preservation, we aren’t going to be able to demonstrate that applicability.
It’s exactly this shifting of the public perception of preservation to all the ways in which preservation creates—experiences of joy and awe and curiosity, economic vitality and a sense of belonging, or a healthier, more sustainable planet—emphasizing the power of place and possibility in the work of preservation and the National Trust.
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