The setting for the nascent American Revolution faces a struggle to turn back the clock. But all around it, time marches on.

BY RICHARD HIGGINS

The 150 or so tall maple and pine trees weren't present when the first, bloody battle for a fledgling nation was fought here. This land was farmed for 300 years before becoming the nucleus of Minute Man National Historical Park. During the past century, however, the trees sprouted and grew, undermining the accuracy of the landscape as a historic site and blocking tourists' views of the fields where American and British soldiers skirmished. So a year ago, as part of an ongoing effort to restore the park and better tell its story, trees were cut down on 50 of the park's 971 acres, 20 miles northwest of Boston in the towns of Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington.

The trees may have interfered with mental images of colonists pressing a retreating column of redcoats, but some residents of the area had come to appreciate the woods as a bit of nature in their densely populated suburbs. Without the trees, "the park looks denuded," says Eric Davies, a Concord resident whose daily routine takes him past the park. "It was a lot prettier and more tranquil the way it was before."

Davies and other critics of the restoration are a minority, park officials say, but their objections underscore the complexity and crosscurrents that bedevil almost any effort at historic preservation. The entanglement is especially strong at Minute Man, which is trying to evoke the landscape of centuries ago while life in the 21st goes on all around it. Power lines, traffic lights, an interstate highway, and an alarmingly expanding airport all declare contemporary life. Yet park interpreters continue to deal with changes that accreted on the landscape for generations. The goal of preservation may seem straightforward, but as critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1997, "There is nothing tidy about it." At Minute Man the embroilment has become so confusing that the National Trust put the park on its list of 11 Most Endangered Historic Places last year.

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