Fire at the Whittaker Chambers Farm

John J. Miller at National Review is reporting that the Medfield Farmhouse at Pipe Creek Farm in Carroll County has suffered a bad fire.

Conservatives across the country know Medfield as the famous farmhouse where Whittaker Chambers wrote his autobiography Witness and Pipe Creek as home to the pumpkin patch where Chambers hid his cache of stolen documents given to him by Soviet Spy Alger Hiss.

Ronald Reagan designated the farm a national landmark. You can read more about the history in my Examiner piece on Maryland’s Prominent Place in the History of Espionage

Mauricio Tamargo, who heads the non-profit Freedom and Historic Preservation Foundation, which is dedicated to the preservation of the farm, tells us that we don’t know the full extent of the damage, but that it appears significant. Chambers’ son John has been working with the foundation to preserve the farm.

Click on the link to send a donation to help the foundation preserve and restore this singular historical landmark in the history of the conservative movement.

As Miller notes in his NR post, Arthur Koestler, another witness the to evil of communism, wrote when Chambers died “the witness is gone, the testimony will stand.”