For centuries the local lords and bishops were responsible for its upkeep in exchange for the right to levy tolls on travellers using it to cross the river, although some of its stones were looted and serious damage was inflicted on it in the 17th century.
The one person who is ostensibly at the top of the social hierarchy — Blaise, the landowner and proprietor of a historic house — is actually just scraping by, and has to allow tourists on the grounds and in the house in order to pay for its upkeep.
The First White House is, technically, a publicly-owned museum (last year, its upkeep cost Alabama taxpayers in excess of $100,000).
The trail is under the general administration of the National Park Service (NPS), but the federal Bureau of Land Management and other agencies participate in its operation and upkeep.
The governor and his family don't live at the mansion, but the first couple is invested in its restoration and upkeep.
It would pay about $300,000 of what is expected to be more than $4 million in upkeep costs in its first year of operation, said another archive official, Sharon Fawcett, deputy assistant archivist for presidential libraries.
"We are also not paid, the community chips in with some upkeep money but we are volunteering for the most part".
These are businesses where fine art is warehoused, where antiques are restored, where jewelry and leather garments are made — where the prosperous life, so much and so misleadingly in evidence in modern New York, receives its methodical upkeep.
