Preservation Technology Podcast https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. Copyright 2024 NPS - For Personal Use Only NPS RSS Generator en Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. National Park Service no catherine_cooper@nps.gov Catherine Cooper no Jason Church, Preservation, preservation technology, podcast, preservation science, NCPTT, National Park Service, Research, Architecture, Engineering, Archeology, Museum Collections, Historic Landscapes, historic landscape preservation, historic landscape, cemetery, grave marker, headstone cleaning, graves, technical services, Catherine Cooper episodic no https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/5B00419D-01D3-B7FB-778AA8974F2B5D6F.png Preservation Technology Podcast https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm Thu, 28 Mar 2024 21:53:27 -0400 National Monuments and Contested Land ]]> Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/67689E21-0607-041D-1F94A8674044B36E.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-6771D0C2-F2D0-D5A2-9498CE9DD76E201C National Monuments and Contested Land National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with McKenzie Long about National Monuments and why some are more contested than others. 772 no full 150

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-- McKenzie Long: Hi, I'm McKenzie Long. I'm the author of “This Contested Land”, and I'm a writer and graphic designer who lives in Mammoth Lakes, California. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. McKenzie Long: Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. Catherine Cooper: So could you tell me what the impetus was for writing “This Contested Land”? McKenzie Long: I spent quite a bit of time climbing in Indian Creek, which is an area in Utah that became part of Bears Ears National Monument when President Barack Obama designated it. And I was just madly in love with this place. Well, I still am, and I had spent about seven years of climbing there every spring and fall, and it was my favorite place in the world. It felt like my home place. When the monument became designated and there was a lot of uproar about it, some people were angry, other people were really happy. I was like, what does that even mean for this place that I really care about? And I started to look into it out of casual curiosity, and I realized that there isn't really that much written about national monuments, especially modern ones. There's tons of stuff out there about national parks, but I couldn't really find a whole lot about monuments. And so I started looking into them a little bit more. And for me, the topic just got more and more interesting because these places are public land that's part of our national fabric that people aren't very aware of. And I think there's a lot of really interesting stories in all of these places. Catherine Cooper: I completely agree. How did you choose which national monuments to explore both physically, and culturally, and historically? McKenzie Long: One of the very fascinating things about national monuments is that they're so controversial. I feel like national parks are fairly universally beloved, and national monuments, especially ones that have been designated in the last 20 years, almost always cause an argument between certain groups of people. I think that's really interesting because people are so passionate about these places or different uses of the land that they get really fired up about it. I was looking for the most controversial ones to talk about because I thought that those might have some of the most interesting stories. And I don't want to give Trump credit for the inspiration in this book, but in 2017, he issued an executive order to review 27 national monuments that had been designated since 1996 and on. I started looking at that list to see what monuments were included, and a lot of the most controversial ones were included in that list. I ended up writing about a couple others, but those ones were where I got started in finding out which monuments had some more interesting things to say about them. Catherine Cooper: You share parts of conversations with a variety of people and around the various monuments. Could you talk about how you went about making those connections and relationships and the process of working them into each chapter? McKenzie Long: Most of the connections I made were actually through cold calling. I hadn't written a book before, but I was still really interested in talking to people. And so I started looking for people who were either passionate about these places or involved in these places. So sometimes that was people that were advocates for the monuments getting established or people that were really strongly opposed to a monument designation. And I spoke to several biologists that do work in national monuments that I visited, and I spoke to people like ranchers, indigenous people that have ancestral ties to these places as well as current ties that are very important to them. I just would reach out to people and talk to whoever would talk to me. And in terms of weaving them into the chapters, it was really important to me to write this book in a way that expressed a tangible experience of being in these places. I wrote it from my personal point of view so I could talk about what it's like to be there and give people maybe a little tiny sense of what it could be like to be in these deserts or forests. But I didn't really want the book to be about me because I'm not the most important part of the story. So including the voices of the people that I spoke to was important because everyone I spoke to has a really intense connection to the land. And those stories, I think, become the most important part of the book. Catherine Cooper: One thing I noticed in each chapter is you ask a lot of questions of how people relate to the land. What is preservation? What is conservation? How do we handle this? How do we negotiate it? Are there one or two that you're continuing to think about and work with since writing the book? And do you have any new perspectives or stories to share? McKenzie Long: I would say that probably the one that is echoing in my mind the most is the question of how do we as a nation create a new legacy for public land that includes and respects more people. National parks got their start as a pretty exclusionary thing. Indigenous people were pushed out of places so there could be an illusion of uninhabited wilderness in parks. But even though that's how public land got its start, that doesn’t have to be how it continues forward. I think there's already a sea change happening. Bears Ears was a very indigenous-led movement that was promoted and advocated for primarily by indigenous groups. And so if we look for what legacy public land can have in the future, including the interests and priorities of many groups of people is very important. And I think that there's actually quite a few monuments that are being proposed right now that are being advocated for by specific communities, such as Castner Range, which is outside El Paso. [Note: Castner Range was designated as a national monument by President Biden in May 2023.] It's a predominantly Hispanic community, and there's a very community-led movement to get that mountain range designated as a monument. Since a president can designate a monument by proclamation and it doesn't need to legislatively move through Congress, monuments are easy to create. Monuments, I think, can be a really powerful way to include interests of different people. You're asking about new perspectives, I finished writing this book right around the time that Biden took office, and he reinstated the boundaries of a couple monuments that President Trump reduced. I thought that was really interesting, and it was somewhat expected, but it was also exciting. And after that, I expected him to designate more monuments, actually. And he has designated one, which is Camp Hale in Colorado, and he's promised to designate another one, but he hasn't actually done it yet. And that one is Avi Kwa Ame, I think is how you pronounce it, in Nevada. So I hope that he actually does designate that one, and then I'm hoping that he will designate a few more, especially as he reaches the end of his term. There's Castner Range in New Mexico. There's Range of Light in California outside Yosemite National Park, and I think those would be pretty interesting, and especially since Biden has promoted this concept of 30 by 30, where he wants to protect 30% of American land and waters by 2030, monuments could be a really interesting tool and a way for him to push that forward. [Note: as of February 2024 Biden has designated 5 new national monuments.] The Antiquities Act, which is the law that allows monuments to be created by presidential proclamation, it came about because of archaeological developments. It was a time in American history where indigenous people were being forced out of their places; they were being killed; but at the same time, people started looking at some of the dwellings, and petroglyphs, and ruins left behind and finding that interesting. And so there was this strange parallel that people were being removed, but then there was an appreciation of their history. When the Antiquities Act was created, it was with the goal of protecting some of that history and not letting it get looted or destroyed, though the law did not give rights to the indigenous people who those ruins and history really belonged to, unfortunately. The Antiquities Act started as a way to just protect certain cultural resources in our country. Since the law has slightly vague language, it has actually been used a lot more broadly than that. There's many national monuments that are created that don't have a specific cultural or archaeological resource to protect. Now, it's used to protect things like biodiversity, and wildlife corridors, and things like that, which wasn’t necessarily the original intention of the act. So it's flexible. It allows presidents to do things that they think are important and that reflect the ideals of society of that day rather than from 1906, when the Antiquities Act was written. Catherine Cooper: I read the book as a lover of the national parks and monuments. And who would you say your main audience is and what would you like them to take away from the book? McKenzie Long: My book could reach a pretty broad audience because I think there's the public land lovers, the people that already love parks and monuments, and I think there's the people that are interested in politics in why national monuments are so controversial. I wrote this from the perspective of a recreationist, I'm a climber, a mountain biker, a backcountry skier. That's how I have made really close bonds with land, and I don't think that's the only way you can make close bonds with places, but I think there are a lot of people out there that for them, that is their way. And so some recreationists are more about their activity and not paying as much attention to the place around them. And so this could also perhaps broaden the horizons of recreationists, and that's a generalization. I understand that's not everyone, but that's who I would assume would be interested in reading this book. The main takeaway is I want more people to recognize that there's more public land in this country than just national parks and state parks, and the public land serves a purpose that goes beyond just scenic beauty or recreation. There's a lot of uses that take place on public land, such as ranching. There's even mining on public land, and a lot of cultural uses of land. I think that as people understand that there's a lot more of that in our country. I also hope that that extends to appreciation for things that are a little more subtle and that extend beyond the obvious, because places like Yosemite have a lot of grandeur and they're very special, but even walking into a sagebrush desert in the middle of eastern Washington, it doesn't necessarily have really charismatic features or a lot of drama, it is still just as intricate and incredible. I hope that more people will come to appreciate those kinds of things. And as I was already talking about, personal connection to land is extremely important and really powerful. I do think that should be recognized. In terms of policy, I think that goes back to making sure that everyone, and a lot of different communities, are included, different priorities are respected, and that there's compromises in place for different types of uses of land that could be very important to different people. Catherine Cooper: And that's part of where the controversy comes from, because there's even the debate of whether or not a president should be able to undo another president's monument declaration. McKenzie Long: Yeah, the Antiquities Act only says how they can be made. It doesn't say how they can be taken down. There's a lot of back and forth between legal scholars about what that means and if presidents are allowed to remove a monument by a previous president. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your words with us. This is phenomenal. McKenzie Long: Yeah, thank you, and thanks for reading my book. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

]]> Too Much Stuff ]]> Tue, 12 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/0C36AE8D-9949-D459-493291914BD554FA.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-0C444B18-9ABE-2393-355BE87FE8984636 Too Much Stuff National Park Service Tad Britt and Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speak with Peter Bleed, a retired professor of anthropology from the University of Nebraska, about creation, use, and management of archaeological collections. 1178 no full 149

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A Fascination with Collections Sadie Whitehurst: My name is Sadie Whitehurst and I'm an archeologist with NCPTT. Today, I'm having a conversation with Tad Britt and Dr. Peter Bleed. If y'all would like to introduce yourselves, Tad. Tad Britt: Hey, y'all. My name is Tad Britt. I work for the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training as the chief of archeology, and welcome to our podcast. Dr. Peter Bleed: I'm Peter Bleed. I'm a retired professor of anthropology from the University of Nebraska. Spent my whole career teaching at the University of Nebraska, but moved down here to Arkansas to be closer to my grandchildren. I'm still an archeologist and still really interested in the work and the activities of archeology. Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for talking with us today, Peter. You've got lots of really interesting ideas of how to continue improving our field and looking back at the way we do things and improving certain aspects of our day-to-day lives as archeologists, such as collections management and curation, and that's what has started this conversation today. I know you have a lot of experience and thoughts to share with us. Is collections management important in modern archeology and what are your thoughts on that? Dr. Peter Bleed: I'm really interested in collecting. Most people assume I'm a collector, and certainly, I have accumulated a lot of stuff, but I'm interested in the behavior of collecting. As an archeologist, of course, I also was actively involved in making archeological collections. I was kind of a square-hole archeologist, teaching field schools and doing research with contracts and grants that involved excavation. As a part of that, I was always involved in teaching archeology. In teaching those crafts, we had to teach and practice collections management. As I look back on it, I think archeologists were more interested in making collections than in keeping collections. Now we've got a whole bunch of collections and we've got to treat responsibly that we've got to make use of and that we've got to decide what to do. I'm also really interested in the activity that lots of people, I'd say most people have collections of stuff that they maintain, even though people will say, I'm not a collector, an awful lot of people do have big collections of interesting stuff. With the generation change, I think we should think about what's going to happen to those collections. I'd like to encourage discussions of how and why we collect and what we're going to do with all this stuff we have. Sadie Whitehurst: I think that's super important moving forward. Those are some interesting observations and they're quite plain, but it's not something we think about as we go along, and it's an interesting perspective. Dr. Peter Bleed: It tends to be the case that archeologists gather materials, curate it, clean it up, put it in bags, do the immediate collections management, but then it's turned over to collections managers. There tends to be a divide or I wonder if there is a consistent divide between collections managers and archeological researchers. That divide is I think, is unhealthy. I think we should find ways of making use of or dealing with the collections we've made. Those decisions of dealing with the collection should involve both archeologists, people who are doing research and who are using the material reflections of behavior as a source of information about the past. But also, the practical decisions of what are we going to do with all this stuff and if we keep collecting, can we do that responsibly and who's going to make those decisions? I think archeologists had in both collections management and in data gathering how to give great thought. Certainly, the folks at NCPTT are actively involved in thinking about what are we going to do with and how should we treat our collections. Sadie Whitehurst: You mentioned who's dealing with the collections, but now you've mentioned the treatment of them, and that's an interesting aspect too.

Types of Collections Dr. Peter Bleed: We've got two kinds of collections that I'm interested in, archeological collection, stuff that consists of all the material that we have systematically recovered as a record of the past, and then we've got private collections. In terms of the research collections, we are pretty proud of how we collect things and documenting the standards we use to make this collection. Once it's in the box and once it's put on the shelf, we've got to remember that we've got to drive what we're going to do with that stuff. Putting it on the shelf is not the goal. The goal is using this material as a source of information about human history. Sadie Whitehurst: Now I'm thinking we're really diving into this discussion, but I wonder if we should maybe mention what a collection might consist of for someone who's not familiar with archeology or anthropology. Dr. Peter Bleed: We should talk about what a collection might consist of for archeologists. We've got huge amounts of material that we systematically and responsibly collected, but are we really working hard on figuring out what to do with it? Are we building theory on fire-cracked rock and lots of very bulky material? Or if the challenge of collection, what are we going to do with all these collections comes up? Can we responsibly say this doesn't need to be kept? I'm not comfortable having asked that, I've said that. Those are discussions that I think we've got to be involved in and either we've got to take the responsibility making use of these collections or we've got to have active cogent reasons for keeping them, or we've got to let other people say we can't keep it all. Sadie Whitehurst: Because behind every paper is every method and every artifact looked at is a box on a shelf somewhere, and that's heavy to think about.

What do we do with Collections? Dr. Peter Bleed: I'd say I'd go a step farther. For everything we look at, there's a whole bunch of stuff we look at and don't do anything. We've got to actively decide how we are going to treat these materials. I think there tends to be a divide in the profession. We've got to ask the question, how central to modern archeology is collections management? Are the collections managers, curators and collections managers, leading the field? Are they working with? Are they archeologists who are covering the whole front of modern archeology or are they separated from the folks who are doing archeology as opposed to the people? Is there a separation between the people who are doing "archeology" and the people who are collections managers? When I was teaching archeology, we dig, every dig, and then you've got some time in the lab and everybody had to do it. I'm not sure that after the field work is done that the integration between collections and research is positive and effective, or I want to make sure that all of that is archeology and that all of it is supported and encouraged and active. Tad Britt: What do you think of the role of archeologists communicating with private collectors who don't necessarily have a degree in archeology or cultural resource management and how should we move forward in our discussions with private collectors? Dr. Peter Bleed: Private collecting, I think is really an important part of what archeology and the modern generation of archeologists ought to be dealing with. There are people who collect lots of the things that archeologists are interested in, but then there are a whole bunch of other collectors who have good collections that they have built and that they're getting old, you have to ask what's going to happen to those. You've got stone tool collectors and collectors of a whole lot of other things. Archeologists, I think should pay attention to all of that collecting. Now, in terms of archeological collections, the handshake, the intellectual linkage between archeologists and collectors who collect stone tools and other archeological material has been complex. We have a great deal to learn from archeological collectors, stone tool collectors. They can find much more than we can find. They have access to a great deal and they are really, really, really expert. Question we've got, and I think this is the question you raised, Tad, what is our responsibility? What can we do with and for them? Now, I want at some point, maybe in a future conversation, we can talk about all those other collectors who have got great huge swaths of American cultural patrimony. We can talk about that private collective. Let's talk about the stone tool and the archeological collective. I think it's fair to say, well, how much material can archeology, institutional and professional sense, how much stuff can we accept? We can't accept it all. We simply can't have it all. Furthermore, we've got to decide what we would do with it, what we can ask and address with it that are worth asking and that are possibly better or worse what the nonprofessional collectors bring to their interest. Finding that, making that an exciting intellectual activity is pretty exciting to me. What's going to happen to all those collections? I think the reality is we're getting ready for a generation shift. The baby boom has passed. Those of us who are pre-baby boom are certainly leading the passing, but what's going to happen to all of those collections? Everything cannot be tunneled into and sent into institutional collections, or maybe it can. Everything will get collected. If that's the case, the world will just be full of these huge collections, and the job of archeology will be to make use of those collections to find ways of treating them as a source of information about the human and the world past. Sadie Whitehurst: You mentioned cultural patrimony, and I wonder if you could touch on a bit more of what that actually is and what that means for collections management. Dr. Peter Bleed: We dirt archeologists tend to treat the collections we bring home as a record of what is a documented record, a source of information about some past behavior that involved material culture. That's called archeology. We believe that the material record of behavior really does matter. We can call it, I'd like to hang the word cultural patrimony on stuff, because it's our stuff, it's our record. It is our documentation of what we've done and achieved. Now, it's not the only one. We've got recordings and documents of various kinds, but the material stuff of our lives is an important document. What has happened? It's what we can also bring forward is patrimony in the future. What's going to happen to all these collections that are made if somebody wants to know cameras or all of the things that people can collect, all the people who collect antique weaponry of one sort and another? All of that is a document for the human past. I think we should say, is it our patrimony? Is it something that documents what we as humans or Americans or Midwesterners or Southerners have done and achieved? Is it a document of our activities, make it our patrimony or not? If we say yes, then we've got to say, what is our responsibility as archeologists to the treatment of this stuff? Even if it's not in our collection, even if it's in collections of private individuals, what are we going to do?

A Challenge to the Field Sadie Whitehurst: Well, do you see any aspects of collecting and curation that are going to require more research, more advanced methods or preservation technologies apply to them that we can improve upon? Dr. Peter Bleed: I think that passing the generation, the now retiring generation of archeologists has been very interested in cultural preservation and in the maintenance of the archeological record. In that sense, I think that the collections that have been formed by a great many people, constitute a fragile record that needs to be assessed and documented and appreciated. That I think cultural preservation should spend a little time thinking about what's going to happen to all of the collections that have been made by private collectors, and what is our responsibility as cultural preservationists to documentation, assessment, and preservation of those collections. The other thing that I think is really pretty interesting and is worth thinking about is collecting engagement, engaging communities in our collections. I think the best thing arguably—hasn’t always been easy—but the best thing that's happened to archeological collections over the past generation has been the engagement with native communities in terms of why, how, and what should happen to the collections of native communities in order to address those issues. Archeologists have had to and have been able to engage in conversation with native community. Those engagements haven’t always been easy, sometimes have been absolutely difficult. They've been really vital. They've made collections management much better than it used to be. It's actively involved. I think that if we take that engagement model, we can certainly meet the needs, speak to the needs of native communities and ancestral cultures with our collections. If we take that same approach and look at collections and we realize that collecting is something that great many people do, and we, as professionals, might find ways of engaging with collectors and discover a great deal about the "wonderful treasures" that people have accumulated. The patrimonial impact that those materials present, engaging with collectors could well be, I think, a way of bringing cultural preservation into the next generation. Sadie Whitehurst: Engagement is a huge part of that. Dr. Peter Bleed: I think the engagement with ancestral and descendant communities is really wonderful. It hasn't always been easy and we've had to learn a great deal in order to do it effectively, but it's been extremely positive. Archeology, curation, museums, all got better as a result of it. Now, if we turn that around and we look at all of the other stuff that's out there that people "collect", can we find ways of working with them, learning from them, and looking at their materials at those collections to make our collections, collecting more effective and to also speak to the needs of huge swaths of society? Sadie Whitehurst: Well, Peter, how we can continue engaging with you and your work? Dr. Peter Bleed: Oh, for heaven's sakes, I'm of a passing generation, Sadie. The question you should ask is what can you do? What can you all do to help the emergent generation of archeological leaders and collections managers speak to the needs of all the material culture that is out there and is being handled in potentially significant ways to archeology, to museums and collections facilities? Sadie Whitehurst: Excellent. You're right. I think you're leaving us in good hands and I hope we can continue to do your work justice. I really thank you for having this conversation with us today. Dr. Peter Bleed: Yeah, I enjoyed the conversation.

]]> Cultural Impacts of the Apollo Program ]]> Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/07697ACE-A058-ACC5-54EDAAFECEB7A9C1.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-079A4440-ABDB-AAFE-E9A65801E18FA3AF Cultural Impacts of the Apollo Program National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Bret Bennington and Rodney Hill, professors at Hofstra University about the far-ranging cultural importance and impacts of the Apollo Program. 1457 no full 148

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ...

Bret Bennington: Bret Bennington. I'm a Professor of Geology at Hofstra University on Long Island in New York.

Rodney Hill: And I'm Rodney Hill. I'm an Associate Professor of Radio, Television, Film, also at Hofstra University in the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication.

Catherine Cooper: You just published a book called After Apollo. Where did this project start?

Bret Bennington: It started because someone in the administration at Hofstra University thought it would be a good idea for Hofstra to do something to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing, and the reason for that is probably the location of Hofstra University in Nassau County on Long Island, Nassau County is where there were many milestones in the early history of flight, but it's also where the lunar module was built by the Grumman Corporation. And so there's this connection. Charles Lindbergh took off from a spot about a mile north of Hofstra University, basically from what is now the entrance to Macy's at the mall. So the call went out for faculty who would be interested in organizing a conference, and I've always had an interest in space flight. I was always a wannabe astronaut growing up. I'm an amateur astronomer. My day job is paleontologist, but I'm an amateur astronomer. So I immediately saw that this would be a great opportunity to maybe do something interesting related to the history of space flight. And then they decided they also wanted a faculty member who represented not so much the sciences but the humanities. And ...

Rodney Hill: Yeah. I will just also add that Hofstra University has a wonderful cultural center, and they put on conferences throughout the year on many different topics. They're actually known for their series of presidential conferences, looking back on the presidencies of recent administrations. I think the last one they did was ...

Bret Bennington: They just did Obama?

Rodney Hill: They just did one on Obama.

Rodney Hill: So they do conferences on all sorts of things, and so it was kind of natural, given the Long Island connections to Apollo, that they would do something on the 50th anniversary. And as Bret said, they wanted to cover not only the science aspects, but also the humanities and the arts. And so the administration sort of came to me and asked if I would help and sort of oversee the humanities and arts side of things. I do film studies, and one of my big interests is Stanley Kubrick, and of course, Kubrick did 2001: A Space Odyssey, so we were actually able to work that into the conference.

It came out in 1968. So the film came out before Apollo, and I think it came out even before we had very good photographs of the Earth from space. So all those visual effects in 2001 are just completely imagined, it's from the imagination of the filmmakers. So that interest in Kubrick, and I've also always been interested in science fiction film, and so this was a great fit for me as well. So out of that conference, so Bret and I ended up sort of co-directing the conference. We had scholars from all over the country.

Rodney Hill: One of the high points of my life, and I'm probably speaking for you as well, one of the guests of the conference was Dr. Mae Jemison, one of the Space Shuttle astronauts, and Bret and I did a Q&A with her on stage. And I could have died then and there and been quite satisfied with my life. It was a real honor to meet her. She was just delightful.

Bret Bennington: A very impressive person.

Rodney Hill: Gave a wonderful keynote talk for us, so that was really nice.

Bret Bennington: And there were a lot of little kids in the audience who knew exactly who she was and were really ... There was a little girl, who was probably six or seven, sitting in the second row holding a Mae Jemison doll, and this kid was vibrating in her seat. She was so excited. So that was really cool.

Rodney Hill: Yeah, that whole experience really brought tears to my eyes just being there with her and seeing the audience reaction to her. We also did a screening at the Cradle of Aviation Museum of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and we brought over Jan Harlan, who was Stanley Kubrick's producer, and he introduced the film and did a Q&A afterwards. And that was a real honor for me to get to meet Jan Harlan in person.

Bret Bennington: And we had a film student.

Rodney Hill: Oh, yeah. One of our film students, she was a senior at the time, Connie Anderson Castilla, I think professionally now she goes by Connie Tais, she was one of my students in film, but she was also taking an honors course with Bret, and that's how she found out about our conference at Hofstra. And she approached you about, she wanted to do a documentary on the Grumman engineers.

Bret Bennington: So about half-a-mile from campus is the Cradle of Aviation Museum, which has the lunar module, the actual lunar module that would've flown on either Apollo 18 or Apollo 19. And they have volunteers, who are the former engineers, retired engineers, who worked on the lunar module, who kind of hang around the exhibit and will talk to you and tell you everything you want to know about it. And so I was able to connect Connie up with the people at the museum who worked with these volunteers, and she ended up interviewing a bunch of them and doing this wonderful oral history documentary. It was very moving, I thought.

Rodney Hill: When she first told me about the project, I was thinking, "Okay, this is going to be like a 10-minute student documentary. It'll be very nice." And she said, "Oh, no. This is going to be like forty-five minutes long." And I thought, "No, no, no, you can't do that. That's way too ambitious." But when I saw it, I was really blown away. She did a magnificent job. She traveled down to the National Archives and got a lot of footage and research and things.

Bret Bennington: She got a bunch of NASA images and footage, and sort of interspersed them in with the footage of the gentleman that she was interviewing.

Rodney Hill: It was really an extraordinary piece of work, and they showed it at the Cradle of Aviation, and I think it's been in a couple of other festivals. And Connie is now working with Ken Burns' company. So yeah, so we're very proud of her.

Bret Bennington: Yeah, for sure.

Rodney Hill: And so we took the best of those presentations and asked those authors to flesh things out and give us really full-blown essays that ended up in this book.

Bret Bennington: I know it's a good example of how if you volunteer to do things that are outside of your comfort zone, it very often leads to interesting opportunities, and that's how you broaden yourself intellectually.

Rodney Hill: So these essays come from all sorts of different approaches, different fields of academia. So we have chemists represented in the book, but we also have political scientists and film studies people and cultural studies people. It's a really great collection. I'm pretty proud to be associated with it, to be honest.

Catherine Cooper: There's so much variety, and it really shows how interdisciplinary and how broad-reaching Apollo was, how important it was to all spectra of American society.

Bret Bennington: One of the things I think that comes out of this book is how it didn't necessarily have to happen. It wasn't inevitable. And there's a chapter that discusses how these German rockets ... So if you think about contingency, one of the things that happens after World War II is we invade Germany, and we capture a bunch of German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, and we bring them back to the US, and we put them to work. Itjust so happens that Wernher von Braun was an evangelist for space travel. The thing that he cared about more than anything was getting humanity off this planet, regardless of what you think of him as a human being because of the fact that he used slave labor to build the rockets in Germany, and he was bombing London and everything. If you listen to him, he did what he had to do to realize his vision of getting humans off the planet.

And he ends up teaming up with Walt Disney to basically sell the idea, this idea that space travel is human destiny to the American public. And I don't think the space program would've been possible without that sort of propaganda groundwork that was done that planted the idea in the public, because it costs so much money to put astronauts on the Moon.

Rodney Hill: Actually, the chapter on Disney and Wernher von Braun is written by somebody who was not at our conference, a former grad school buddy of mine named Chris Robinson. And I knew that he was interested in Disney television and that he had sort of been researching this, so I said, I contacted him and said, "Hey, Chris. We're putting together this book. If you have something, we'd be happy to take a look at it."

Rodney Hill: And this is like mid-1950s, we're talking 1955 or so, when Disney had just started his Disneyland TV series with ABC, which really was all about promoting the idea of Disneyland as he's building the park and then getting people excited about that. But then there were these different segments, including Tomorrowland, and this is where the man in space segments with von Braun sort of came into play, this Disney imagination of the future of humanity, right? Kind of fun that way.

Bret Bennington: It's good old German propaganda and American fantasy, sort of ...

Catherine Cooper: Capitalism.

Bret Bennington: ... capitalism combining to lay the groundwork. And then the first chapter in the book is this one by Matthew Hirsch is this wonderful sort of take, a review of the whole Apollo enterprise and how he calls it, "We ran as if to meet the Moon." And he just points out what a crazy idea, and it's kind of a miracle that it worked. Again, there was nothing sort of predestined about it, and it could have gone wrong in a hundred ways and never come to pass, but it did, and it changed everything.

Rodney Hill: And one of the things he talks about is the fact that there always has been this notion that we could do that, that going to the Moon is something that we could consider. So he sort of looks at the history of science fiction stories, envisioning man going to the Moon. This goes back at least into the 1800s with Jules Verne and other people. And then in the earliest motion pictures, you have these fantasy films of going to the Moon. And so that's one of the things that Hirsch finds so amazing is that we imagine that this is something we could think about doing.

Catherine Cooper: Yeah. Méliès, and all of those early silent films.

Rodney Hill: Yeah. That's one of the beautiful things about science fiction. You have to imagine something before it can become a real thing.

Catherine Cooper: And then it also almost becomes a template for, "I wonder if we can do that?" And then we invent things to make it happen.

Rodney Hill: Right. Then how would we do it? What would this look like, and how would we do it?

Bret Bennington: There's another chapter which I like called Picturing Women in the Space Age, the Impact of the Lunar Landing on Film, Television, and Fashion that looks at sort of how the space program impacted women. Initially, women weren't really allowed to participate, but the sort of cultural fascination with space travel definitely did not exclude women. So you have women who are characters in TV and film playing important roles as space travelers long before NASA allowed women any significant participation as space travelers.

Rodney Hill: And the author of that chapter, Julie Wosk, actually curated an exhibit at the Queens Museum of all these images of women. In terms of fashion, you have fashion designers coming up with these space age looks for women's fashion, and she also looks at a lot of film and television images. I think that's an exhibit that has been traveling around to other museums as well.

Catherine Cooper: You mentioned that there's this broad base of support, that this was basically sold to the public, but it wasn't for everybody in the public, and there's a chapter on that specifically, isn't there?

Rodney Hill: Yes. Yeah. Patricia Rossi, who's an attorney on Long Island, I believe she's a civil rights attorney among other things, she talks about the backlash among civil rights leaders at the time, representatives, leaders from the African-American community pointing out the irony of spending millions and millions of dollars on what they saw as a kind of superfluous gesture to go to the Moon, while obviously there's problems of poverty and injustice in the US that need attention and need funding. Whatever somebody may think about that particular argument, Rossi points out that this controversy acted as a kind of ...

Bret Bennington: Catalyst.

Rodney Hill: ... catalyst, that's the word I'm looking for, a catalyst for renewing energy in the civil rights movement to say, "Hey, come on. If we can do this, we can also take care of these other problems."

Catherine Cooper: Right. Fix some things at home.

Rodney Hill: Right, right.

Bret Bennington: Yeah. She points out that even before Apollo 11 launched, Ted Kennedy came out basically in favor of canceling the Apollo program because it was costing too much money. So John Kennedy's own brother just said that we can't afford to do this, that we're neglecting these other priorities, that people are starving in American cities, and we need to address that. And that argument eventually became so compelling that Nixon did cancel the Apollo program. He politically couldn't justify the expense anymore.

Rodney Hill: It's too bad we didn't actually do anything substantial about the poverty problem, though. Right? "Okay. We canceled this one thing. That doesn't mean that we solved the other problems."

Bret Bennington: Well, I think Rossi argues that this controversy did lead to some of the important civil rights legislation that came along in the late '60s and early '70s.

Catherine Cooper: And then it's also tied to other important aspects of the United States' policies with regards to immigration, because we started with Wernher von Braun, who we got from Germany, and then a whole bunch of other international figures are important to this as well.

Bret Bennington: There's a chapter by another Hofstra faculty member named Rosanna Perotti, who talks about the critical role that immigrants have always played in the space program, the different sort of generations of immigrants, that the original immigrants were the German rocket scientists and some Italian immigrants who came to the US before and during the war to escape fascism. And then immigrants from other parts of the world became important to the space program after Apollo, and she gives some really some nice examples of different individual people who were important.

Rodney Hill: In various different capacities, including as engineers and some later astronauts, and so all throughout the space program.

Bret Bennington: Well, my favorite is Farouk El-Baz. He was a remote-sensing expert from Egypt, who ended up being a big part of training the astronauts to be extraterrestrial geologists, in particular, training the command module pilots to make observations of the lunar topography and lunar geology from orbit. But it was also part of their other scientific training.

Catherine Cooper: Kind of turning back to an earlier thing that we discussed, the rise and fall of public opinion around the space program, there was the Apollo program, and that got canceled due to funding…

Bret Bennington: Skylab ...

Catherine Cooper: ... and Skylab.

Bret Bennington: ... comes in. Skylab was made possible by the fact that we had all this Apollo hardware line around. One of von Braun's big ideas was to build a space station. So we were able to do that by taking, I think it was a Saturn V midsection and converting it into a space station, which became Skylab. So that was the major manned spaceflight endeavor until the Shuttle came along.

Catherine Cooper: Okay. And then we had the Shuttle and then another lull.

Bret Bennington: And that brings us into the modern, well, the International Space Station. And now we're into the era of commercial spaceflight.

Rodney Hill: It occurs to me that the public attitude towards these things today is pretty lackadaisical compared to the zeitgeist to the late '60s when everybody was interested in space. Certainly in American culture, it was such a part of everything. Everybody was drinking Tang, kids wanted to be astronauts, all these TV series have astronauts, things like I Dream of Jeannie and all sorts of strange things.

Bret Bennington: I think that's James, the last chapter in the book is written by James Spiller, and he talks about that, that shift in sort of how the public perceived manned spaceflight and astronauts was deliberate in a way, because the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts were promoted as explorers. This was the next frontier, and then they were the trailblazers that were risking life and limb to make it possible for humans to explore outer space.

But Skylab and the Shuttle, they were promoted differently. The idea behind the Shuttle was that space travel would become routine, and so the Shuttle astronauts weren't explorers, they were the settlers, they were the pioneers. They were the blue-collar astronauts who were just going up into low-earth orbit to get the job done. Shuttle launches weren't supposed to be seen as these amazing, adventurous things. They were supposed to be seen as just business as usual. It didn't quite pan out that way, because we lost two shuttles, and it wasn't very routine, it wasn't as safe as we wanted to think it was.

Rodney Hill: Spiller also talks about this transition from government-funded space travel to now the privatization of it. And so not only have you lost this idea of these explorers, but now it has become a thing, it's a phenomenon for rich tourists to go for up, for thrill seekers.

Bret Bennington: Right, and he specifically raises the question of are we going to be able to get the public behind human spaceflight if human spaceflight is seen as just a bunch of rich tourists going up into Earth orbit? I don't necessarily think that that's really happening. Yes, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, those enterprises are sort of predicated on being able to generate a lot of revenue by sending wealthy tourists up into low-earth orbit. But the people that go to Mars are not going to be wealthy tourists. They're going to be trailblazers in the mold of the Apollo astronauts, I think.

I mentioned this in the introduction. My feeling is that as long as, I mean maybe part of the way we're going to fund space travel in the future is by getting rich people to pay lots of money to go on sightseeing tours, and then that money gets funneled into developing technology and the hardware that we need to extend exploration. But government's always going to be involved because of the sums of money needed, particularly to develop really new technologies. SpaceX is being supported and funded by the federal government.

Catherine Cooper: And we also have the Artemis program.

Bret Bennington: Which is an interesting hybrid where NASA and its contractors are developing the rocket, but then NASA has given the responsibility for developing, subcontracted the lunar lander to SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Rodney Hill: And given the fact that there has to be this ongoing government support of these initiatives, I think it's essential to somehow get the public back on board and get public enthusiasm renewed for this. We're speaking to you here at this wonderful conference at Cape Canaveral that you've organized, and we've been hearing from various different perspectives. But one through-line that I've noticed at this conference is, much like our book, I mean the interdisciplinary aspects of this conference, you have people approaching these questions from an artistic standpoint. And I think that the mythologizing of it, the making space this big, this larger-than-life endeavor, if we can remind ourselves of the enormity of what has already been achieved, but what could be achieved in the future, and how that is important to the entirety of humanity. So I think that the arts and humanities could play a tremendous role in renewing that kind of enthusiasm.

And some of the participants here at the conference have asked questions like, "What should we be teaching our young people about people who want to be scientists and engineers, and how can they have an awareness of the historical importance of what they're doing so that they want to preserve the records of what they're doing?" And I think that's where the humanities come in. You've got to somehow instill a love of history in the people who are running these projects. It's not just about the technical aspects, it's not just about the money. It's also about this amazing, the gesture of getting off the planet. It's an amazing, amazing thing, and somehow, how did we ever lose that?

Bret Bennington: Is China going to be the next country that we're in a space race with, and will that motivate the public as a nation to care about space travel again? Of course, the other great motivator is money, and I think it remains to be seen whether there's money to be made beyond low-earth orbit. We know SpaceX has been very successful. Putting satellites in orbit is a very lucrative business. There's a lot of commercial applications to satellites. But is there money to be made on the Moon? Is there money to be made in the asteroid belt, on Mars? If there is, then I think we're going to colonize the solar system pretty quickly. If there isn't, then it remains to be seen. Because if there's a financial imperative, then as long as there's money to be made, companies will be doing that. If there isn't, then the only reasons to expand beyond earth become to get humanity off the planet as an insurance policy. So if we blow up the planet, we're still on the Moon, we're on Mars.

And then of course, the other imperative is scientific, but one can argue you can do most of the science with robots, which we've been very successful with.

Rodney Hill: Sure. Which is also not a very inspiring prospect. It's hard to get people excited about. But if things can be accomplished without astronauts on board these flights, by all means.

Bret Bennington: Having people involved definitely makes people care. I mean, the human element is super compelling.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you both so much.

Bret Bennington: You're welcome.

Rodney Hill: Thank you, Catherine.

Bret Bennington: Thank you.

]]> Communities of Ludlow ]]> Tue, 30 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/98FBEBF0-07C5-0D60-721D297077F289E1.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-990C17FB-F920-1B22-085216CB3F807B2D Communities of Ludlow National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Fawn-Amber Montoya and Karin Larkin about the history of the Ludlow Massacre and their involvement with the history and the community. 1074 no full 147

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with:

Karin Larkin: Karin Larkin.

Fawn-Amber Montoya: I'm Fawn-Amber Montoya.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me today. You both recently published a book called “Communities of Ludlow: Collaborative Stewardship and the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission.” Could you give a brief summary of the events?

Karin Larkin: The Ludlow Massacre was the culmination of one of the most violent events in US labor history, but very few people know about it. It happened over a century ago in 1913 and 1914 when southern Colorado coal miners went on strike to fight for better living conditions, safer working conditions, and fair wages. Thousands of miners and their families went on strike in September of 1913. They were kicked out of their company owned housing, so they moved into tent colonies that were set up in advance for them up and down the strike zone. So, they lived in these tent colonies for 14, 15 months. They suffered through one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record. Tensions ran pretty high between the strikers and the company, the militia, the Colorado National Guard who were policing the strike. Ludlow was the largest of these tent colonies. And on April the 20th, 1914, bullets flew through the Ludlow tent colony.

To escape the violence, four women and 11 children went and hid in a cellar that they had dug out underneath one of their tents. When the gunfire ceased, the militia and the National Guard came through, and they lit the tent colony on fire. And all but two women who escaped, the other two women and 11 children were all suffocated and died in that cellar that day. This sort of horrific event was a wake-up call for the nation, not just about the conditions and the coal mines, but the conditions and what was happening during the strikes, which was generally ignored. And this led to a lot of reforms, congressional inquiry, and changes in the labor laws throughout the country, and it's given us some of the privileges that we enjoy today.

Catherine Cooper: Could you talk about how each of you became aware of the Ludlow Massacre and became involved in the study and sharing of this history?

Fawn-Amber Montoya: My family is actually from southern Colorado. They migrated north from northern New Mexico in the late 1800s and settled in a small town outside of Trinidad, Colorado. It was known as Camp Engle or Engleville. When I was growing up, we lived outside of Trinidad in a small town called Hoehne, Colorado, and it was my first field trip for third grade. We went to the tent colony site. In, I think it was 2005, I was doing research for my dissertation, and I had driven by the site a number of times, been at the site a number of times, but my great uncle, we were getting ready for a family reunion. My great uncle was nowhere to be found because he had gone to Ludlow. And I remember that really sticking in my head about how important it was for my uncle as a former coal miner and to be from Trinidad, to be present at Ludlow on the morning of the family reunion. That Ludlow was as important to him as it was to his family. And so that was just something that had stuck with me for a very long time.

Then when I was doing research on my dissertation, I was planning to look at Southern Colorado and the steel mill during World War II. And so, I was driving from Texas Tech University to the Steelworks Museum of the American West to do my research, and I would drive by Ludlow every time.

And I reached a point where I had to figure out that Ludlow wasn't done yet. I think sometimes there's been some really amazing books that have been written on Ludlow, “Killing for Coal,” specifically by Thomas Andrews. And so you can get the feel of the work's been done. What I started writing on was the community of Ludlow and the memory of the Ludlow Massacre. And that was a place where I found for my own scholarship, the work hadn't been done or needed to continue to be worked on. And I think Karin and I have addressed this in this book, that there's still more to be researched about the Ludlow Massacre. We in no way see this as the final say or the final piece. So, we would always encourage scholars to continue to embrace this work, but to make sure that they're very thoughtful about the communities of Ludlow and the rich histories and relationships that have been developed and to try to continue to honor those memories.

Karin Larkin: I have a very different first experience with Ludlow. I honestly had never heard of the Ludlow Massacre or the site before I became involved with the archeological project to excavate it. I was invited to participate in the archeological excavation, and I thought to myself, what can you do there? What's still left? It was a tent colony. What are we going to find archeologically? And I was very surprised at the rich history that we were able to uncover. At the point where I was invited, I thought to myself, I better start learning this history and do some research. They gave me a reading list, which I went through. And then I started doing the actual archeology, and I became deeply involved and really touched by what we were recovering during the archeological excavations. We were finding things that you would expect, typical miner’s items, ax heads and buckets and stuff like this.

But we were also finding children's toys and parts of baby bottles, heirloom dishes and canning jars that still had food in them. And it just really personalized this history for me in a way that it was a touching reminder. So that gave me this direct and tangible connection to the Ludlow history, but also the massacre that really touched me.

Catherine Cooper: There seems to be a very deliberate inclusion of multi-vocality in the book. Could you talk about this deliberateness and the variety of ways for sharing and preserving history that you engaged with for this project?

Fawn-Amber Montoya: I would probably say I don't think that we started off with the intentionality of this multi-vocality. The book in many ways was “What were the next steps?” And after the end, the sundown of the official commission and the writing of the governor's report, I think that we knew we didn't want it to just sit on a table or sit on a bookshelf. We wanted the story and that experience that we had of connecting with community and these voices to become the history. One of the difficulties of being scholars and for myself of being a historian, it's about who gets to tell a story and what becomes the official histories. And we knew that unless we recorded this in a way where it would become part of the history that what we had done could be lost. And not just what we had done, but all of the contributions and these stories that were uncovered or brought to the forefront would be lost.

I think in many ways the book reflects the variety of people who we were able to engage with in the commemorations, both either as audiences or as presenters, as community members who were present in these spaces who sometimes just provided the buildings for us to meet in. One story that it is not included in the book is Carolyn Newman, who is a Mother Jones re-enactor, who runs a museum in Walsenburg Colorado. And she did a series of newspaper articles where she had looked back at the newspapers from 1913, 1914 and put them back into the newspaper 100 years later.

And so, if I could go back and say whose story should be included, I would've probably figured out a way to make sure I wrote Carolyn into that. But I think it was also that this wasn't about us trying to control the narrative. We wanted to very much be reflective of how each of these individuals were or are. And so, I think, like I said, I don't think it was always us thinking, oh, we have to do it in this way. It was as we started to put together the book that this is what the commission really felt like on a regular basis.

Karin Larkin: One of the biggest challenges for academics is first of all, recognizing the sort of bias and the gaps in the documentary and the historical record, and then how can we ethically as well as accurately complete or fill in those gaps. And so, figuring out ways to make sure that we can include diverse stories, but also make sure that the stories that we're including add value to the historic record, as well as balancing this desire as an academic to make sure that the information is authentic, and it's accurate, there are multiple lines of evidence to help support it. Sometimes you don't have multiple lines of evidence to support some of the facts of history. One of the challenges is figuring out ways to be open-minded and open to different perspectives. And then how do we include those in ways that other academics will recognize their validity, right?

And so that's one of the things that we were very intentional in including Linda Linville's story within a published academic book because her family story had been not just excluded, but was discounted by historians in the past. And we felt that there is value in adding the lineal descendants’ stories in an official telling of the story because they had been intentionally excluded for so long. I think one of the challenges is balancing these ethical dilemmas with academic rigor. And that's something that I struggle with in my own scholarship, but I don't think necessarily it's something that a lot of historians, academics spend enough time thinking about and grappling with these issues.

Fawn-Amber Montoya: I don't think you're wrong. And I think part of it is who scholars end up writing for and as historians, it's always the pressure of who's your press, where is your publication going to be at? And I think for this book, our audience was different. We were writing for the commission members. I think we were writing for the statewide committee. We were writing for the lineal descendants. And for me, we didn't write this book for historians. The book is written for the people that were in community with us. And I'm more concerned about what they think about the book and whether or not they think we got it right. I'm more concerned about whether we did right by the women and children that were killed at Ludlow and less about what my historian colleagues might think about it.

And when Karin and I had the opportunity this past summer, because annually there is a Ludlow Massacre Memorial, and Karin and I were able to be there, and we were able to give Mary Petrucci, who is the granddaughter of the first Mary Petrucci, a copy of the book. And to be able to show her the picture of her father in the book, and that her father, whose brother and sisters died at Ludlow and whose mother had to live the rest of her life knowing that her children had died. That is who our audience is. We wrote the book for people like Mary.

We've spent a lot of time with this and in a lot of different ways, whether it was through our own personal research, background readings, other people speaking about it, being present on site. I'm always amazed at the moment when people get it, when for them they have that moment of, oh my gosh, this is the story. This is the craziest, most horrific, painful story that they've ever heard. And I think for me, I come back to that again and again, is that these women that died and these children that died, and the survivors and the descendants that this scarred them. It killed them, it scarred them. It scarred the land. This trauma that was inflicted continued to live on, and it left a legacy. And that in the commission's work, we didn't undo what had been done.

That trauma is still there. It's still there present in the lives of the people. That trauma is still very present at the site. You have moments when you can still feel it. And that violence that was left on the land left a mark. And I think that's what I come back to again and again. I still come back to, I don't live in Colorado now, but I still come back to Ludlow annually. And I think that's no matter what we did, we could erase the horror that had occurred. I think we've done our best to bring justice to the people in the ways that we could. And I think the story has to be continued to be told over and over again. And no matter how many times I hear about Linda or how many times I hear about Mary, or how many times I hear Mary Petrucci and what had happened to her, how many times I teach this or talk about it, or in different places that I hear the story, it doesn't soften. And it's still very painful for me.

And I always think about as a historian, as a parent, what is the story that I think needs to live on until the next generation and what is the most important story that I would share? And it's this one probably. It's definitely on the top of my list. And it's really about why it's important for us to think about the people that are around us and their backgrounds and the living conditions that they're in. And I think this is where I love talking with Bob Butero because I think Bob has an amazing way of framing the importance of labor history and framing the importance of the work that United Mine Workers do. And this work is still extremely relevant to our nation and to our world today. And that hasn't gone away. And I think that piece of Bob at the end of his chapter of really talking about why does this still matter today? It didn’t end with Ludlow. It's going to continue on, and that there's still things to learn from the Ludlow Massacre.

Karin Larkin: I think one of the things that I would like to add or finish with is that the story is not over. We're still learning new things all the time. For instance, with the renovation of the cellar, we uncovered those powerful new symbols of this cross and the shield that were on the outside wall of the concrete cellar, there was no visible indication of that on the inside wall. So, when those were uncovered, I had the hair on the back of my neck and my arms was standing up, and I got goosebumps everywhere because it really just reminded me that we don't know half of what went on that day. And we can never really understand the terror and the trauma that happened at that time. But what we can do is try to make sure that this history isn't forgotten. By forgetting it, it becomes irrelevant because we need to keep remembering this history so that we can see what an impact it had for us today and make sure that we don't repeat some of these same mistakes in the future.

I sent pictures in the chat. I put a link to the article that shows you the pictures of the most recent excavations. We also found a tent stake that was in situ that looks like it was one of the stakes that was holding down the tent over the cellar where the women and children were killed. So, I know it's an inanimate object, but it was there and it witnessed that event. And so, when I found that and I was able to see it and touch it, it just really drove home the reality of what happened there. And I sent these pictures to Mary Petrucci and I sent it to Linda Linville. And I remember Linda Linville wrote back to me and said, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said, this just gave me goosebumps. She said, in looking at this, it just reminds me that this past is refusing to stay buried. And I thought, yes, you're right. And I'm just humbled and proud that I've been able to have some small part in helping to tell these stories.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for sharing this history with us through the book and the podcast.

Karin Larkin: Thank you.

]]> Voices from Bears Ears ]]> Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/ECF221D6-D4ED-8EFF-C340AF021AEA120C.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-ED107C8A-CBC3-232E-DF76655C9184DB57 Voices from Bears Ears National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Rebecca Robinson and Steve Strom about listening to and sharing the various opinions surrounding the formation of Bears Ears National Monument. 2371 no full 146

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with.

Rebecca Robinson: Hello I am Rebecca Robinson. I am a writer and journalist based in Southwest Washington state.

Steve Strom: And I'm Steve Strom, a retired astronomer who has been working for the last seven or eight years on conservation related books.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. You've recently published a book called Voices from Bears Ears. Could you talk about what first drew your attention to the conversation around the proposed National Monument?

Rebecca Robinson: This project began it seems like a lifetime ago. In early 2015, at the time, conservation organizations, in particular the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, were leading a campaign to ask the Obama administration to establish a greater Canyon Lands national monument, which is a large swath of land red rock country in southeast Utah, the areas, ecologically and culturally significant to many people and Native American tribes, indigenous peoples in the region and like Bears ears, had natural resources that drilling and mining companies were ready to exploit. So the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, or SUWA and its partners were asking, as I mentioned, then-President Obama, to establish this National Monument using something called the Antiquities Act, which was signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt back in 1906 to quote, “authorize the president to create historic landmarks. Historic and prehistoric structures and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the government of the United States.” It's a mouthful, but it ends up being very significant in the battle over Bears Ears. So in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt ended up using it to protect the Grand Canyon. At that point, as a National Monument because Congress was failing to act. And again, this becomes very significant in the Bears Ears issue as well, so our initial interviews focused on the Greater Canyonlands proposal, but by the summer of 2015, our initial sources, some of whom were part of the same Greater Canyonlands, were really shifting their focus to another conservation movement in Southeast Utah, centered in the Four Corners region where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and it was led by a just-formed coalition of five Native American tribal nations. The Hopi, the Navajo, The Ute Indian tribe, Ute Mountain Ute and Zuni tribe. They were petitioning the Obama administration to establish a Bears Ears National Monument that would protect ancestral lands from drilling, mining and the impacts of motorized recreation very similar to Greater Canyonlands, just in a slightly different region. And the Bears Ears is so-called named after a pair of two very large buttes that look to many people like ears of bears poking out of the earth. They really are key landmark in a wild landscape that can be seen for many miles in every direction, and they're sacred to the indigenous peoples of the region and what was unique about the Bears Ears campaign was that while conservation organizations played a key role in promoting and lobbying for protection and establishment of a monument, the true leaders were the tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, it was an indigenous led effort, the likes of which the US hadn't really seen before. It also wasn't a straightforward conservation proposal. The coalition emphasized the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape, which their ancestors had called home since time immemorial and, most significantly, the coalition proposed a co-management agreement with the federal government in which a representative from each tribe, tribes being sovereign nations who have a government-to-government relationship with the federal government would co-manage. the lands of the monument in a way that was consistent with their cultural values and also conservation values more generally. Actually, we also heard that there was fierce opposition to this proposal from some locals, though not all, critically, and elected leaders who saw the establishment of a National Monument as a, quote-uN-quote land grab by the federal government that by setting aside some of this land for protection could rob them of their livelihood. And access to some of their treasured places. [It was] a compelling story, we wanted to learn more. So we headed to the Four Corners region and started interviewing people. As tends to happen when following a story, one interview led to another and another and another until we knew that we had to spend some serious time on the ground in the region to truly understand the issues at play.

Steve Strom: The notion of a land grab, often used to oppose the Bears ears is a little bit deceptive in that the land that putatively was being grabbed was in fact public land, like for example a National Forest. So it's important to note that these are public lands that, like national forests ,belong to us all.

Rebecca Robinson: We found three themes that emerged that connected people on all sides of the issue. One was that they all had a cultural and spiritual connection to the landscape. Many of them in the local area, felt that their voices hadn't been heard by people who were deciding the fate of landscapes that they called home. And that they lived in a rural area with a lot of poverty and a lot of industries that had come and gone over the years, such as uranium mining, things that had gone boom and bust, and they faced an uncertain economic future, and that also informed their very passionate views on this. And it's also informed by ancient history, as well as more recent. And there's an intersection of religious beliefs and different visions for economic future and the meaning of the word sacred, as well.

Catherine Cooper: So it sounds like such a huge scope just around this one National Monument. How did you begin to formulate the project and then put together these interviews?

Rebecca Robinson: What drew us to the story was the seemingly epic nature of it and really encompassing so many different intersecting issues that at the time and still inform a lot of political and cultural debates in the West in particular, but also the country at large. So I mentioned before that we started with a couple of initial interviews and one interview led to another and to another and another. And everyone had someone to recommend. And we happened to have the luxury of time in certain parts of this project and we were able to invest the time in going to southeast Utah and other places in the Four Corners region and spend significant time on the ground in the communities we were reporting on and so that made it easier to identify people to interview.

Steve Strom: I think a crucial decision was made by Rebecca relatively early on in the process and that is to allow the story to be told by the individuals involved in the conflict, rather than doing as I had originally imagined, a book which would follow a more academic form description of the geography to a description of the indigenous history, Anglo history and so on, and I feel that to the extent that the book has real power, it derives from the decision to let people talk.

Catherine Cooper: That is absolutely one of the things that drew me to the book. I know this isn't a question I wrote down, but was there a commonality in how you conducted the interviews? Did you start with one question that was the same for everyone, and then go from there?

Steve Strom: My recollection is that we adjusted to each of the sources and tried to meet them. Where they were, I think that to the extent possible, we tried to engage them first on a personal level before going too deeply into the weeds of the Bears Ears discussion. And I think in the end, we followed pretty much the same themes in asking the questions. But I think that each of the interviews usually from my perspective were tailored to the individual.

Rebecca Robinson: I think that for some interviews we did get into the weeds because we knew that some politicians or some leaders of advocacy organizations were very much involved in the policy, which was a crucial part of understanding the story especially. One thing I didn't mention is that at the time that the Bears Ears proposal was taking shape, there were conversations led by a Republican congressman in Utah, representative Rob Bishop, that involved many different stakeholders. You had ranchers. You had business owners. You had rock climbers. You had representatives of Native American tribes all trying to come together to find a compromise on these thorny public lands issues. And there were reasons why it went off the rails that had to do with politics and cultural differences, but I think that when we spoke to some of the folks that had been involved with the policy aspect of things, we would tailor our questions more to policy and getting into the weeds of legislation and land boundaries and whatnot. But then we took a different approach with some respected elders in the Mormon community. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is hugely influential in the part of Southeast Utah where we were conducting our interviews. And so we very much focused on the spiritual connection to the land and how that very much informs views on how land should be managed and stewarded, and so I do think to Steve's point that we in some ways took the same approach, but approached the interviews from a different standpoint, based on who we were talking to.

Catherine Cooper: Steve mentioned this very unique structure to the book. How did you decide which interviews would become chapters and which places you would pull quotes and those interleaving pages that you created?

Rebecca Robinson: We had the opportunity to spend a great amount of time with some of the folks who ended up being the focus of their own chapters, folks, we were able to meet with again and again and again and really develop a sense of their role in this greater political and cultural story. Others were not necessarily key players, but people who were behind the scenes helping to make things happen to bring different people together in this larger movement on all sides to determine what the future of this wild landscape was going to be. And I think that some of our choices were sort of surprising to us in the end that they weren't necessarily people who had been quoted in. Newspapers or media pieces, but they were people who, behind the scenes actually ended up playing significant roles and or people who had been involved in the issues for a very long time.

Steve Strom: It was a combination of close interactions over a long period of time, the desire to include voices from a wide range of stakeholder interests than to select individuals whose stories were particularly powerful, whether from a spiritual standpoint or from an institutional standpoint.

Catherine Cooper: Could you each share a favorite story about working on the book or a meaningful interaction that happened afterward?

Rebecca Robinson: I do think one that has stuck with me over the years is the afternoon we spent with Mark Maryboy, who is the focus of one of the chapters in our book. Just as context for Mark, he is the first Native American elected official in the state of Utah. He was elected in 1986. He served for many years on the county commission in San Juan County, which is where Bears Ears National Monument ended up being established, and he led the initial effort to document some of the cultural resources and sacred sites that became really foundational to the eventual Bears Ears monument proposal, really documenting sites where objects of archaeological significance, places that were central to creation stories, places that were significant. He took us on an afternoon when a classic desert southwest thunderstorm came in and rolled out fiercely and quickly, and we happened to be in the place where he took us just as the storm was clearing and the sun came out and bathed the field in golden light and really kind of set the scene. And Mark took us to this place that was very significant for him and he told us the story about how in 1968, Robert Kennedy came to the Navajo reservation and visited with some members of the Navajo Nation, elders in particular. And Mark was very young. And he was just kind of running around and playing with friends. Then his father stopped him and said, you know, listen to what these elders have to say. And he said he listened and they were talking about the land and all of these sacred places on the landscape that they wanted to communicate to Bobby Kennedy were very significant and why they merited protection. This really became a driving force in Mark's life and it really led to some of the work that he did that ended up not just informing the content of the Bears Ears proposal, but really helping to bring the five tribes together to advocate for protection of this shared culturally significant landscape. It was a remarkable afternoon and very central to the story that we ended up telling in the book. And I will just never forget the time we spent with him.

Steve Strom: I was there as well and I was listening raptly, but also as a photographer I was overwhelmed by the light at the time, but also the wind blowing through the trees and the droplets of water coming. Down and the magical sense of the desert. It was an overwhelming experience for every sense feeling rain on your face, anyway. Every sense was excited at that moment, and I think it probably stands out among the many, many fantastic experiences that we had. It turns out that I'm Rebecca's grandfather. And we came to this place in very, very different ways. And perhaps Rebecca would like to at least provide her perspective on how we managed to join this particular enterprise.

Rebecca Robinson: We have been traveling together as a family to this country for decades, and so this was a landscape with which we both were very familiar and deeply invested in its future. And so I think that we never had the opportunity to collaborate professionally and when an opportunity presented itself, we jumped at the chance to work together.

Steve Strom: I didn't know whether Rebecca would want to confess to this because working with me carries certain burdens. I'm not an easy person to work with, even though I perhaps come across as somewhat gentle and unassuming, I do have pretty strong views. And the thing that gives me great pride is that Rebecca matches them and then some.

Rebecca Robinson: On simultaneously a lighter and more adventuresome note, we also had the opportunity to travel with a group of Mormons who were embarking on an annual pilgrimage along what is known as the Hole in the Rock Trail, which is a trail that was taken by some of their ancestors who were directed by leadership in the Mormon Church to travel from southwest Utah. Across absurdly rugged and punishing terrain to establish the first Mormon mission in San Juan County, Utah, and so every year they recreate that route in parts by gathering in a bunch of ATV's and traversing this crazy trail of Red rock and sandstone and things that one cannot imagine non motorized recreation tackling. But we had the opportunity to join them on this trek and it was very fun and a little bit hair raising like nothing we've ever done before. What really struck me during our book tour. We've really fortunate to get an in person tour in just before COVID, for which I'm eternally grateful. I think it was really meaningful. To speak with people at book readings and signings, people who either knew bears year's country so well that they could identify particular landscapes we had talked about or tell us about fun and slightly harrowing story they had on some rafting trip. For that reason, we're deeply invested in the future of the landscape and then people who never heard of the area before, but. Who came to the talk out of curiosity and then really wanted to know what the literal and figurative next chapter would be and how they could get involved in efforts to protect the region and connecting with people on that level was? Really meaningful and we still to this day will get emails from people saying. Saying I read your book, are you writing a sequel? I'm using this in my class and so it's been pretty rewarding to see that there's continued interest and part of that is thanks to politics that has kept bears ears very much part of the national conversation for years. Since we published our book.

Steve Strom: One of the more meaningful interactions I had was with Humanities professor at Brigham Young University, who came to one of our meetings and provided entry. Way into many folks in the LDS community, folks who in the future from that point led me to folks who became sources for the next book I did, which is called the Greater San Rafael Swell, which describes another effort at land protection. The work on the Bears ears. Book and the follow up meetings really provided entree into the next phase of my investigations of how people actually can find ways of compromising about land use issues which have long, long been highly controversial.

Catherine Cooper: So the book came out in 2018. What has changed since then?

Rebecca Robinson: Oh my. In some ways it's sort of the more things change, the more they stay the same. But it's important to note in 2017, then President Trump actually took the monument that Obama had created a year prior and reduced its boundaries by 85% from 1.35 million acres that was created by President Obama. The impetus for this came from pressure by Utah Republican politicians to really appease the desires of some of their constituents to reverse the, quote-un-quote “land grab” that in their view, had been orchestrated by the federal government. And that was huge. Predictably, many people sued, I should say, the coalition of tribes and conservation organizations, recreation, advocacy groups, many different people as a coalition filed suit. That is ongoing. But in October 2021 President Biden restored the boundaries of Bears Ears to the delight of many constituents, including, of course, the tribes and their allies, who had been in this fight for quite some time. Additionally, last summer, I believe, the Bears Ears tribes signed an official co-management agreement with the federal government, which is incredibly significant. Having sovereign tribal nations and agencies of the federal government, such as the Forest Service and other federal land management agency Steve mentioned managed together, it's a really unique partnership and it incorporates many of the elements of the Bears Ears Proposal, which could be viewed as combining what we might call Western science with traditional indigenous ecological knowledge that will inform land stewardship. It's a really unique approach and it's quite amazing to see that eight years later, the vision that the tribes had as part of their initial proposal in many ways has come to pass. So that's very significant. Speaking of lawsuits, the state of Utah has sued the federal government, alleging abuse of the Antiquities Act, which again, as we mentioned, Obama used to establish the National Monument, which has been around for over a century. Specifically, the state is citing the language in the Antiquities Act that specifies that the areas protected are, essentially, to paraphrase, no larger than they need to be to protect very specific resources. So, they're alleging that by establishing these huge monuments. [the federal government is] in essence abusing the law and not using it in the way it was intended to be used. The suit is basically aiming to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on this. Should the Supreme Court rule in their favor, that could raise real questions about how future presidents can use the Antiquities Act to set aside areas for protection. So that's significant and that's something to keep an eye on for sure.

And then I would say finally, this is not something that's necessarily associated with Bears Ears alone. It has much broader implications. But in 2021, Deb Haaland, a former US representative from New Mexico, was appointed the first-ever Indigenous Secretary of the Interior. And she's placed great emphasis on honoring tribal sovereignty and increasing indigenous representation in the federal government, particularly in land management agencies and also recognizing traditional ecological knowledge in government land management practices. This has both practical and symbolic implications.

There is, from the view of many different people, a need for healing between tribes and the federal government. Whether it's for broken treaties or trauma inflicted by the system of Native American boarding schools run by the federal government, there are many different reasons why the relationship between tribes and the federal government has been fraught over time, and so I think Secretary Haalland, along with other people in the Biden administration, have placed a great priority on furthering that healing process. I think the significance of that cannot be overstated and it will be really interesting to see how her leadership continues to advance some of those priorities.

Catherine Cooper: So Steve, you mentioned that a second book came out of your original work on Bears Ears. Could you talk about other ways in which your work at Bears Ears has impacted what you have decided to do next or current projects you have on your plates?

Steve Strom: I think that the most important lesson I learned from Rebecca is that allowing voices to speak and to express their own stories is truly a powerful way of informing folks about challenging issues. And as I mentioned before, I have this rather academic way of thinking about issues and I'm trying to parse them and arrange things in logical order. Well, that's not necessarily how people interact with one another. For example, in the book I mentioned earlier, the Greater San Rafael Swell, I was able to talk to folks ranging from miners to county commissioners to representatives of ATV groups and so on, and to capture their story and to describe how with a lot of time, a lot of trust building, political leadership it's really possible to come to some compromise that allows peoples’ spiritual and economic connection with the land to be incorporated into larger landscape conservation. So that book came out again by the University of Arizona Press in 2020. And I was going to do a follow up book centered in Utah around the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. But COVID intervened.

I decided instead to look at a conservation issue around an area in Arizona where I had lived for 22 years, specifically the Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, and I was interested once again in trying to understand how it's possible to do large landscape conservation in a way that incorporates the views and needs of a very broad range of stakeholders. I've just submitted that manuscript for review to the University of Arizona Press. It's called Adapting to a Changing World, and describes four conservation efforts in Arizona and New Mexico. And again, the common themes to reaching consensus on challenging issues is a lot of time building a lot of trust and being willing to work together. The shortest time it took to reach consensus on any of these agreements, I looked at five years and the typical was 10 and the extreme value was 25 years. It's that kind of time that's needed.

The thing that most concerns me and perhaps vexes me at this point is that on the one hand, it's possible to reach these agreements [if] you allow enough time, which wasn't available in the case of Bears Ears. On the other hand, we're facing really urgent needs to protect large landscape in service of providing habitat for a wide range of species, allowing them to room to move and migrate. It's also going to be necessary to protect watersheds, which are typically huge, and trying to figure out how to do that for a mosaic of tribal, private and publicly held lands is an incredible challenge, and we have to meet it quickly. And yet. It takes a long time to incentivize conversation and to build the trust necessary in order to reach some sort of satisfactory agreement. So I don't know how it's going to be possible to meet the conservation challenges that we face on the time scales that are important given the fact that the pace of human interactions and trust building is just a very, very slow one.

Rebecca Robinson: I am also working on a book in the early stages about another indigenous-led conservation movement. This one is centered in the Pacific Northwest [where I live] and it also involves an intertribal coalition, although this one is much larger. It’s a coalition of nearly 60 Native American Tribes in the Northwest supported, as was true in Bears Ears, by their allies in the conservation recreation community, among others. [The coalition] is advocating for the removal of four hydroelectric dams on the Lower Snake River in Eastern Washington state. They're doing that in order to save several species of salmon from extinction. This is one [issue] with plenty of data to back it up, that decades ‘worth of scientific data show that these dams have contributed to a catastrophic decline in the salmon population, and advocates say that removing the dams will help to restore a free-flowing river, in which salmon can thrive and not face many of the threats that come with trying to navigate dams and the reservoirs behind them on this rather epic journey they make to the Pacific Ocean and then back to their natal streams to spawn the next generation.

Similar to the Bears Ears proposal, the [tribes emphasize] the need to protect physical landscapes and natural resources, but also that by not doing so, their cultural and spiritual identity is under threat.. as self- identified salmon people, salmon are central to their culture and physical and spiritual sustenance. For that reason, they and many others view this issue as about more than conservation and. ecological restoration. It is, at its core, a social and environmental justice issue, and, as was true with Bears Ears, there are many who oppose this movement and this plan, among them farmers who rely on the dams, reservoirs to irrigate the crops, public utilities who sell the power generated by those dams to their customers, barge transportation companies, which would no longer be able to transport grain and fertilizer and other goods as far as they can with these particular dams in place and then others who question the wisdom of removing infrastructure that generates clean energy at a time when some Northwest states have set really ambitious goals for cutting carbon emissions in the era of climate change. Dam removal advocates note that this energy can be replaced by other renewable sources, but some of that infrastructure has yet to be built. This. Is one of these debates that's been raging for decades between different stakeholder groups in the courts and at the grassroots with little movement. But today, for several different reasons, the campaign to breach the dams has really been gaining momentum, and there are even signs that leaders in the Biden administration are open to the idea, not outright supportive but open to considering it among the suite of other options to help restore salmon populations. The issues speak to a lot of the same things that concern the Biden administration and administrations past, namely renewable energy, social and environmental justice, climate change, and, very similar to Bears Ears, they're strengthening relationships with tribal nations.

Catherine Cooper: I'll admit that I want to read all of your books. So what would you like readers to take away from your book, and who have you found is your audience?

Rebecca Robinson: I think that our audience has proven to be surprisingly diverse. [Voices from Bears Ears] was released by an academic press, so naturally we assumed that some of our audience would hail from the academic community. But it seems to have had enough broad appeal that we've discovered that everyone from grassroots environmental advocates to people who, as I said, have never engaged with these issues or know the landscape well at all, have really engaged with the book. And really, I think the themes in the book are broad enough and relevant enough to a large swath of people in the United States, that there's really something for almost everyone to connect to in the book, whether it's the future of rural America, what it takes to achieve political compromise, the future of conservation and just a host of other issues that I think make it relevant and compelling to a large number of people. I would like people to take away, especially in such a polarized era, that achieving compromise, whether it's on public lands issues or other thorny cultural and political debates requires all parties to come to the table in good faith [and] with open minds, and with an acknowledgement that no one's going to get everything. As one of our sources, the legendary rancher Heidi Redd said, you know, the dinner plate must be split. Everyone's gotta be a little bit unhappy and willing to sacrifice something in order to come together around a shared understanding of what is most important to protect. I think also behind every contentious policy debate are real people, and it would behoove policymakers, especially at the national level, to listen to the voices of all their constituents, not just the loudest ones, the ones with access to a megaphone, but people who historically have been overlooked and/or excluded from these conversations. Connected to that is that planning for the future requires acknowledging the past. Whether that's acknowledging people who, as I was just saying, may have been excluded and/or overlooked by decision makers [in] these critical conversations, or in the case of Bear Ears, there's a lot of painful history there between different groups. And I think part of moving forward on these issues, in a respectful and amicable way, is [acknowledging] some of that painful history and figuring out how to move forward in a way to heal old wounds, but also build new relationships based on a foundation of mutual understanding and respect.

Steve Strom: [For] most conservation efforts to succeed, one, they ought to start locally and when you have national or statewide conservation groups on the one hand and state and county government on the other hand, getting involved at the very beginning, it's more likely that you wind up with polarized discussions. Whereas if conversation starts slowly on a local level and people can come up with a shared vision, you're much more likely to build up from the grassroots to a solution and it's at that point that I think that political leadership becomes important. But until you get to that point, if conversation starts at too high a level too soon and proceeds too quickly, the chances of success are not very high. So I agree with everything that Rebecca said. But again, meeting on the land among people who belong to that land and vice versa, is really the key to conservation success. And conservation and success that includes not only land protection but protection of the cultural values of people and their economic future.

Rebecca Robinson: As we saw with Bears ears, the future of conservation will almost certainly involve finding a way to combine Western science, very data-driven science with indigenous traditional ecological knowledge. I think we're really seeing that begin to be integrated in an official [federal] government capacity and I think that may well be the way of the future in terms of decision makers trying to find ways of addressing and mitigating the adverse effects of climate change. They’re looking to indigenous leaders who successfully stewarded landscapes for many thousands of years for ideas and approaches to helping with approaches to wildfires and water protection and things of that nature. And so I think we're starting to see that happen in an official capacity at the government policy level. And I would expect that to continue. Obviously so much depends on leadership and other circumstances. There's no way we could predict at present, but I do think that's going to be a key component of conservation initiatives in the future.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much.

Rebecca Robinson: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Steve Strom: I hope you get a sense that enjoy one another's company and there's often a lot of verbal sparring because we each have our own way of looking at the world. But nevertheless, I've had an enormous amount of fun, and as I said, I've learned a lot, not just from the folks with whom we talk, but certainly from. OK, didn't think that way when we started to work together.

Rebecca Robinson: It's been a tremendous gift to get to work with Steve, especially at this point in our lives. It's been really special and I have learned a tremendous amount as well, including different ways of viewing a landscape that at first blush is just - the scale is so vast. And yet there are so many subtleties to see at the ground level. So getting to see that landscape through Steve's eyes, I think, gave me a more nuanced appreciation of it.

Steve Strom: Well, the very best thing did was to produce a great granddaughter.

]]> Creating Inclusive Museums ]]> Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/4643D5A2-A460-02D5-BC123FD0413DDAC7.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-465B4243-DDC7-D38E-65552B3C5A9CD7B4 Creating Inclusive Museums National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Dr. Porchia Moore, Dr. Rose Paquet, and Aletheia Wittman about advocating for and building inclusive museums. 1388 no full 145

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Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with ... Dr. Porchia Moore: Hi. My name is Dr. Porchia Moore. I'm the rotating program head of Critical Museum Studies at the University of Florida. Dr. Rose Paquet: Hi. I'm Rose Paquet. I am an independent scholar and artist living in California. Aletheia Wittman: I'm Aletheia Wittman. I am an independent consultant and coach working with museums and the cultural heritage sector. I am in Seattle. Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you all so much for joining us today. To kick off the conversation, I'd like to ask each of you how you became involved with the discussion of inclusion in museums. What are your stories? Aletheia Wittman: The way that I came to this subject and personal connection with this subject, is really through starting my graduate studies at the University of Washington. I was getting a degree in museum studies. Rose and I were in the same class. We had different tracks to the research and to projects that we were doing. But through seeking out resources, voices, some practices that were emerging in the field related to inclusion that we really were looking to, to understand inclusion better, so that it could inform our research and our areas of inquiry. We were really feeling at a loss for where to go for those resources. So for us, it was really this connection that we had, that we were both interested in subjects that are leading us to asking new questions about inclusion, "Who's talking about inclusion? What are the different frameworks for talking about inclusion?" For me, I was really interested in the lens of social justice as the fore of how I was investigating emerging curatorial issues in museums. I was interviewing people at different art museums that were talking about how they were committed to social justice. I really wanted to understand, what was the conversation like, before I arrived as an emerging scholar and person who wanted to enter the field. I was really wanting to know, "Where can I build my work from? And how can I find community in accessing information about inclusion?" Really building and making my practice one that I felt ethically good about, both as someone who wanted to work in museums and a scholar. Dr. Rose Paquet: Like Aletheia said, we met when we were in this graduate program, both investigating questions of inclusions from different perspectives and from different projects. I'd moved to Seattle from living in Alaska and working on repatriation projects for a museum called the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska. I had experienced a sense of vibrancy around museum really being a place and a resource for the community in terms of the stories that were being told and how they did their work. In Seattle, I was working with an organization that was offering art classes and museum visits to adults who were experiencing homelessness or recovering from homelessness. That became the focus of my work in the museology program; really trying to look at it from the perspective of people who tend to not be included in museums. In fact, I would encounter homeless people sitting outside the museum in Seattle and felt this dissonance of, "We want the museum to be for all people and for our community, and here are people who maybe we consider not part of our community, although they're sitting right here.” What are the resources we have? We have shelter. We have art. We have these things that provide wellness. All sorts of things for people." I don't think in a prescriptive way. Whatever it is, it is valuable regardless of your background. I was focusing my work on that. From the perspective of, "People who had been homeless and who were homeless, how would they want to engage with the museum? What would be meaningful to them?" That’s how we started the Incluseum —as a space that could connect people, connect ideas, and show that this is a network and there are a lot of people who care about these matters. Together we create more strength for this work to happen in the world, rather than working in isolation or in a way that you think, "I'm the only one who cares," which is really saddening and can be discouraging, so building that momentum together. Dr. Porchia Moore: It's so interesting, every time we share that story it's like I get excited because, quite literally, discovering the work that Aletheia and Rose began changed my life. In 2011, I was enrolled in a library information science program at the University of South Carolina. I had been awarded a Laura Bush 21st Century Leadership Librarian Grant. It stands for Cultural Heritage Informatics Leadership Librarian, or CHIL Librarian. It was a small cohort of us, about eight. Our responsibility was to look across the GLAM sector, so galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, and identify and attempt to solve some really critical problems across the GLAM sector for the 21st century. My mother was a fourth grade teacher. She was largely in charge of organizing her school field trips, so I would go with her. Most weekends, instead of us going to a football game or a basketball game, we would hop in the car and go check out a historic site. My mother was really into history and culture. Her love of history and culture definitely shaped my love and passion and understanding of it. So being in this doctoral program where our entire lens was looking at problem solving across the GLAM sector. And we could also specialize, so I specialized in museums. I also earned a graduate certificate in museum management. One of the critical issues that was really important for me is, as someone who was born and raised in the Deep South, someone who is female bodied and Black, when I would go on these trips, I would be invigorated by beauty and the history and memory, and all of that, but I would often feel like there was a lot missing, a lot of narratives missing. I really wanted to try to also understand why when I would go on these trips, I would either be the only person or one of a small handful of people of color. So that was my original guiding question in my doctoral program and my doctoral research. Then I was really fortunate enough to be able to have a mentor and connect with other doctoral students in the education department who introduced me to critical race theory and this notion around scholarship as a form of activism. So thinking about activist scholarship and thinking about the power of problem solving within that context. Within the context of museums, thinking about repatriation, restoration, social justice, as Aletheia mentioned. I became really, really frustrated because I was not seeing language or ideology or even analytical frameworks that helped me really understand and unpack this issue of barriers to participation in museums. Then somehow I discovered The Incluseum. I was like literally shouting, "Oh, my gosh, these people speak my language. I found my people." So I reached out. I think I heard back from both Aletheia and Rose, but I know that Rose and I spoke for well over an hour in our first conversation. I was so elated. I was looking for new language and new rhetoric, so words like liberation. One of the things that I really did not understand is why within museums we were constantly still having a conversation about diversity, because diversity is a really hegemonic term that does not in any way speak to dismantling current systems of practice or thinking about future building . So this notion around inclusion, I thought to have this collaborative inquiry space where we could all collectively unpack what that word inclusion meant for us in our little part of the globe was really, really important. Dr. Rose Paquet: We'd been talking about publishing a book for a few years prior to working on this concrete project. We thought, "Oh, it'd be fun to do something like this together." Bounced around different ideas. It seemed that with the coming 10-year anniversary of The Incluseum, and of our work together, it was a good time to look back this last decade and everything that transpired in this work together, and what we've learned, so that we can also look forward and position ourself for the future. I was finishing my doctoral studies, this was a couple years ago, and it seemed like, "Wow, maybe some of this research I'm doing for my dissertation could be well suited for the book." So these different pieces started to come together about what this book could include with different reflective pieces, and then a bit of a research piece, and then a looking forward piece. I was like, "Wow, here we go. This is it. We’ve got it." Dr. Porchia Moore: I will also jump in and just kind of say, I think, like she said, we have been talking about writing a book for a really long time. I also feel like a kind of catalyst for writing the book was, especially at the height of the quarantine and COVID-19, was kind of taking a critical assessment of the field in general. In particular in 2020, when we saw so many museums closing and people being laid off and furloughed and we saw open letters, that museum landscape seemed really, really rocky, if you will. We thought it was the perfect time to be able to take an assessment, to be able to look back, especially in light of this notion around museum activism. Rose, Aletheia, and I were dubbed museum activists very early on. We were trying to figure out what that really meant, but we were identified as change agents. I think we all collectively felt like change agents, but I think, like Rose said, it was just a perfect timing to look back at the impact of The Incluseum as a project, look at all of these wonderful collaborators that we've been able to work with for about a decade. And how all of that synergy coming together at varying conferences, from AAM to Museum Computer Network to Museums and the Web, to AASLH, NCPH, all of these different conferences, being able to always galvanize and network with people, and continue to have these really rich, powerful conversations around inclusion. So it was really exciting for us to think about looking at where we started. Aletheia Wittman: A lot of those conversations about doing the book in general really led to a lot of conversations that became the outline for what the book was going to include. As Rose was talking about, there was this sense of we're looking back at this project at 10 years, and we're in this reflective place in thinking about, "What is it that The Incluseum has been? What are we thinking about in terms of its role?" And also what it's been in relationship with many other collaborators and people who have been asking questions, sometimes together with us at varying times. These other projects that have coexisted with us. So we wanted to start off the beginning of the book reflecting on our own personal stories. So you'll find that. We wanted to start by thinking about and introducing the question itself that brought us all together, "What is inclusion?" So we invite the reader into that background. That has kind of been the question that the project has turned on. We move from there to a genealogy of looking back. Both at the project, but in context of the developing discourse of inclusion in museums from our specific vantage point. I think it's been very important for us to always be naming, to the reader and to people we're in dialogue with, that we're telling a story about inclusion in museums, specifically from our vantage point in this project. So situating ourselves, and also recognizing that there's a lineage that our work is indebted to that goes back decades and decades. We are picking up and adding to this emerging story of what we understand inclusion in museums to be, and that story's going to continue to change. So we needed to do the history. We needed to lay that out and to open it up. And to recognize so many of our colleagues and friends and coworkers in asking critical questions about inclusion, but we also wanted to build that book towards the future focus. We move from past to present to future as the trajectory of the book and how it's structured. At the end of every chapter, we pose these critical questions for the reader to invite in the reader, tapping into their own experiences, which we can't speak on behalf of, but we know is part of the story that we're trying to tell. So we wanted all these invitations to consider inclusion and to think about how it's evolved in our understanding. And that we can continue to provoke questioning about it in the future, and that we all need to be doing that from our different vantage points, our different roles. The backgrounds that we bring. The localized histories or organizing, potentially, we've been involved in. So there's a bit of a back and forth we try to establish with the reader throughout the book. That probably comes from our background blogging. You're really putting yourself out there and you're really hoping you get a dialogue. That's the whole hope. But in a book, you're a bit stuck in your own narrative. I think now that the book's out, that's been something that's been really fun, is now we really get to engage in some of those dialogues with readers because we have always thrived off of that in our work. So really, the user experience and the reader experience is the whole point of writing the book. Dr. Porchia Moore: I'm not going to speak on the future of The Incluseum, but I think often what I envision for the book is a multitude of things. One, I envision and hope that many if not all museum studies programs read the book to learn and understand this amazing intellectual and professional journey of taking a single word and excavating, mining, expanding upon this single concept as a means to evoke powerful change in the field. It is my hope then that once people sort of understand all of this work that has taken place in the last decade, that ... I feel like really strongly that we're in a new place of change and that we're in a new cycle of looking at whether it's focusing on a new word or a new framework or a new methodology. I'm really excited about some of the emerging museum professionals that I'm meeting. My own students who are just killing it in terms of thinking about critical museum work, asking all kinds of new questions, pioneering really amazing research. So I think part of that vision, part of that hope, is that we will see The Incluseum. Aletheia Wittman: One of the hallmarks I think of The Incluseum project from the start has been this core of collaborative inquiry. I think one of the things that's happened as a result is that it's somewhat been a platform that responds to the call of collaborators, emerging subjects or events that matter, or bring more people together in a networked way. So that has meant we kind of move I think at the speed of ... maybe trust is a good way to say it. As many people have said before, moving at the speed of trust, in that we have a lot of ideas. But sometimes to prove the idea or to get a real sense of where to place our efforts, we listen a lot to where conversations are going or open ourselves up to hear from people where they'd like us to go. I think that at this particular time in museums, there has been such a radical remaking and resetting of all the things that museums thought were so stable and being shaken up, that there's still time to figure out what's ahead and where we should go, because there's a lot that we've all been through. There’s a lot of things that are emerging from this moment, like the unionizing movement and the conversation about unionizing. There's a lot about pay transparency and museums as workplaces that are beholden to kind of the ethical discourses about how people are supported, their mental health, their overall wellbeing. So how are museums becoming those places of work that have the bars set high and help set museums out to be a model instead of lagging behind. One thing that I think we can share a little bit more about is also just our collaborative process as authors, which I think many might relate to as the pandemic has been happening. We've all kind of shifted communication styles. The nature of work has shifted. As we've been talking about the book, things have been thrown up in the air. We, as authors, I think writing a book together, where we all contributed to every chapter--I'm curious to hear from Porchia and Rose a little bit about that experience of creating a new kind of collaborative model for even writing the book. That was responsive to the pandemic. We kind of go through all these things in the book of what our collective realities were like. We start right there because that was our background when we were putting the pieces of this book together. We tried to be explicit about a little bit of how it happened, in the book itself, to pull back the veil of even, what does writing a book look like these days? Especially one of this kind that is really connected to a decade of work. Our coming to that and having conversations about it. Being transparent and sharing that with readers. I'm curious if Porchia and Rose wanted to say more about that collaborative class of writing. Dr. Porchia Moore: This is going to sound very Hallmarky, or whatever, but it's true. It did not feel, for me, like anything other than the beautiful way that the three of us have always worked for the last decade. The warmth and the empathy and the grace that we give each other all the time, the care. We're special to one another and I just think it shows up in how we communicate, how we write, the process for ... As Rose said, I think even when sometimes we're texting one another or we'll have a Zoom check-in, I think that over the years we've just always respected one another, and have always been collectively inspired by the other. So for me, the process, it just was more sort of formalized, if you will, because we had the outside entities of the editors and the publishers, but really and truly, it just felt like a continuation of how we have been working, whether it's the blog or whether it's workshops or presentations at a conference. I mean, Rose and I, we had a presentation way long ago. I think 20 ... I don't even know. It was at an AAM conference in Atlanta. It was myself, Rose- Dr. Rose Paquet: And it was Margaret Middleton. Mm-hmm. Dr. Porchia Moore: Mm-hmm, Margaret Middleton. Was it even an hour, Rose? We were just like, "Oh, we're not going to do this anymore." We chucked our whole entire presentation. But I think, also, we've done that probably way more than once. We're very responsive, because I think that we're also very reflexive. I think that process of being responsive and reflexive, and just very empathetic and passionate allows us to have a particular way that we work. We're not scripted. I mean, we all sort of come from academia, but I don't think we function in any way as "normal academics." I think we just have a very unique, common ethos that works for us. I don't think everyone could step into the process, but we've been sort of like this since the beginning, so I deeply appreciate it. Dr. Rose Paquet: Me too, so much. And that this way of working together, for me, also mimics the ideas we want to amplify through our work with The Incluseum. And through the book, too, of being responsive, taking time to listen, and that we can't have this sense of urgency if we're trying to build trust. We're putting that in practice through our relationship and our work together. To me, that is super special, and gives integrity to the whole endeavor. Catherine Cooper: Thank you all so much for joining me today. Dr. Porchia Moore: Thank you so much, Catherine. Aletheia Wittman: Thank you, Catherine. Dr. Rose Paquet: Yes, thank you.

]]> Uncovering the Work of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a Forgotten Botanist ]]> Tue, 19 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/1AAA7FAB-C2D7-D868-6527CA0F4FAB0F0D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1B0ACFC0-90C1-2E4C-3A3AA2610CFC5F61 Uncovering the Work of Sara Plummer Lemmon, a Forgotten Botanist National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Wynne Brown, who has been researching the life and work of Sara Plummer Lemmon, and championing the conservation of her scientific illustrations. 656 no full 144

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-

Wynne Brown: My name is Wynne Brown. I am a writer, editor, and graphic designer, and I am based in Tucson, Arizona.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us.

Wynne Brown: It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Catherine Cooper: Could you tell us a bit about how you discovered Sara Plummer Lemmon and what drew you to her?

Wynne Brown: Yeah, I'd be happy to. Way back in, I think 2012 when I was working on the second edition of my book, Remarkable Arizona Women, I ran across a woman of the 1880s who was a botanist and an artist, and she's the woman for whom Southern Arizona's Mount Lemmon is named. She climbed the mountain in 1881 as part of her honeymoon at age 44. I thought that was pretty intriguing.

And then a couple of years later, I learned that the University of California and Jepson Herbaria Archives in Berkeley, California had six linear feet of material on Sara Lemmon and her husband John Gill Lemmon. I thought that was pretty intriguing. I didn't know whether or not it was field notes or illustrations or diaries or letters. It turned out to be 1200 pages of Sara's handwritten letters. I made three trips to Berkeley and photographed them all and moved them onto my hard drive and then started reading them. I was just captured by Sara's observation, her voice, what appealed to her. And then when I also started looking at her artwork, and I have a background as a scientific illustrator, I was just totally captured by her and decided that I really, really wanted to do a book because I did not want her story to be neglected any longer.

Catherine Cooper: What was your process for distilling and working with such a large body of correspondence in Sara's collection?

Wynne Brown: I think every different biographer brings a different filter. To me, the fact that she was both a scientist and an artist was really one of the filters that really appealed to me. Also, the fact that she just completely reinvented herself because she was born in Maine, educated in Massachusetts, then educated more and worked in New York City and then moved to California at the age of 33 because of horrific health and that she constantly had bronchitis and pneumonia and decided that California would be a healthier place to live even though she knew no one there.

She just basically reinvented herself from a New England gym teacher to a Western scientist and artist. That whole transition was one of the filters that I used to go through all this material and try to see what are the pieces that I want to keep in order to build an accurate, fair story. With 1200 pages of letters and then everything else is there, you can't use everything, but you have to figure out what filter fits for the story, the particular story that you're telling about somebody.

Catherine Cooper: It sounds like both a challenge and a delight.

Wynne Brown: That sums it up perfectly. That's exactly what it was. She just grabbed me and I would walk around the mountains around Tucson or walk around town with her voice in my ear because she has a very strong voice. In the book, it was important to me to keep her voice and not inflict my voice on hers. And so that's a balance that's kind of tricky because I wanted to include enough of her words, yet I had to provide context for the readers so that they had a way of anchoring her into the world at that time.

Catherine Cooper: How would you characterize Sara's impacts on all of these fields that she was involved in, art, science, suffrage?

Wynne Brown: It's such a shame because it's so typical of the time. For example, in the collecting labels of all the plants that they collected, they collected plants all over the West, and the collecting labels are all J.G. Lemmon and wife. Sara's name was not even included on their scientific discoveries. That's so typical of the times where women were just neglected and erased, their effect. I would say that basically her effect in conservation and suffrage and art and science were all just underrated because nobody knew about her.

Catherine Cooper: What would you say is the most surprising thing you learned during your research?

Wynne Brown: I think I would say her resilience. As I mentioned earlier, she had terrible health issues that her lungs were challenged and she was constantly sick. Her husband, John Lemmon, who went by J.G. Lemmon, had been a prisoner of war in both Andersonville and Florence after the Civil War. And so he was very damaged from his war experiences.

These two theoretically frail people managed to climb mountains and camp in wildernesses and go to incredibly remote places, and they just got an astounding amount done in spite of their frailties. I think that was something that really surprised me, and one of the things probably that I admire about her the most is her absolutely relentless curiosity.

Catherine Cooper: Are you continuing to work with Sara's collections and materials, and if so, could you share a bit about those projects?

Wynne Brown: My husband jokes that he married two women, Sara Lemmon and me, because Sara still has not let go of me. When I saw her artwork for the first time back in 2017, there were two boxes that had been donated to the Berkeley archives. In these two relatively small boxes, there were 276 watercolors on paper.

Some of them are in just terrible shape. Some of them have been munched on by insects who liked the paper but not the pigment, so that they look sort of like cutouts. And others of them survived the intervening 140 years really beautifully, and they're in the book. But I resolved way back in 2017 that I wanted to do whatever I could to try to prevent those paintings from deteriorating even further. Through the generosity of a couple of donors plus putting all the proceeds of the book into it, I was able to raise enough money to travel back to Berkeley and to hire an art conservator whose name is Susan Filter to assess the paintings.

This isn't art restoration. This is really art preservation. Technically it's called rehousing and stabilization. It involves basically getting each of these watercolors into their own archival quality folder with a glassine sheet and then put in archival quality boxes so that they won't fall apart anymore. When I first saw them, the archivist hadn't even looked at the contents of the boxes because the paintings were so fragile they were afraid that by taking them out and counting them, that they might just crumble.

Last year, we went back in August. By that time, I had raised enough money that we were able to get the preservation work done on the first 276 paintings. Miraculously, amazingly, the archivist during COVID had discovered two more boxes of paintings, which was about another 200 or so paintings.

I hadn't budgeted enough and hadn't gotten enough funding to be able to finish those, but I'm really excited to say that thanks to a couple of very generous donors, we do have enough money now to go back to Berkeley this summer and finish up rehousing all of the work. I'm just thrilled by that, and especially since some of the work that we're now finding in those new boxes include some paintings from the Santa Catalina Mountains, and that's the mountain range in Southern Arizona just north of Tucson that includes Mount Lemon, which is the mountain named for Sara.

Catherine Cooper: That's absolutely phenomenal. This is a sideways question for you. Are any of the illustrations of the type specimens that Sara and J.G. discovered?

Wynne Brown: It's a little bit hard to say because they were casual about the geographic location. Nobody had GPS in those days, and sometimes they would indicate the location of the plant by where they were camping, and sometimes they were camping a mile or two from where the plant was actually located. So it's a little hard to say whether or not it was for the type specimen, but there are definitely examples of, for example, there's one of a morning glory, which was later named Plummer's Morning Glory in honor of Sara's maiden name.

Catherine Cooper: That's absolutely lovely. What would you like people to away from your book or from the work that Sara has left behind?

Wynne Brown: I think really my primary goal in writing the book is that Sara not be forgotten, that her story not be forgotten. I think that that's actually happening. I'm delighted to say that the book has done really well. It's now in its second printing. It won both a Spur Award and a WILLA Award. The Spur is for Best Western biography. The WILLA Award is for best creative nonfiction.

I wanted to write it in a way that was readable, and I think that succeeded from what people have told me. And I wanted people to really appreciate who Sara was, both as a scientist and as an artist. I think that also is happening. I think maybe one of the lessons that Sara can offer all of us is to really follow your interest and that reinventing yourself can certainly be a success.

Catherine Cooper: That is a fantastic note to have people think about. Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Wynne Brown: Absolutely. It's been such a pleasure, Catherine. Thank you.

]]> Writing about Louisiana Culture ]]> Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/13E0C038-B82F-FF4D-161FCB2B1B35BAA6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1405FDC8-E942-1021-BF0A4B0E7E2402A8 Writing about Louisiana Culture National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Jenny Keegan, the Trade Acquisitions editor at LSU Press, about curating a book series about unique aspects of Louisiana culture and history. 499 no full 143

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with--

Jenny Keegan: Jenny Keegan. I am the Trade Acquisitions editor at LSU Press, responsible for acquiring our titles on regional topics as well as books for general readers. Thank you so much for having me.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us. You are in charge of the Louisiana True Series. Can you talk about what that series is and how the initiative came about?

Jenny Keegan: Yeah, absolutely. The Louisiana True Series is a series of short, fun books. They're running about a 125, a 175 pages, so they make great gifts. And each book introduces the reader to one element of Louisiana culture. Kind of our joke pitch in-house for the series was that each book explores a topic that as a Louisianian you have to explain to out-of-towners. So our first book was Mardi Gras Beads by the wonderful Doug MacCash, and I swear we made that the first one because I was so tired of telling everyone that only tourists flash people for beads. So the first of those books came out in the spring of last year. Since then, we've added Nikesha Williams's Mardi Gras Indians, Rien Fertel's Brown Pelican, and Burke Bischoff's Po'Boy. And then in the spring of next year, we're going to have Jonathan Olivier's Gumbo. We have a lot more in the works, and I encourage your listeners to reach out to me with any suggestions for topics or authors because we want this series to continue to grow.

When we started thinking about this series, it was really a collaborative effort with everyone at the press. So we got together and talked about the series as a whole. Our marketing manager, James Wilson, came up with the title Louisiana True, and we just kind of sat down and started throwing out ideas for topics. I think I sent an all staff email to the press as well, to be like, "What are some things that you would be interested in learning more about or that you think other people would be interested in learning more about?" And they sent me a ton of great ideas.

I've also had authors bring ideas to me that I hadn't considered before. So I'll sometimes reach out to an author and I'll say, "I have a topic in mind. I think you'd be great at it based on your past writing." But then they end up being interested in something completely different. And sometimes it turns out that their other idea isn't a perfect fit for the series, but could be a fit for a standalone book on LSU Press's list because sometimes an author thinks they want to write 35,000 words about a topic, and it turns out they want to write 85,000 words about the topic.

So I mean, it's been a great way to start conversations and hear about what interests people. So far, I have mostly been reaching out to people whose writing I admire to ask them if they're interested in writing a book for the series because it is still pretty new. But I certainly continue to be interested in hearing from people who have ideas, and I would love for people to reach out to me with suggestions and proposals because one of the things that was the goal of this series and that continues to be brought to light the more I work on it, is that Louisiana has a really remarkable and fascinating culture. It was influenced by Native cultures, by French and Spanish colonization, centuries of African enslavement, and by our place on the coast and at the mouth of the Mississippi River. So many people have come to and through Louisiana, bringing their culture with them, and we want the series to really honor and reflect that as much as possible.

Catherine Cooper: When you approach these authors, what are your guidelines for them and who is the audience that you have them write for?

Jenny Keegan: Oftentimes authors will come to me or I will come to them with this series, and they maybe haven’t written a book before and they aren’t sure how to approach it. So I do try to be really collaborative and as helpful as possible. The chief guideline for us has been the word count. So these are running between 25 to 35,000 words. That works out to about 50 to 100 pages in Microsoft Word, depending on if you’re double spacing and what font you’re using. So the main guideline is that length and then the instruction to share the basics of what the food, tradition, place, custom is. Beyond that, I really invite authors to be creative.

So we’ve had books in the series that are written as a very straightforward, chronological accounting of the history of the thing or custom, but other books might look at the topic through snapshots of moments in time, which the Brown Pelican book does. Or could take a more personal lens focusing on people and their experiences in which the Mardi Gras Indians book does. That author, Nikesha Williams, drew very heavily on interviews with Black Masking Indians, and she got some really interesting stories from them about how they came into the tradition, how they continue to make their suits, passed those skills onto their family members and so forth. So essentially, I want the authors to have fun because in my experience when an author is having fun with their topic, that really comes through for the reader and the reader is then able to have as much fun as the author is. So I always encourage authors to look for the elements of each topic that they find the most exciting and interesting and focus on those.

To your question about audience, I would say the audience is anyone from Louisiana who wants to know more about where our traditions came from, and then anyone coming into Louisiana who wants to understand why we are the way we are. They're great books to give someone who's coming to our state for the first time, maybe as a tourist or especially if someone's moving here. These are very good gift books for new Louisiana transplants. But then I've also found, I was born and raised here, and I learned new stuff in every single book. Our authors are just doing such a good job of getting really great interviews, going into archives, pulling out old newspapers, finding all this information that I then get to learn about too. So it's wonderful.

Catherine Cooper: Part of the thing that seems to be underlying this entire series is the uniqueness of culture in Louisiana.

Jenny Keegan: Well, I do think Louisiana has a really unique culture. Like I said, because we're situated right at the mouth of the Mississippi River, there've been so many different cultures that have come in and through Louisiana, and I think all of them have left a mark on our culture and blended together in this really lovely way. There's something special about Louisiana, and I think we as a state, I think people have really cared a lot about preserving those kind of folkways and those cultural traditions from all these different backgrounds, whether it be Native people, Cajun people, Creole people. And we've all kind of lived cheek by jowl, especially in New Orleans, but across the state. So people have really blended their traditions into each other.

I mean, one example that I always think of is in our Po'Boy book, one of the chapters is talking about Vietnamese Po'Boys. And whenever anyone comes to Louisiana and I suggest getting Vietnamese Po'Boys, they're like, "Well, how is that different than báhn mi? And I'm like, it's not. It's báhn mi. These two culinary traditions grew up a lot separately. They grew up separately, and now we've influenced each other because so many Vietnamese refugees came here during the Vietnam War, and that's just one example. But I think there are a lot of things like that in Louisiana where especially because we have such a strong culture around sharing and enjoying food together, it's made it really, I hope, a welcoming place for a lot of different communities and offered a way for different immigrant communities to find a path in to Louisiana culture and making a home here.

The goal of this series is similar to the goal of our press, which is that we want to really communicate to readers the really rich and lovely cultural assets and traditions that Louisiana and the South has to offer. And we're just really proud to be the publisher of record for LSU and for the state of Louisiana. And at our core, we share LSU's mission of advancing knowledge, and we really want these books to do that, but we also want readers to have a good time at the same time.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Jenny.

Jenny Keegan: Thank you so much for having me.

]]> Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration ]]> Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/DB81B831-9B0F-AD3E-B3ABB311D4633B71.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-DBBD7AE8-A33D-7909-417DAF9519B15758 Historical Archaeology and Indigenous Collaboration National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Rae Gould, Holly Herbster, Steve Mrozowski, and Heather Law Pezzarossi about centering indigenous collaboration in their archaeological work in New England. 1233 no full 142

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with... Rae Gould: Hi, I'm Rae Gould and I'm a member of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc. I also serve currently as Executive Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Holly Herbster: Holly Herbster. I am in Pawtucket, Rhode Island today, which is where I also work at the Public Archeology Lab, which we refer to as PAL. And I'm a cultural resource management archeologist and a principal investigator at PAL and also a proud graduate of the UMass Boston Historical Archeology Program. Steve Mrozowski: I'm Steve Mrozowski, I'm director of the Fiske Center for Archeological Research and distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Heather Law Pezzarossi: Hi, I'm Heather Law Pezzarossi. I am an assistant professor at Syracuse University. Catherine Cooper: Welcome. So could you introduce how you all met and got started on this project? Rae Gould: I think the first person out of this gang that I became colleague and friend with was Holly. I was serving as the THPO, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, for my tribe. And as part of cultural resource projects, Holly and I would stay connected about projects. Sometimes we would do walkovers together. I had some training under the Mashpee person, Mark Harding, who was working for Quinna at the time, and just immediately connected with Holly. She and PAL in general do their work in really respectful and engaged ways. I wish every archeologist would watch and listen to how they do their work. Met Steve along the way. He was working on the project for Magunkaquog that Holly had done her MA thesis on or was in the process of doing her MA thesis on, but it became a UMass Boston project. And I think at that time he realized there were tribal people in the area as well. And then eventually Steve became one of my professional mentors and was on my committee for my PhD dissertation. And then Heather is one of his students and one of the many people that he has trained over the years on how to do this work. Steve Mrozowski: I think we actually met, Rae, the first time about that there were these wonderful canoes that were discovered in one of the ponds out there, and they asked us whether we would help with their conservation. But as Rae pointed out, I was working on projects in Ashland, Massachusetts, which was Magunkaquog at the time. And then we had the opportunity to do this project with the Hassanamisco. And I had never really collaborated with indigenous folks before that, and in fact had avoided doing the archeology of indigenous North America because I just didn't feel comfortable doing it. But I really didn't have a model of how it could be done properly. And so I talked to Rae and I met with the tribal council and one of the members, Cheryl Holly at the time, actually raised some fairly serious but correct questions about what we did and how we did it. And so I asked them would they support us doing this work because otherwise we weren't going to do that. And they agreed. Then one of the great things about having great students to work with was Heather came along and she and her now husband, Guido Pezzarossi both worked with me on the project at Hassanamesit woods, which started in 2003. And I think one of the things that I do want to say is that I was at Uppsala University on sabbatical in 2016, and I was writing a book that was supposed to be entitled, the Metaphysics of Archeological Practice. And we had been talking, the four of us about writing this book, and I remember getting emails from Rae saying, “So are we going to do this or are we not?” And I remember coming to it like a really big moment and thinking, so how many people you really think are going to read the Metaphysics of Archeological Practice? Nobody cares about that. And I thought, let's do the Nipmuc book as we referred to it. And obviously that was the right choice. Heather Law Pezzarossi: It was a good choice. I started at UMass Boston at the right time. I think that's what it was. For me, I was just starting out when UMass Boston was just starting out organizing and designing a field project at Hassanamesit woods. Steve was already my advisor, I think by that point. But from there I got to meet Rae and I knew of Holly because she had been at UMass Boston before me, but then I got to know Holly better too. And we've just always been in contact ever since. Rae Gould: We had been presenting from the material that we had worked on and the different sites that are talked about in the book. So it was just kind of this organic unfolding, I think where one point we were like, gee, we should put all this together and write a book or something of some sort. Heather Law Pezzarossi: My very first conference presentation ever, it's a weird conference presentation where there were questions after, which doesn't happen all the time. And I was absolutely terrified because I had given the presentation and I thought it was over. And then somebody asked a question that I couldn't answer, and Rae stood up and defended me. And then from there... Holly Herbster: I was there when that conference happened. So I remember that we all sort of bonded together behind our mama bear. You introduced the connections Rae, but for me, this was kind of a transitional thing from the Magunkaquog site being rediscovered as part of a PAL CRM project for a subdivision, and the little bit of research that we got to do as part of that CRM project. We never have enough time to do the testing we want to do or the research we want to do. So I felt like we had kind of scratched the surface and I became really, really interested in trying to find as much documentary information as I could about the site, which was utilized during this period of intense propagandizing of the John Elliot missionary movement and sort of how native people were represented in the records as well as in the physical remains that were in the ground. And when we realized how important that site was, and UMass Boston was able to come in and do sort of the proper, more full, excavation and analysis of the site after PAL had first done some work there. That turned into an opportunity for me to expand that research and worked perfectly as a thesis topic for me. Rae Gould: We were going on 20 years of knowing each other. We had done these presentations, we had been talking very organically about these sites and the fact that no one had really done a Nipmuc specific book. So that was important. And the other element about it that we all agreed on, I think pretty much immediately was that it'd be something that was really accessible, so that anyone from my tribe could pick this up and read, say a 10th grade education. It wasn't theory, it wasn't for our colleagues, although certainly our colleagues use it. It's a great introduction to both archeology. There's a lot of methodology, there's data analysis, there's interpretation, but it's something that even a high schooler could pick up and read and really get to know Nipmuc history and culture through this lens of archeology. That is just, I think, a really great way to share it. Steve Mrozowski: I've learned so much from all of them, and that's true. Holly, I've learned a lot about perseverance and sticking to it. And Heather was just the most wonderful student you can imagine, just to work with. What's kind of unusual to have four different authors actually be authors on the same book and we knew that that might present a challenge. And the editor at the University of Florida Press was really wonderful. And when we decided that the book would be made accessible to just anybody who could read it, that was another challenge worth fighting. And everybody's a good writer, and that really helped. And it's easily the most satisfying experience. I don't think that would've been the case with others, because I have written with other folks and each one is different. I think it was really important that Rae was the one who said, anybody from the tribe has to be able to pick this up and read it. It was a wonderful thing to get to do. Holly Herbster: I have to say that for me as a CRM archeologist, the idea of gray literature surrounds me every day of the week. I feel like we do a lot of writing and research, and that information doesn't go anywhere. It gets filed on a shelf. I am so, so proud of this book and of our group all working together on it. And I feel like this is a book that I would want to read over and over and over again about other types of archeology in other places. And I don't really see books like this a lot, at least the archeology of the northeast, the places that I work. And so I am hopeful that this book, beyond being so important for telling Nipmuc history, will also be the model for other people to start thinking about how are they doing their archeological work, who are they doing it with, and how are they giving that information back out again in a way that's lasting? Rae Gould: So Steve had written a book with a colleague previously called Living on the Boot, and when I read that book, I was like, if I ever write a book, that's the kind of book that I want to write. And I want it to be fun to read. I want it to be engaging and I want it to be educational and didactic at the same time. So I think I said to everybody like, hey, what about using Living on the Boot as a model? I think it works. Holly Herbster: You're right. I amend my statement that I had never read something like that. I did read Living on the Boot, and that is my same impression. Heather Law Pezzarossi: I think the takeaway for this book is going to be different for everybody. There's a lot of opportunity for people to say at the very basic level, oh, I didn't realize that the historical period heritage of Nipmuc people was so rich. But beyond that, there's a lot of potential for other realizations as well. There's potential for talking about issues of materiality. I'm talking about it from an academic sense, but materiality doesn't have to be this academic thing. It just has to do with how objects relate to personhood. Steve Mrozowski: For me, it was a real learning process and the Nipmuc have been just very welcoming. And Rae is, is just an easy person to work with. And what I'm most proud of about this book is that it's readable and it tells a story and we bring to life these folks in a way that makes them real. And it's not just the artifacts, the material culture, but the work that Holly did with all the documents. And the book begins with those three amazing vignettes of individuals and their experiences. And right off the bat, that sets the tone for the rest of the book. And by the way, I should say we're still working. And one of the reasons that these books are important is because I now have a new Nipmuc student, Britney Wally, and she came to this through the book. That's what we hope the book does more than anything, brings those relationships out and fosters them. And so I just hope this serves as a model for how other people should do it and I think it has. I the fact that the Society for American Archeology gave us the scholarly book of the year award, the fact that they were able to recognize that this was an amazing scholarly product with the ability to communicate to everybody, I think shows how good it is and how proud we all are of it. It's all really good archeology and it's very scientific if you want to use that term. And I always have found it great that when I talked to Cheryl Holly about it, she likes the science part of it the best. And I think that's what the Fiske Center represents, that it brings a lot of really good western science to bear on serving indigenous people. And that's the way it should have been from the start. Heather Law Pezzarossi: I have never done archeology that wasn't geared toward collaboration. That was where I started. I just kind of showed up at UMass Boston when this was beginning. But the real lesson of collaboration is that it takes a long time, and that's not really how academia is designed for these projects that take decades to come to fruition. It's not the model. So for me to just sort of realize right off the bat, just like in every other aspect of your life, rich relationships take a long time to develop. This one's going to as well, and you need to have that in mind from the get go. And second of all, be willing to be wrong. That's also not how academia operates normally. Holly Herbster: I started my long archeology career not learning that collaboration was the way you should do everything and how everything is done. A good part of my career as a CRM archeologist and as an academic was done prior to developing relationships with indigenous communities in the places that I worked all over New England. And I've gotten to the point where when I look back on that, I can't imagine not doing that now. It's really opened my eyes to the responsibilities of doing this profession that I do love and understanding that there are those hard conversations that you need to have sometimes and that it is a process of learning every single day. I am a completely different archeologist today than I was 30 years ago, and I'm always learning. I'm changing the way I think about something. And it's all based on these ongoing relationships that are continuing to be built. Steve Mrozowski: The phrase that I've been using a lot is get ready to give it up. In other words, you just got to say, tell me what you need, what you want. Will you support this? And you've got to be willing to just listen to what I think of as the airing of grievances. There's a release of emotion that people are going to share with you, and you've got to be comfortable with that. And I have to be honest here, working with the Hassanamisco has been easy for me because of the individuals involved. It's like I really love it. Working with some other groups, it's been a lot more challenging. And yet the one thing that I did learn early on that continues to come true is you need to be willing to understand that there's a history there, that if you are interested in it, you have to understand that it's not your position to be the authority. Your position is to listen. Rae Gould: You need to ask if people even want you doing this work and approach it and say, here are my skills. I'm a historian, I'm an anthropologist. I have been thinking about this geographic region or about this particular topic. Is this something that would be of interest to you and/or how can my expertise and my skills be of service to your people? You don't know how many times in one academic year I have to actually say to my colleagues, well, have you asked if they want this work being done? And for many people who are experienced academics and maybe into their 50s and even 60s now, that's the first time they've actually heard that. Holly Herbster: We as archeologists need to be more forceful in kind of changing the way that we do things and understanding that the system that we operate in with our Section 106 compliance and our federal and state regulations needs to be changed. And we need to advocate for that because we're the people who are doing that work under those regulations because as it has been made clear today, true collaboration and true consultation takes time. It needs to involve people, engaging with each other, giving people an opportunity to have the time, especially if there are multiple people involved in a conversation to be able to talk about things. So I think that we have a responsibility as the non-indigenous people to kind of push the way that we're doing things into a new way of doing things. Heather Law Pezzarossi: One of the ways that collaboration can begin is with allyship. Steve Mrozowski: One of the big things that we are doing and have to do is not only reach out and treat with respect the indigenous folks who we hope to collaborate with, that I think is a given. But I think one of the things that maybe folks don't realize is that we have just as big a challenge reeducating our colleagues and the people who run our universities, or institutions like PAL, because where I am at UMass Boston, we're on record as wanting to be an anti-racist community. And there's a stress on community engaged research. But believe me, when it comes time to have somebody come up for tenure, the colleagues are not going to look at community-based research the same way they're going to look at "scientific research" and good collaboration in my mind is good science. That's the thing that I always hit my colleagues with who view themselves as scientists. This is what good science should look like. Believe it or not, they're harder to get to than some of the indigenous folks. Because I always understand why the indigenous folks are like, why should I trust you? That I totally understand. But why my own colleagues won't trust you and think that, oh, you're just doing this because it's trendy and stuff like that. I really lay into them when they do that. And even my most difficult colleagues, they might come around after a while and it's funny because they'll like look down the hall to make sure nobody hears them say, “I'm really starting to see that what you've been talking about, there's something to it.” It's a big challenge to overturn at least a century, if not longer, worth of practice. But God, it's so liberating and you feel for the first time you're actually doing something that serves a community. Holly Herbster: I occasionally have to reach out to an area and to tribal groups that I'm not familiar with. And one thing that I've really learned from these relationships that I've built in New England is that you do start in a very formal way and approach tribal leadership. And right off the bat, I always make sure that I indicate who I am, what my reason for reaching out is, what my background is. And I just ask, is there any information that I need to provide to you about me and the work that I'm doing or I'm proposing to do? And who would be the best person to reach out to? So just ask the questions right away. Just don't go charging in. Heather Law Pezzarossi: I also think that in terms of the idea of protocol, you have to be pretty flexible with that. It's going to be different for every group. There are manners, I guess, for lack of a better word, but also understanding that groups are going to respond differently to different kinds of requests, and that relationships can be formed in all different kinds of ways. Steve Mrozowski: So right now I have a project we're doing with the Shinnecock on Long Island, and one of the things that we realized was we started out trying to formalize a set of protocols, and we wanted it to be a totally encompassing protocol. And then it became obvious that we were going to have to change that to a sort of project by project protocol. And the reason why that was was because the Shinnecock wanted to do things in a very all-encompassing manner. So they took the notion of protocols very seriously. And so we're still in that negotiating process. And I think that the most important lesson I've learned is that each group of people is different. Each tribal nation is different. So you just have to be flexible and see what they want. But I think most importantly is it has to be sincere. Rae Gould: It's not just about being a research professor. There are many ways to do this work and that this book can be a model for, and I'm just super, super grateful that we've gotten to know each other, that I've had the honor of knowing and working with Steve and Heather and Holly. If I never do another thing in my life, I'm good. I'm happy and really, really pleased that we did this and just thankful for their friendship and for all of the knowledge that they're doing. Steve Mrozowski: Well, one thing I will say is that we're all still working together. I'm working on two other projects with Holly. And Rae, and Heather and I have been talking about another project with the Hassanamisco where we want to sort of repopulate the Nipmuc landscape today. And so I would expect that this won't be the last time that we do what we did for this book. And that's... I sure hope not, anyways, so I don't see any reason to stop. Holly Herbster: I just want to say this is, for me, the proudest accomplishment of my professional career. And I don't see a way to top it. Maybe we can, I hope we can, but this collaboration and these relationships that I've built with my colleagues have been so important to me and are really going to guide my future career for as long as it lasts. Heather Law Pezzarossi: This has been such a rich experience, and I think one of the most important things about our project is that going forward and just kind of questioning that idea that indigeneity is something past facing and refiguring it so that we can think about indigenous futures, is a project for all disciplines but an especially important one. Steve Mrozowski: That's the way archeology has treated indigenous history. Like they ended and it hasn't ended. Everybody's still here. And that's why we have to be future oriented and reconnect those pasts to futures, because that's what it's all about, the future. It's not about the past. I mean, it's about having the past serve the future. And that's what this book does. Catherine Cooper: Thank you all so much for sharing your insights and experience with us. Holly Herbster: This was great. Rae Gould: Thank you, Catherine, for reaching out to us. Steve Mrozowski: Thank you. Holly Herbster: Get us for comedy hour. Catherine Cooper: Bye everyone, have a wonderful Saturday. Steve Mrozowski: Bye folks. Heather Law Pezzarossi: Bye. Steve Mrozowski: Bye-bye.

]]> Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest ]]> Tue, 07 Nov 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D6323A54-F1F5-7692-E2188824A26125B2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D632E056-F423-0B29-D3209E74A9D3F410 Archaeological Field School at Kisatchie National Forest National Park Service Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Erlend Johnson, from the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab, and Matt Helmer, Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest, about archaeological explorations at Kisatchie National Forest. 660 no full 141

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Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst:  Hi, my name is Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst and I'm here with:  Erlend Johnson: Erlend Johnson, I'm the project director of this project for the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, Louisiana Public Archaeology Lab.  Matt Helmer: And I'm Matt Helmer, I'm the Forest Archaeologist for Kisatchie National Forest and an affiliate professor with Louisiana State University.  Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Thank you all for letting us come and visit the field school today. I guess you could start off by telling us a little bit about this site and why there's a field school happening here.  Erlend Johnson:  OK, so there are a couple of sites that we're at right now. They were first identified about 20 years ago in 2003, by a phase one survey by Pan American Associates. They did a number of shovel tests, and this site was considered to be especially relevant because they were coming up with a large area and large densities of artifacts. They were finding as many as 500 flakes in a 50 by 50 centimeter unit, and they were finding a variety of points. There's a possible base of a Clovis, there's San Patrice points, and there are a number of earlier points as well. So, there's a whole spectrum of remains all the way from the historic period to possibly Paleoindian, and there are three large concentrations. This was deemed by the Forest Service to be one of the more relevant sites to study. That’s why we came here and why we decided to do a field school here. I don't know if Matt has any other things to add to that.  Matt Helmer: This particular site that we're working on was part of a large hurricane relief project that we initiated after hurricanes Laura and Delta significantly impacted western Louisiana, almost flattening the entire district here. The upturned trees were everywhere, and this district has thousands of archaeological sites, and the archaeological sites were particularly hard hit as trees fall down and basically the root balls pull up archaeological material to the surface and rip archaeological contexts out. We basically put together a relief request in association with all of our other resource areas for the Forest Service, like salvage timber and all of our other resources. We put some of the money that we received from Congress towards both archaeological salvage that we're doing here as well as doing archaeological testing on some of our impacted sites to see if they're eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or not. This site immediately, as Erlend mentioned, stood out to us because it's about 100 acres in size, combined. It’s broken up into two sides, but it's really one very large site. We’re on the Drakes Creek drainage here, it basically follows a big floodplain. We're on a high point just above that, just a few miles from the Whiskey Chitto River. It's a very important location that would have been a great place to set up a camp or possibly have a village site. We have the entire sequence of occupation, as Erlend mentioned, of the peopling of the Americas, potentially from 13,000 years ago and the Ice Age, all the way through up to the present day. That’s why we chose this particular site. In addition to the hurricane damage here, there is a significant amount of looting. It's illegal to excavate on public lands. This particular site was heavily looted because of, I assume, the materials that the looters were finding. In fact, we convicted a looter on this site a couple of years ago. Combined between the storm damage and the looting, we really thought we've got to get some information and some salvage out of this archaeological site and get some attention towards it for preservation before it's completely lost. Erlend Johnson: What we did today was we brought one last unit down to the level where the post molds were. We trowel cleaned everything, we sprayed it down, we took some pictures, we did a drawing, and what we're starting to do now is we're starting to excavate below the level of the post molds. We're going to move our way back and we're going to bisect see their shapes and all that. We're also just curious to see how much further down this goes. At least from what we're seeing here, this is Late Archaic possibly, maybe Woodlands. Even in one of the shovel tests close to here, there was a scraper that looked to be maybe Early Archaic or older. In phase one, in this area, they came up with a San Patrice point, which is Paleoindian to Early Archaic. They came up with another Paleoindian to Early Archaic point as well. I can't remember that off the top of my head. There might be some old stuff further down. That's what we're waiting to see. Matt Helmer: Post moles doesn't sound very exciting, but in this part of Louisiana, we're very far from the Red River Valley, the Mississippi River Valley, where you typically have larger, more permanent village-type settlements. Most of, if not all the archaeological digs that have happened in this part of western Louisiana, have not come up with evidence of more permanent occupation. It all looks like small, ephemeral campsites where people are just coming through (short-term campsites) and then they leave. We don't have a lot of evidence for intensive occupation. One of the significances of a post mold is that shows us that there was at least some sort of permanent structure here that would lend us to believe that this could have been a more permanent, a hamlet, a village site, something like that. This would be the first of its kind that far out of the Mississippi River Valley or the Red River Valley. So that's what we're really trying to better understand, here is the intensity of occupation as well as the time depth. You know the chronology of occupation, too. Erlend Johnson: So, at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, we've given students a lot of opportunities to work with NRCS (Natural Resource Conservation Service) and do phase one shovel testing. A number of the people that are working here with us now have participated in that sort of research. There have been other field schools in the past. A couple of years ago, there was a field school with the Coushatta (Tribe of Louisiana). This is a pretty unique opportunity to do large horizontal excavations. They’ve taken part and learned all the different steps from setting out units, to screening, identifying material, to how to dig with a shovel, how to trowel clean. As we've gone along, we've integrated them into work, and they've gotten opportunities to try their hand at different things. This is a great opportunity for people to learn more about Louisiana archaeology, one of the few. Evergreen (Field School), of course, is another very different sort of opportunity that's going on right now for that. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Will there be opportunities like this in the future?  Matt Helmer: We've excavated with this project less than 1% of this site. I would foresee whether for an academic investigation, or Forest Service work down the line, potentially. We are moving to a second phase of this particular project with the agreement that we have with UL Lafayette, and we're going to be moving to another area that was heavily impacted by the hurricane on the east side of our forest. Where there's potentially new mound sites that are undiscovered as well as a series of Course Creek village sites. Yeah, there is certainly more to be done here as sometimes you go home with more questions than answers, but I certainly hope that this will ignite a renewed interest in this area. Typically, we're doing Section 106 compliance. We’re doing surveys to identify sites and avoid them. We're not really investing in actually studying the sites that that we manage and steward. One of the great things about this project for me has been to see the positive reception that we've received from Forest Service leadership and others that they really see, “Oh, wow. You guys aren't just out there digging for little pieces of flakes.” You know, they don't really understand what we do, so this has been a great opportunity, not only to train students in the next generation of Louisiana archaeologists, but for us to show all of the other folks that work in the Forest Service that this is the significance of the resources that we manage. These are folks that we work with every day—in silviculture, fire, biology, botany—for them to better understand what we do [is rewarding]. Hopefully in the future, there will be more support for projects like this from Land Management agencies. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: How can we keep up with the progress of this project?  Matt Helmer: Well, after this UL Lafayette is going to do a laboratory portion of their field school. Students will also have an opportunity to see the full circle from the excavation portion of the project and the design, all the way through to the laboratory analysis. Dr. Rees (of UL Public Archaeology Lab) and Dr. Johnson will both be putting together a technical report based on this work. Fortunately, the Society for American Archaeology is meeting in New Orleans this April, which is timely for us. We hope to be able to have students present posters. We'll have talks and presentations as you know, it's still going to be pretty preliminary. It takes a long time for us to get from excavation, to analysis, to write up, to really make sense of what we're looking at here. That would be the big the next big event, an SAA poster session potentially, or working into the LAS (Louisiana Archaeological Society) session that we talked about, and then after the technical report, we'll look into publications that we can publish based on this work, potentially including a book. We've got a lot of ideas in the works. One of the things that I'd like to do is increase what we call interpretation. So [this would be] something along some of our hiking trails on this district or recreation sites where we can put some of the information out here for the public. This is all public land, and a lot of people are really interested in the archaeology of this area. We hope to be able to put some informational panels and things like that out on some of our trails so that people know the history of the place that they're coming to recreate in. Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Awesome. Thank you all for talking with me. And I wish you all luck with the rest of the work here.  Matt Helmer: Yeah. Thank you. Erlend Johnson: Thank you.  Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Can't wait to hear more. 

]]> Organic Residue Analysis of Archaeological Pottery ]]> Tue, 24 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D2FBA953-BA48-A8F6-65B68C9771F6358C.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D32158EA-A036-A601-2D43E2A20CEA89F4 Organic Residue Analysis of Archaeological Pottery National Park Service Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Nora Reber about her book An Archaeologist’s Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery 821 no full 140

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Sadie Whitehurst: Hi, I'm Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst, and I'm here today with:

Nora Reber: Nora Reber.

Sadie Whitehurst: We're going to talk about Nora’s book, which is a guidebook called An Archaeologist’s Guide to Organic Residues in Pottery. It's written in a way that really is digestible for the archaeologist with little experience and chemistry. It’s got tons of amazing case studies, visuals, and examples, and it's just explained quite well. I'm excited to hear a little bit about how this book came to be and her perspectives on it. Nora, could you speak a little bit to what inspired you to make this guidebook, and what pulled you into studying organic residues in archaeology?

Nora Reber: Thank you for all the kind words. I guess that’s kind of two questions. I first got involved in residue analysis sort of almost by accident in undergraduate. I started out actually as an anthropology major, and I sort of got kind of sucked into chemistry and learned how to use a GCMS, which is a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which is the primary chemical instrument used to analyze residues, as an undergraduate, and kind of got interested in the concept of residues at that time and then continued that in graduate school and enjoyed it for a variety of reasons. It's really interesting problem solving. It's an interesting body of knowledge. The book I actually wrote after doing residues for a fairly long time, but I got interested in doing it in part because people kept asking me the same questions over and over at conferences and in emails, and I was always happy to answer them. But it seemed to me that it would be nice for people to have a reference ready to hand to answer these questions. Then, I was approached by University of Alabama Press, and, you know, they asked if I'd be interested in writing a book on the topic of all those questions people have asked me at conferences through the years and what I think archaeologists should kind of know as a basic introduction to residue analysis, what it does, what it doesn't do, that kind of thing. I sort of thought about it and I thought, you know, I kind of would be.

Sadie Whitehurst: What are some of the questions that people were asking?

Nora Reber: The first question people usually ask is, can you detect this one specific thing? Can you detect nuts, or can you detect fish, or can you detect this one specific type of fish? And the answer is usually a little bit disappointing to the archaeologists because you can detect fish in general, but you can't detect exactly what sort you've got there or what sort was processed. Nuts are tricky. I'm pretty sure they're there in a lot of North American residues, but you can't say for certain, generally speaking. You can't tell the difference between, say, deer or any other meat animal. Usually, people want to know about specific resources and usually the answer is quite disappointing. So that's kind of too bad.

Sadie Whitehurst: You can never get very specific, can you? You can just get closer to the right answer, a little bit closer to getting a full picture.

Nora Reber: That's a really good way of thinking about it. Because of sort of the chemistry, you can get closer to the true picture with some resources than others. For example, if you're not working in North America and you're interested in dairy, the results on dairy are really good Using isotopic work on residues. But since I work mostly in the southeastern United States, I don't get to answer that question, which is kind of too bad. But we can detect isotopically unique things often in most unglazed pottery. That's where residues really absorb kind of the best. From what we can tell, everything kind of absorbs and mixes together. When we're looking at a residue, we could be looking at fats and oils or their byproducts from everything ever cooked in a vessel over its entire lifetime. And you know, that could depend. It could be they started using the vessel and then someone accidentally dropped it, and it was used for a month or two. Or we could be looking at someone's absolutely favorite pot that was used for, you know, five, six, ten years, even more. But we can't really tell very well. People have done some interesting things with wear patterns and so on. The best guess is that when we do a residue, we're looking at things from everything ever cooked in the pot over its entire use lifetime. It's as though someone took an average of all the pots in your kitchen and tried to figure out what you were eating.

Sadie Whitehurst: That's a really interesting way to think about it. Do you have a favorite case study from the book?

Nora Reber: In a lot of ways, my favorite case study is probably the one that was least helpful, which was the Florida shell cup. That was a really unusual case study within the book. It’s kind of atypical in that it's the only non-pottery case study. It's based around a shell cup, you know, those big busy-con shell cups you get on the eastern seaboard. This one was from Florida, and we were specifically looking for black drink, which has a unique compound in it for this area. The biomarker caffeine and methylxanthines which are theobromine and theophylline. Nancy White in Florida had excavated, and she covered it up immediately. She packed it up all full of the soil, put it in a covered box, which is amazing. We didn't have any of those problems with caffeine contamination from open shelving that you get. We had the dirt from inside it, so that was great. Normally you can't trust non pottery vessels for residues because in pots, when they're fired, it basically burns out all the residue, so it starts fresh. But shells are made by sea creatures which are all full of lipids. Shells actually have their own lipids. But those, you know, sea creatures, don't have caffeine in themselves. So, any caffeine we found in the shell cup couldn't have come from the original shellfish but must have come from processing with caffeine. It was a really interesting little study and we developed a method together. Me and DiDi El-Behaedi, who was an undergraduate at the time, got together with a chemist at UNCW with a good HPLCMS, which is better for caffeine than the technique I usually use. I got up there and we extracted our cup, and we ran it and there was caffeine in it, and we were so thrilled! And then we ran the blank and it also had caffeine in it. And so, we knew that some form of caffeine contamination had somehow got into the blank during our laboratory processing. And to this day, I don't know where it came from.

To this day I (A) don't quite know what we did wrong and (B) don't really know if the shell cup was used to process black drink or not. The reason it's one of my favorite examples is because it shows the importance of blanks and the importance of keeping really good track of contamination. So that's why I think it’s probably my favorite example, even though it was a truly crushing moment, you have that potential in any residue. You have to keep very tight control on possible contamination. You're always looking for sunscreen and bug spray and we're often finding it. We run laboratory blanks in parallel with all of our archaeological residues. If they're not clean, we have to stop and scrub the lab down and figure out what happened, and if we're lucky, go back and rerun everything. If you've got a sherd that you know you're going to take for residue analysis, you should wrap it in tin foil in the field. You should probably refrain from washing it if possible, but that almost never happens. Like I do my own excavations and it doesn't always happen with me either. You know, sometimes I get back to the lab and I do collect—if I'm doing a prehistoric site, I do collections for residue in the field. But, you know, sometimes I get back to the lab, we wash things, and, you know, there's what I missed in the field, and I still want to take it, so I do. But yeah, it's sort of an increasing order of contamination. You know, you can take it from the field in paper bags and then wash it. That's not too bad. You can keep it in plastic bags. You'll have plastic in it for sure because the plasticizers just essentially soak within the pot. Even if you draw them all off the surface, there's always plasticizers in that case. But luckily most plastic bags are pretty limited. They just have a few plasticizers, no fats or oils. We just kind of discount all those plasticizers. Trickier is if they're labeled, particularly with Wite-Out and ink and nail polish and all that. We can work around it but we’re working around more things at that point. Plasticizers, the ink, the white out, the nail polish; the list is kind of getting longer there. And then the real problem for us, which is really hard to judge actually, is if the people in the field had a really creamy drippy sunscreen on, particularly one of those natural ones. Normally a biomarker is a compound that's unique to something. So, you know, caffeine maybe a biomarker for black drink in the southeastern United States or maybe a biomarker for cocoa in America and so on. And there are biomarkers for, you know, sunscreen too. All those active ingredients you read when you're reading the back of your sunscreen, that's your biomarkers generally. DEET is like a lovely biomarker for bug spray, super convenient for us. Now we can usually tell if we've got a sherd and it's got biomarkers for sunscreen and there's all kinds of one fatty acid just way out of balance, then it's probably from the sunscreen. Now people put natural things in the sunscreen. That's actually the worst, because if they're modern synthetic fragrances, then obviously they can't be archaeological. That's very easy. But natural fragrances and natural things, well, being natural could have come from the archaeological record. If it's a fragrance, we can usually tell it's modern because most fragrance compounds will wash out of the sherd archaeologically, and so we never see them. But yeah, it gets kind of trickier with those issues. Sadie Whitehurst: There are so many factors for contamination, and it sounds like you just really need to build experience in this field to be able to interpret your results.

Nora Reber: Interpretation is really the toughest part of residue analysis for sure. Sort of a weird body of knowledge. Most chemists do, synthesis so we can get along with the natural products chemist really well. But all their stuff is recent, like nice fresh plants, but all of our stuff has been sitting in the ground for several hundred years usually. The closest thing is really an organic geochemist. Their area of interest tends to be in a more narrow range of compounds. It's its own particular sort of chemistry, like a cross between organic geochemistry and natural products. And in terms of contamination, I find it really most useful to come up with a percentage. If you can work out what percentage of the residue is contaminated, then you can say to yourself, well, that's pretty high. I'm worried about this residue. I don't think I should interpret it as much confidence or, wow, that's really low. I'm happy with this.

Sadie Whitehurst: Do you have any advice for archaeologists or chemists interested in studying organic archaeological residues?

Nora Reber: I would say read the publications and read my book. If you're really interested in going further with it, apprenticeship training is probably the most useful way of doing it. It really helps to go into someone's lab and kind of do the work, which is very easily teachable in a couple of weeks. And then the interpretation, which is harder and takes a lot more time. It's a pretty young subfield, but traditionally, you know, in the 20 year, 30 year tradition of the field, that's how people are trained. They essentially go into other people's labs and do apprenticeships there.

Sadie Whitehurst: If there's anything that you hope people take away from reading your book, what would that be?

Nora Reber: I would say the residues aren't magic. Like we can't we have some little wand and tell you people are cooking rabbits or whatever you want them to be cooking. But it is really useful. It's worth doing. If you're lucky, you can come up with some unique resources if they're isotopically unique and it allows sort of a big picture interpretation of what people were cooking in their pots. So that can be really helpful. There's a lot of data there, but it may not be quite as specific as people generally want, you know, when they first think about it.

Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and your experience with making this book. How can we keep up with you?

Nora Reber: I have a lot of research going on right now. I mostly work, you know, collaborating with archaeologists since I've been largely excavating on historic sites these past few years. But I'm working with Ahana Ghosh at the Indian Technical Institute of Gandhinagar, which is actually some residues from outside the United States, which is kind of different for me. So she's working on an Indus Valley Project. I'm working with Emily Bartz on some Stallings pottery from Georgia, so that's a lot of materials. I'm working with Tim Baumann on some experimental sherds looking for beans. And then I'm also working with Paul Eubanks of Middle Tennessee University on some salt pans.

Sadie Whitehurst: Thank you so much for talking to us again and for letting us have a little conversation about your book!

Nora Reber: Okay! Thank you, really enjoyed it.

]]> Southern Pine Beetles and Archeological Site Modeling ]]> Tue, 10 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D26C764C-D185-E0CB-2A109F1C96D82276.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-0508EBA3-BDB2-90E0-1177F2306D8BD3CB Southern Pine Beetles and Archeological Site Modeling National Park Service Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst talks with Dr. Zac Selden about his NCPTT Grant research on archaeological site modeling for the Sabine National Forest in advance preparation of the southern pine beetle. 591 no full 139

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Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Hi, I'm Sadie Schoeffler, and I'm here today with:

Tad Britt Tad Britt, and our guest today is:

Zac Selden Zac Selden, from the Heritage Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Thank you, guys, alright. Today we're going to talk a little bit about Zac's grant through NCPTT. He's going to tell us a little bit about his research: Archaeological Site Modeling for the Sabine National Forest in Advance Preparation of the Southern Pine Beetle. If you would, tell us a little bit about your project.

Zac Selden I think this really all spun up after I met Tad and went to a predictive modeling seminar up at the University of Arkansas. There, after [the seminar, I] met with the Forest Service folks and we had discussed different ways of modeling the Davy Crockett National Forest at that time. While all of that was spinning up, I also had been in conversation with Tad about what's the best way to go about predictive modeling, what are the best techniques, what can we use, and what is the cutting edge. We worked then to use a bibliometric survey to identify the tools and techniques that would kind of give us the edge we needed to be competitive. Identified the software and the methods that we wanted to use, and once we had all of that ready, [we] moved the collections from the national forests and grasslands in Texas to my lab where they were documented, and we've been chasing predictive modeling kind of ever since. This particular project was designed knowing that we have a native species that will impact the forest and the forest responds to that impact in a particular way. However, to date, they've been managing it mostly through informed guesswork, and if we had a model like the one we're trying to build, that would help them to better manage those properties and hopefully make a more data-driven decision in terms of how they manage those situations where potential cultural heritage resources are impacted.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Could you tell us a little bit about the Southern Pine Beetle and what it does?

Zac Selden It eats trees [laughter]. It heavily impacts pine, as you can imagine, and because of climate change, the range of that beetle is expanding. Where it was this traditional American southeastern pest that you know occurs, it kind of flash mobs a forest and then decides, “alright, well, we're going to move west or we're going to move east,” wherever it starts that particular season. Well, now they're moving west. They hit Mississippi, I think 2-3 years ago and are in Louisiana now. The goal is to have the Sabine national forests model up and rolling before they are impacted by the southern pine beetle. They have now spread upward to northern New York and now New Jersey. It has become a much larger issue and hopefully, at least it's our hope, that once we have the model built in the code and everything is ready, we can make that exportable to other forests, other properties where they could use it.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst How does the process of building a predictive model work?

Zac Selden So, it begins with sites. The site information is just XY data. We wanted to know what variables we should use in that model, and that took several conversations, not only back and forth with Tad originally, but then with the National Forests and Grasslands personnel. The personnel that were on the Davy Crockett helped us to pick what they saw as environmental variables that correlated with site locations. For that particular piece, we were looking at proximity to water, elevation, soil, and vegetation. For the Davy Crockett model, we threw absolutely everything at it just to see what's stuck, and there are ways to get the model through using a bootstrap method. It gives us a means of identifying those variables that most closely articulate with your sites. When we use those that were most impactful as a means of really kind of trying to squeeze as much accurate information out of the model as possible without going too far if you go too far, it's called overfitting, so you get these high accuracy levels, but it's not generalizable. The goal with the Davy Crockett was design, research, and development and kind of really tweak and learn, as a group. We wanted it to be useful for predicting prehistoric sites generally, and historic sites, and then they were going to use a model for all sites for more CRM-based endeavors. For me though, so I guess it's twofold. You know, any kind of predictive model is going to have applications in applied research, which is what we're doing there. My own kind of selfish motivation was to look at how these resources change through time for the Caddo period. I haven't made a whole lot of headway there admittedly, but it is something that's on my radar, particularly with this model, because I think that it's really the first test of how generalizable DE David Crockett model really is.

Tad Britt Zac, can you elaborate on the maximum entropy model approach that you take?

Zac Selden So, we started with a GUI, a graphical user interface, where everything was point and click, and we have since evolved since Maxent went open source and is now available through R. We wanted the code to be completely exportable and user-friendly to the extent possible so that folks can plug and play that model anywhere that they have these kinds of resources and these kinds of risks. I think the crux of that would then be what variables you plug in, it's going to differ in every location, but the algorithm that we're using, it's a machine learning procedure. It gives us a means of using 80 or 70% of the sample to really define our predictions, and then the remaining 20 or 30% to then test those predictions and get a good idea about how accurate they are. We're using these to make predictions for the forest. One of the side projects that I've been kind of slowly whittling away on is, is it possible to then look at maybe something as simple as mounds? Where do we have mounds that are occurring in the woodland period, deformative early cattle period, middle, then late historic, and how does land use change? Do we see the intensification of populations around certain resources, and do we see the movement of people across space? We absolutely do. I think that raises a whole bunch of questions about if they're moving, what are they taking with them? What new tools are they developing along the way and how do those tools evolve as well? Pairing this I think with other advanced tools, maybe geometric morphometrics, can be useful in looking at not only the evolution of how folks use space, but maybe the evolution of the tools that they took with them, and the ideas that they took with them. I think there's a there's a lot of different things that you could plug into it, and it could be anybody's passion project. If you wanted to look at Munsell colors, if you wanted to look at the geology, maybe the correlation of a certain environmental variable or a certain lithic. Do you have obsidian occurring in one place and not in another, and then did those folks move across that boundary? We definitely have boundaries in the Caddoa region that we know exist, but mapping movement has been a challenge. Having a tool like this where we could not only look at and kind of better understand that movement but also, in the end, get a model that would tell us those regions where the recipe is right for other resources to exist, gives us a means of better managing maybe those invisible resources that perhaps we haven't discovered yet. The ultimate goal: I guess the production of reliable knowledge would have to be number one, and for that knowledge to be useful for the folks that come behind to be able to use it and to maybe build upon it to better understand guesswork that we're putting into understanding this patchwork that is the past. I would like to say thanks to NCPTT for helping by funding the project. I do need to give a shout-out to the National Forest and Grasslands in Texas who funded the fieldwork component of all of this. We're not only building the model, but we're going out to test those models. That is exciting and fun and hopefully will help to mitigate some of the survey bias through the years.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst Absolutely! Ok well, thank you, Zac.

Zac Selden Thank you. Tad Britt Thanks.

]]> Preserving History in Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana ]]> Tue, 26 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/FC037784-F017-1728-A321DF6C1830B409.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-FC0767D9-E1A5-0B04-9C362C79B6D198BE Preserving History in Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana National Park Service Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Erica Fox about the work of the cultural and history center, Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana. 895 no full 138

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Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Hi, this is Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst, and I'm here today with:

Erica Fox: Erica Melancon Fox, I'm the executive director of Maison Creole de Freetown in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Thank you, Erica. Can you give us some background information on how the Maison Freetown Community Center came to be?

Erica Fox: Mason Creole de Freetown was a vision of mine for probably close to 12 years now, but it just recently manifested within the last year and a half. I always saw a need for a Cultural Center and representation, especially for African Americans, in Lafayette. It was birthed out of a vision for seeing an African American Heritage Center in Lafayette.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: I know the location of Maison Freetown de Creole is very significant. Could you tell us a little bit about why the location is important and what it means for the community surrounding it?

Erica Fox: Well, first of all, having had family that grew up in the area, I'd learned about Freetown through my family members, and was always enamored by the stories that they told of community. As I started to research more about Freetown, because it was something I had to learn as well, I learned that this was just an impactful community of African Americans and has been so for over 100 years. So, it seems like a great starting place to tell the story of black people in Lafayette.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What about the role that the Freetown neighborhood played in the civil rights movement and a sense of community?

Erica Fox: So, the organization that we established, True Friends Society of Lafayette, is actually the grandchild, if you will, of an actual existing benevolence social group called True Friends Society that was established in the late 1800s in Freetown. This group was very important to other newly emancipated African Americans because they helped, one, in the uprisings and thwarting massacres, they helped keep people safe. They were true friends to each other. So, during a time when there was an ugly time in our history of the city, they helped to keep their African American brethren safe. They also provided insurance policies and burial policies for people of color. They did fish fries if someone was late on rent or needed help with making payments for bills. So, this organization was always there for each other and we continue that legacy one by reestablishing the organization, naming ourselves that and maintaining the Center.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: That sounds like it’s going to be very important for the legacy of Lafayette, and Louisiana, or the country as a whole.

Erica Fox: Absolutely. We have right now through the Equal Justice Initiative and Move the Mindset, which is a civil rights organization here in Lafayette, two displays. They are soil remembrance reminders of some places where African Americans were actually lynched in Lafayette Parish on display. That was one of the missions of True Friends Society, was to try to keep those occurrences from happening, but unfortunately, they still did in this area. So, we do have a display right now that is just a remembrance of that time so that we don't repeat those situations.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What other sorts of things are happening in Maison Freetown de Creole that promote the initiative of the Center?

Erica Fox: Well, we just got off Mardi Gras, or Mardi Gras just ended, and the historical Mardi Gras association was first established here. For the last 65 years it’s been in existence. And so, we currently have some of the Mardi Gras Black Mascara regalia here. So, people that attend can see the craftsmanship of Mardi Gras costuming here in the Center. It also ties back to the history that the Mardi Gras Black Association actually started here in Freetown as well.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: What are some things we can learn about through your Center about the Maison Freetown site and the Freetown neighborhood as a whole?

Erica Fox: The neighborhood as a whole, I'd love for more people, especially our youth, to learn and know that this was a place where African Americans pretty much picked themselves up by the bootstraps, so a lot of entrepreneurialism was established here. Businesses were flourishing at certain times in the history of Freetown, and we kind of lost some of that. Like, some of those places are either no longer here or abandoned. One of our missions is to, one, put up plaques where we can show and designate those spaces and use them as educational tools so that people can learn about the impact that African Americans contributed not just to Freetown but to Lafayette as a whole. So, this space currently has a gift shop, which is also a Co-op made up of indigenous black people of color. It's a BIPOC store of handmade artisans, which also ties back to the history of entrepreneurship in the community. It's providing an opportunity for black small businesses, and then again, we want to celebrate those spaces throughout the community and the neighborhood that people may not know about- those hidden histories. We've had everything from a dance hall, places on the negro motorist registry, we’ve had barbershops and grocery stores, and just places of celebration. I feel like people need to know. I know for some it may just seem like another grocery store, but when you are part of a community that everything was taken away from you – you weren't allowed to read, you weren't allowed to write, you weren't allowed to vote, you weren't allowed to have a business – those firsts mean a lot to this community. So, it’s important that we celebrate those, what may seem like small wins to some. It's major in the African American community.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: So, you're doing a lot to share the history we have recorded already and showcase the continuation of the history today. But you're also involved in a couple of initiatives to add to the historical record, the archeological record, to provide more documentation of what Freetown was in the past and how it evolved to what it is today. What are some of the projects that have been going on to document that history?

Erica Fox: So, one that we're working on right now is documenting the language. I feel like that's one that's threatened, if you will. For me, our family's first language was French. And in the African American community, many of those working with the farms and the tenant farmers, they came from that background where they first spoke French before English. I think it’s important to tell that story and to hopefully keep it from dying. So, language is a project we're working on. We have Creole French tables being held here in the Center so that the elders that do continue to speak that old language if you will, can teach it to those interested in learning, and maybe brush up on some that may have heard it like myself in, you know, my family for years and years, but our grandparents didn't pass it on to us. It was their code, if you will, to speak with each other. But yeah, now I'm having an opportunity to learn and reconnect with my history through the language.

Another project we're working on is taking back the literary importance. So, we have a bookstore that we're going to establish so that we can highlight some authors, black authors, and poets that are writing and providing us a safe space for books that highlight African American culture, and that again is important because we are at a time when African American history and culture is being threatened. Especially in our libraries and public spaces, some of those books are being removed that have some type of basis that show cultural pride. We want to provide a safe space where people can still have access to those books, even if they're being taken out of school or library spaces. So, it's important to showcase a more diverse holistic view of the people that make up this community. Another project we are working on is our sound lab. We're building out a recording space where we are taking oral histories, first-person oral narratives, from community members. We started with those that are 80+, because we want to gather the stories of these culture bearers and these people that you know may not always be with us first. It's more critical to get the stories of the elders who lived here, experienced grandparents who you know, may have been some of those entrepreneurs we talked about, or remember different places in the neighborhood that may no longer still be standing. So, we're proud of our initiative to collect those oral stories in African American tradition. That's pretty much how we learned about things because you couldn't read or write, so oral stories were critical to our culture. So, we want to continue to gather those stories, and we've noticed there is a gap in some of those stories being documented. So, we definitely want our museum and our online presence to be that repository for those missing stories.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Why is it so important that the Community have such a huge role in documenting the oral history of this neighborhood?

Erica Fox: It's important for us to tell our own stories. Even when there is minimal documentation, it's always said from a lens outside of our community. It's just important for us to be able to tell our experiences that we've lived that aren't biased. Sometimes, when other people tell someone else's story, a lot gets lost. It's important to get these stories from the people that actually lived it. Going back to some of the places where some of the history of African Americans' may have been referenced, we weren't always seen as valuable. You'll see that in references where you'll see a family and maybe a black person in the picture. That person's never named or his occupation. It's just like, he's just in the picture. No one took the time to give that person relevance by giving a name or what he did. Same with some of the surveys or census records that aren't being found. You'll see a reference to a person, but there's no name, but it may say negro. We need to know who this person was. It's important to us, and I would hope that it's important to everyone to know about who these missing links to American history are.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: Are there any other projects you want to mention?

Erica Fox: We want to start highlighting some of the African Americans that served in the military, especially those of the 6888 Battalion, during World War II. We have several members that lived in the community and nearby community that served to help solicit the mail during World War II, so our plan is to create an exhibit here that celebrates the African American contributions in the military. Then we are also doing for Juneteenth, we're telling the story of Marquis de Lafayette, who was a staunch abolitionist, and we want to tell the story of his efforts to end and abolish slavery. So, we're excited about those two exhibits coming up. It's also the bicentennial of Lafayette, so it couldn't have come at a better time.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: With all of the projects and initiatives and exhibits and all sorts of media that you're putting out, do you have an end goal with all your efforts that you're putting into Maison Freetown de Creole?

Erica Fox: The ultimate goal is just to have a safe space that the community can know is here and an activated space that they can utilize and share and learn, this was part of Ile Copal's sugar cane plantation, so some of the descendants that worked that land are still here. We want them to connect not just to that history but to know that they've been here a long time, and hopefully will be here a long time after. So much happened in this community that they can be proud of. You know, a lot of times, our story almost seems to start with slavery, but it did not. These people came from somewhere, and we want to be able to not only have a space where they can learn about that history, but also connect back to their African ancestry. So, we want this to be a loving space that folks can know about and utilize and learn about the rich past that is Freetown. Stay tuned. This space is always moving and evolving. We've got creatives that are showcasing their work, so we've got visual artists here on a regular basis and many exhibitions. People can learn more about us at maisonfreetown.org. That's our website. We just want them to stay tuned and find out what we're doing.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst: And where is the museum located?

Erica Fox: Museum is located at 800 E Vermilion St. in Lafayette, Louisiana. It's very close to the downtown area.

Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst : Thank you, Erica. We're looking forward to seeing all your projects and future endeavors come to fruition.

Erica Fox: Thank you.

]]> Activism in Archaeology ]]> Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/60A8F158-D47E-B993-228DFE27E44CFEE5.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-60C78F9E-C532-1D51-AEFAA014282167D4 Activism in Archaeology National Park Service Megan Reed talks with Dr. Christopher Barton about practicing activism through archaeology. 637 no full 137

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Megan Reed: Thank you for joining us. My name is Megan Reed. I'm with the Preservation Technology Podcast and I am here with...

Dr. Christopher Barton: Dr. Christopher Barton. I'm an Associate Professor of Archeology at Francis Marion University.

Megan Reed: Thank you for joining us. Today, we're going to be talking about your book Trowels in the Trenches. Can you explain to me how you connected archeology as a tool for activism?

Dr. Christopher Barton: My work is not a standalone work. There's a lot of other archeologists who have done similar things. Randy McGuire, Megan Springate, Alexander Jones, have done a lot of similar work. When I was in graduate school, many, many, many years ago, I read Randy McGuire's, Archeology as Political Action, and it helped to inspire me and inspire the people I was working with to then develop a volume that had different contributors and people from all different parts of the world studying different times and different topics, and bringing them to discuss archeology and using archeology and our craft, or at least as a medium of social activism.

Megan Reed: Great. What motivates you to bring this book together?

Dr. Christopher Barton: Tenure. No, so it's a bunch of different things. I was raised in the Catholic household and in it, we were taught that I'm my brother's keeper, and those of us that were given certain privileges that we need to take care and we need to help and lift up people that have been less fortunate. In terms of archeology, I'm not trying to say that this is some type of white knight and shining armor. No, the idea here is that I have a unique set of skills, and with utilizing those skills, I can work with people, we can find meaning. The idea is me as an archeologist, I'm not the gatekeeper of the past. I don't turn around, and we don't go out to sites, and we don't excavate sites and look at sites and say, "All right, this is why it's important. This is why you should save it, and this is..." No, when you're talking to community stakeholders, when you talk to members of the public, the idea is that this is pragmatic, this conversation.

I live in South Carolina right now, and if you can't tell from this nasally accent, I'm from Jersey. I am a middle-aged white dude from Jersey, and if I'm going to come down here to South Carolina and I'm going to work in rural Pee Dee region where I'm at now, I don't hold a monopoly on that meeting. I don't know what it means to be from the Pee Dee, right? I sure as hell don't know what it means to be Black, but the idea is that I work with people as equal partners through this collaboration to go out and study the past.

What we try to do through this type of work is that we understand our situations where we are in the present today. How do we get here? Okay, well, we got here from issues that might have happened in the past. If we're talking about the Pee Dee, we're talking about slavery, we're talking about antebellum period, post bellum period, Jim Crow, all this. Well, if we can study that and understand these legacies, well how can we make that into a brighter future? How can we understand that this is the situation that we're in, and how we got here and how can we try to make positive changes to make it a better world for all people?

Megan Reed: That's a great point. For the book, did you find any difficulty in choosing which topics to talk about in the book?

Dr. Christopher Barton: I went back and forth with the editor, and I think it was one of the peer reviewers. In it, I was talking about the idea of archeologist social activism. A lot of people wanted archeology as social activism to be radical, and it very much should be radical. Literally, the title of the book of Trowels in the Trenches, the idea is that it was supposed to be like trench lawn, and this idea of this battling back and forth. And initially, that was what I wanted to run with, this idea of radical, punk rock archeology. But what I found out, at least in terms of my reading and talking with people in different fields and everything was that all archeology is a form of social activism.

You think of the archeologists who are out there working day in and day out, doing backbreaking labor, what are they doing? They're doing it so that they can try to inform us in the present about something happened in the past. Through that they're trying to teach us and trying to enlighten us to make again, us more informed in the future. So one of the difficulties that we had was basically arguing that, that all archeology is a form of social activism. Now granted, it's not all in the same medium as varying spectrum, so we kept getting back to was the idea that archeology social activism is not a product. There's no level of uniformity that comes out. Rather, it's a process, and it's a very, very varied process. There's a lot of trial and error that takes place. I always joke around that I've lost more hair becoming an archeologist than I ever did before. Could also be because I have a toddler, but here's the question for you. What do you think the role is of archeology?

Megan Reed: I feel like we are an educator to the public of things that happened in the past and how we can learn from it as a way of our educating our public and our fellow people about different aspects of the history, and how we can either improve upon it or learn from it in a way to take us forward to the future.

Dr. Christopher Barton: Yeah, and that's a great answer, but going up through undergraduate, graduate school, and all these other, you got a lot of old white guys like me that are teaching it, right? They were obsessed with lists, and they view archeology as essentially an inventory. This is what we found. We need to check off all these boxes, and that's what archeology is. But then over time, thankfully we've pushed that. We've had to work with people like Mark Leone and Ann Yentsch , and what happens is we start to push into talking about social meaning. What is the meaning that is imbued, that is both reflected and reconstructed through these types of objects? That was a foundational stepping point for us as archeologists.

I think we're in another stage now that we've understood that look, we understand about social meaning, we understand about lists, but we are in a very unique position as scientists, as craftspeople to utilize this knowledge that we've had to then use that as a form of social activism. Think about the work that archeologists can do. We can talk about issues of pollution. We can talk about issues of unequal access to healthcare, unequal access to food, all of these historical lineages that we can talk about and legacies that continue today, and we can have fundamental conversations.

With the book, we've basically created three ideas. One is can archeology be used for social activists? Do you think it can?

Megan Reed: Yeah, I think so, yes.

Dr. Christopher Barton: The idea to think that we as archeologists, at one site or in one site report most people aren't going to read except for some, is somehow going to take that, and that's going to create profound change. I don't think that's going to happen, and I think it would be beyond naive to think that a single individual is going to be able to create such positive change in the world. But the idea is that we are in a field that society has deemed important, and that if society has value in it, we have college courses that are dedicated. We have the National Park Services that has aspects that are dedicated. That since we have some type of value in that, then we can take that, and we can use that limited influence to then create some type of change. Even if that's small incremental change, it's still some type of positive effect.

Megan Reed: All topics of trying to connect archeology to social activism are important, but why did you choose these specific topics for your book more than other ones?

Dr. Christopher Barton: The idea is we're always talking about intersectionality, so the different idea. The idea is we want to get a lot of people from different places, and a lot of people are studying different things. Then one of the things that's kind of happened within this growing dialogue and discourse within historical archeology or within social archeology as social activism as archeology is that, and I'm very guilty of this, it's really kind of been curtailed to just historical archeology. What we wanted to do was broaden that to say that look, we have articles in here talking about the Paleolithic and gender identity. We have people studying Jihad takeover in Timbuktu, so the idea was we're trying to diversify it, say this isn't just U.S. Eastern seaboard historical archeology, that rather this can be global and it can have no temporal balance.

Megan Reed: That's great. How would you like our listeners or readers of your book to take away from reading it? Is there any specific things of how you want them to leave with when they read the book?

Dr. Christopher Barton: Yeah, so the idea is that don't ever think of yourself as being powerless in society. Even the fact that you're engaging, that you're reading with an archeology that might not be in your typical reader's list, or you might be thinking about something differently. Just the idea that you're getting somewhat out of your comfort zone, that you're starting to think about different things, in different ways, it's a positive thing for you.

What I would also say, and this is a much more personal note. I'm dyslexic. I have learning disabilities and my whole life, I had people telling me that college isn't for everyone. I was a construction worker, in oil refineries back in the day, and that maybe I should just stick with that. I think I talked about that in a book, but one of the things that I'd like people to take away is that we all have little bits of limitations that either society puts on us, or even sometimes we put it on ourselves. You can overcome those. Sometimes it's going to be a struggle and sometimes even overcoming might seem insurmountable, but I've struggled with writing my entire life. I've struggled even with reading my entire life. If you've helped to set your mind to it and you have a determination, and you help with others, no book that is ever written, is written by a single individual. It is a community that comes together, helps support them, and that's what this book is.

If you're thinking about this in your own personal life and you get done reading it, don't think that you're alone in your struggles, and your ups, and your downs, and everything. You are with a community of people that support and love you. That is really hippie.

Megan Reed: No, that was great. That was great. My last question for you is what advice would you give other archeologists who want to try and take their research to promote it as part of a social activism?

Dr. Christopher Barton: All right. So what I would say is I think the future of archeology needs to be is two things. This is a conversation that Paulette Steven has it right now in her amazing book, but we need to decolonize archeology, and we need to democratize. We need to push away from the pyramid structure where, the archeologist, is at the very top and then students are seen as labor. Community members are seen as somehow on the outside. We need to look this much more like very broad concentric circles that are constantly overlapping.

I mentioned earlier about how I'm not from South Carolina. When we discuss sites and we try to select sites for excavations, my students are part of it. My students have a unique knowledge of what it means to be from the Pee Dee, of the history of it. They have extended social networks. Don't look at students just as labor, right? Students are your collaborator. They have unique insights.

What I would suggest for somebody thinking about doing this, in terms of looking at social activism is never think that you're limiting yourself. If you're just going out and writing a site report, and you're talking... You might add a word that you never put in before. You might be talking about... For instance, I'm talking in another book about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and I struggled over how to actually discuss that. How do you discuss that relationship? Eventually, I turned and used the word rape. Coming from my background and all the cultural baggage I bring, and it was a struggle for me to do that. Changing one word. Is that necessarily a form of a social activism? Well, probably not for most people. It's not radical, but the idea within my mindset, it took me a little bit out of that comfort zone, and then kind of progressed through it.

So again, what I would say is never think of this type of social activism that's just so radical. It's something that can be implemented in any site report. It can be implemented in any scholarly presentation. But the idea is that we need to understand, and to steal a line from Stan Lee here, but with great power comes with great responsibility, and we have tremendous power in our society, and we need to use that to promote good.

Megan Reed: That's great. Thank you so much for joining us and being a part of our podcast.

Dr. Christopher Barton: Thank you so much for having me.

]]> Preserving and Sharing the Story of Women's Suffrage "...the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future..."

]]> Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/8E816EF1-D8DE-BB92-B2435EB0C6F2A866.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-8EAE87E1-A4FB-8709-35FBD81F723E31FF Preserving and Sharing the Story of Women's Suffrage National Park Service Jason Church talks with Joanne Westbrook about preserving and presenting the National Women's Party collections at the Belmont-Paul House. "...the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future..." 810 no full 136 "...the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future..."

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Jason Church: This is Jason Church, Materials Conservator at NCPTT, and today, I'm talking with Joanne Westbrook. So what is your official title and position? This is for my own knowledge, actually. How is the Park Service tied to the National Women's Party?

Joanne Westbrook: So my name is Joanne Westbrook, and I work for the National Park Service. I am one of the museum curators for the National Mall and Memorial Park. It is a rather large park, with more than 32 individual sites and reservations across the District of Columbia. So we've got a pretty big reach, and my specific responsibilities are working with Ford's Theater National Historic Site, and the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

And the relationship with the Park Service and the NWP, the National Women's Party, goes back to the 1970s. So the National Women's Party have their final headquarters on Second Street, right across from what is now the Supreme Court. It wasn't there originally when they bought the house. And in the 1960s, it came under threat from development for the Hart Office Building, which is right next door now. And there was a large outcry from the Washington, DC community to protect the house, not only because of the work of the NWP and their contribution to women's suffrage and then women's rights throughout the 20th century, but also because it is one of the oldest standing buildings in Washington today.

So a lot of preservation support came out, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to not take the main building. There were some other buildings next door that NWP owned that were demolished, unfortunately. But the main house, what used to be known as this Little Belmont House, is still standing.

In the 1970s, the National Women's Party wanted to take this a step further, to make sure they wouldn't have to have this discussion and this public outcry to help them again. And so in the 1970s, they were successful in getting the house listed both on the National Register and as a national historic landmark, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to create a partnership agreement with Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, who helped them maintain the grounds and the collection.

And then in 2016, President Obama issued an order to make the site a National Monument, so the National Park Service was given the house, and the National Women's Party was allowed to continue to use it as their headquarters and maintain the collections on-site. So we have been close partners for over four decades now.

Jason Church: Well, you brought it up, so let's talk about your amazing collection. There are other sites with also amazing collections, but in my mind, yours really stands out with your amount of textiles.

Joanne Westbrook: Yeah, absolutely. So the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future. So they began collecting a lot of two-dimensional objects, the archives, things like that. Some of them, they donated to the Library of Congress in the 1920s. And as you said, we have an incredible collection of textiles that they used in their marches, in their protests. Everything from the iconic tricolor banners that they carried on their banner poles to banners made in honor of different women, banners that were carried by different groups of professional workers, artists, women in the federal government, banners carried by state contingents who came in to lobby for women's suffrage.

So it's really incredible, and the collections also have quite a bit of other material related to the work of the NWP, so we have a lot of the printing blocks that were used to create their publications, first with the Suffragists and then with equal rights. We also have quite a bit of furniture that the NWP used, from the teens down into the 1990s, when they were still lobbying for women's rights and hosting different events and different people from Congress, all sorts of movers and shakers in the city of Washington, DC. So it's a fantastic collection.

Jason Church: So is the National Women's Party still collecting banners and protest material?

Joanne Westbrook: So the National Women's Party actually ceased their lobbying efforts in 1997 and became a 501(c)(3) organization focused really on education about their work and about the continued need for work for women's equality in the United States and around the world. So they're not collecting as heavily as they used to. However, they did collect a little bit around the Women's March back in 2017.

Jason Church: So if someone comes to visit the collection, what would they expect to see?

Joanne Westbrook: The collections that are on site normally and available for visitors to see include scrapbooks that were created by some of the founding members. There are a lot of bold materials, so some of their publications, a lot of the pamphlets they were handing out in their campaign for women's suffrage. We also have some really neat commemorative pieces that they would do as well, little ceramic figurines. We've got a makeup container branded with Logan for women's suffrage. We've got sashes of course. We also have, what I think are really cool are three pieces of textile that were stolen by one of the women who were arrested when they were being held in the workhouse. It's some really iconic, really important pieces talking about the work at the NWP and what it took to have this successful campaign for women's suffrage.

Jason Church: So we talked about these textiles, which are now 100+ years old. What is it like to store and conserve all of these variety of materials? I know a lot of them are satin. What is that like for you?

Joanne Westbrook: So I love textiles and I also hate textiles from a preservation standpoint. So I do have some conservation training early in my grad school career before I realized that I wanted to work with collections on more of a holistic level. So my lens in viewing collections is always from that preservation standpoint and textiles present very unique challenges, especially I think the textiles of the National Women's Party present even more unique challenges because many times when the women were putting together these textiles that were part of their marches and their protests, so it's costumes that they had in tableaus; there are tabards that they would wear over their clothing. They weren't making them like they would make their own clothing, like they would make textiles that they knew would be used many times and needed to have a long life.

So textiles are very fragile normally, light damages them and you can't undo it. It all adds up through the lifetime of an object. If they're dirty, the dirt can also damage them more when they're in storage. And we see that a lot with women's party textiles because as you can imagine, they were wearing these marching through the streets even when they were getting arrested. And so we find there's been a lot of wear and tear on these textiles and that ages them and makes them a little more vulnerable to the agents of decay. So part of how we deal with these challenges is we try and store them properly as much as we can.

We, with all the banners, we roll them in, you get a tube and muslin and you wrap it and make sure that it's protected from light and other pollutants as you can. For as many of them as we can, we keep them in the Park Service’s Museum Resource Center, which is a 53,000 square foot climate controlled facility out in the suburbs of Washington DC to help prolong their life. We try and keep the textiles on a rotation when they're on exhibit. So if you go to the site in one of the rooms, you can see a cap and a cape, and we rotate that out every few months to try and limit the damage that we can. And we're actually really excited. We're looking to have a collection condition survey done this fall to have some expert conservators come in and kind of look at the collections and give us an update on our priorities for the second century of stewardship.

Jason Church: So as a curator, what is your favorite object in the collection?

Joanne Westbrook: Oh my gosh, that's so hard. That's like being asked about your favorite child.

Jason Church: We won't tell the other objects what you choose.

Joanne Westbrook: I appreciate that. Oh my gosh, that's so difficult. I'm new to working with the Women's Party with their collection. Previously I had been at the Museum Resource Center working with the collections of other parks in the region. So I'm still learning about the collection. And honestly, the banners are great. The banners are iconic, but it's some of the printing blocks, and I know that sounds really weird, but it's a plate of metal. It's a wooden block. But I'm more concerned about the work of history, how these organizations did the work that they did to create a change in our country. And so for me, the printing blocks are really emblematic of that because so much of the work of the Women's Party was constantly pushing out their own publications. So not only the Suffragist and Equal Rights, but their pamphlet, their broadsides, educating the American people about why this was so necessary for women, this way to become more equal with men and this fundamental right for them to have.

And it was so impactful and so influential and it really turned the tide in suffrage and the American people's perspective on women's suffrage and how essential it was for them to get this right. And so I love these printing blocks and just thinking about the number of hands that held it and the purpose they put it towards and how it was one of their fundamental ways to reach the American public and really change the tide on women's suffrage in America. And we do in fact have the printing blocks that they used for the program that they handed out for that first march in 1913. And we were just working with that the other day. And I think that's why it's foremost in my mind.

Jason Church: And you have the printed material that matches all the printing blocks?

Joanne Westbrook: I think we do, between what the Women's Party is still managing today and then also what they had given to the Library of Congress I'm pretty sure. No one has had the time to go through the printing blocks and start matching up the publications and how the images were used, but it's a future project that I'm already starting to plan out in my head to work with the Women's Party on getting all those things matched up.

Jason Church: That would be a fantastic project.

Joanne Westbrook: Absolutely. And I think the printing blocks are also a really cool way for our interpreters to have some hands-on activities with the kids. Because with museum collections, a lot of times they're behind glass, they're kind of remote, especially some of the printing blocks that have raised metal designs. So the Nina Allender cartoons, we have a lot of those. We could make those 3D printed and then that could be an activity that our interpreters have with students on teaching them this is how the work gets done, this is how you do the work of progressive action and activism and draw parallel with some of the things that are going on today and have them stamp and make their own publications, which I think would be really cool.

Jason Church: And that would be a really cool project. So does the museum and the collection loan out pieces, and if so, what are some of the more requested pieces from the collection?

Joanne Westbrook: The National Women's Party, I think has between six and eight loans right now. As you can imagine, it's a of climate increased attention. So right now we've got loans with the Brandywine River Museum, with the Library of Congress, with the National Archive, Virginia Historical Society, the Library of Virginia. The Skirball Cultural Center has actually borrowed two pins to do a really exceptional exhibit on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and that's a traveling exhibit that will be coming around the country over the next year and a half or so. So yes, we do loan objects out. It's always really important museum collections, not only that we preserve them, but allow them to be used for the benefit of the American public and to educate those folks who can't come into the house. Not everybody who wants to come into the house can come into the house, just because it is a small historic site.

Not everybody can travel to Washington DC. So it's really important for the NWP and the NPS to make these collections more available to the entire country and even folks around the world. Some of the most requested things are the banners. They're beautiful, they're iconic. It's what people really think of when they think of the Suffragist marching, the Silent Sentinels and the work of the NWP in the 19 teens to advocate for women's suffrage. We also frequently have requests for some of the membership buttons and some of the other historic memorabilia that's associated with the NWP and their struggle for suffrage. But of course, much of the most prominent historic memorabilia is already on display at site. And so we really like to keep it at the site as part of our exhibits. And because they are such important talking points for our rangers who interpret the site. It's an incredible collection.

It's been created and curated by women for its entire history and by the organization that created it. And again, it's just a fabulous collection of some of the work that the Women's Party was doing.

And of course, it's not the only story when talking about women's suffrage. It shouldn't be the only story since this was just one organization that was working towards suffrage. And we do have issues with the legacy of the NWP and NAFA and their illusion of women of minority groups who are also trying to advocate for women's rights. Then of course, the split in order to get southern states to sign on to women's suffrage was often to exclude black women voters because there was still such degradation and resistance in the South. So it's not the full story, but I think it's an important story and it's one that I'm proud that the Park Service is hoping to preserve in perpetuity for the benefit of the American public.

Jason Church: Well, thank you, Joanne. We really appreciate you talking to us today, and we will definitely recommend all of our listeners to go look at your virtual exhibits.

Joanne Westbrook: That is our sincere hope too. And in the meantime, people have two avenues for accessing the collections online and the house itself. They can go to the official NPS website for Belmont Paul, and that's nps.gov/bepa for Belmont Paul. Or they can find the National Woman's Party, womanparty.org. And if you go online, you can find all of their collections have been made available. They've done a really fantastic job of getting their collections database online. So you can see an incredible amount of pictures and everything that tells the story of the historic work that the NWP has done. What we have today is only a small subset of what there was back in whatever period you're studying. And that's especially true with those banners because a lot of times the banners were ripped out of their hands, they were destroyed. So I am all the more grateful for the incredible collection banners that we have and their inspiring messages then, and I think a lot of them that are still applicable today.

Jason Church: Absolutely. Thank you, Joanne.

Joanne Westbrook: Absolutely.

]]> Pursuing a Career in Preservation Horticulture ]]> Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/C0DB72BB-959F-C454-C71FAAA19ECB5343.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-C109CCE0-C51C-2DA4-7263A5EC6B59FB4D Pursuing a Career in Preservation Horticulture National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Erin Fogarty about starting a career in preservation horticulture and her current project at Massachusetts Horticultural Society. 934 no full 135

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Erin Fogarty: Erin Fogarty, the Conservation and Historic Gardens Horticulturist at the Gardens at Elm Bank in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you talk about how you decided to combine horticulture and conservation?

Erin Fogarty: So, I want to preface it by saying that I grew up in an area with a lot of public gardens. My childhood home was more or less 15 minutes from Winterthur, Longwood, Hagley, the cream of the crop of historic gardens. So I had a lot of exposure to historic public gardens and horticulture from a really, really young age. I've always liked being outside. I've always liked history, especially in regard to architecture. And when I was looking at grads, I was given the opportunity by Dr. Jules Brook, a professor who later became my advisor that I really loved working with, who said, "Hey, I have this historic garden called Gibraltar in Wilmington, Delaware that we'd like to do some historic preservation planning on.

Little did she know that this is a garden I went to when I was nine years old. And ever since then I've wanted to make it beautiful again. I think that landscapes are really, really fascinating. They're constantly changing. So unlike a period room or a historic building, to a lesser extent, you could spend all the time in the world maintaining a historic landscape or you could leave it completely alone, put a fence around it, never touch it, and you're still impacting what it looks like 10, 15, 20 years in the future, which is terrifying, but it's also such a cool opportunity.

Catherine Cooper: So what does preservation horticulture entail?

Erin Fogarty: Really it depends on who you ask. It's in some ways a really old field. We have conservation of historic landscapes going back to the Ladies Mount Vernon Association in the 1860s, but as a data backed and records backed kind of systemic discipline, it's really new. For me it kind of has a similar vibe to translating literature. So you take every single thing you know about a garden or a piece of art or whatever, but also social context in which it was created. A lot of the landscapes that I've worked on were developed in a time before the estate and capital gains tax, which does really, really impact what people were doing and how they were doing it. And use all of that in combination with knowledge of what it's like right now. So how many people are there to take care of it? Is it open to the public? What's its environmental vibe? And use all of that to restore it in a way that honors that original vision, while also making sense for both its current environmental situation and also to the people who will be using it and interacting with it.

So, something that I always end up having to do is adjusting plantings for changing shade conditions. So they plant trees, they want them to be little, the trees were left alone, now they're 60 feet tall. That changes what you can do there. That has happened to me before. Transitioning from it just being a garden in someone's backyard to a garden that is now visited by the public, tens of thousands of people per year; knowing if the owner had access to a greenhouse that would impact what plants they could put in, things like that. Basically finding out what made it special when it was created, and finding a way to convey that specialness. And on the day today, it's a lot of just being covered in dirt.

Catherine Cooper: Congratulations on your new position with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Could you tell us about your current project for them?

Erin Fogarty: Yeah, so Massachusetts Horticultural Society is a public garden in an old Estate in Wellesley. So about half an hour outside of Boston, give or take. And the garden was designed in 1916 by Percy Gallagher. He worked for Olmsted Brothers Firm and it was designed for Alice Cheney Baltzell, whose father had a major role in the founding of both American Express and Wells Fargo. So what we’re talking about is like unlimited money. [Olmsted Brothers] designed a bunch of gardens, but one of the gardens they designed was a kind of Asian inspired water garden. So it’s an Asian Japanese garden made by a white guy who’d never really been to Japan, if that makes sense. But it’s a time period where everyone was really, really interested in that style of design. Elm Bank was not really gardened for about 70 years from 1938 to 1996, in which time that this Asian garden was not managed and all these plants which were brought over and kind of introduced to American gardens from Japan, many of them did so well in the area that they’re now invasive plants.

So right now, my job is to rehabilitate this water garden in a way that, again, honors the original design while making sense for us right now. It’s a super cool design. It’s basically a kidney shaped pond with a bridge in the center modeled after the Shinkyo Bridge in Nikko, Japan. If you’ve seen that Japanese red bridge, that’s what it looks like surrounded by really dense, overflowing beds of mostly woody perennials that continue in a curated woodland for about a little bit over an acre. And I’m holding off because the main things that define the project are its challenges, which I know you’re going to ask about in a second.

Catherine Cooper: Feel free to go right into the challenges.

Erin Fogarty: Okay. So there are three major challenges. The least challenging thing is that we don’t really have any pictures of the site. The woman who commissioned it, Alice, was really, really private, like so private that the only photos we have of the garden were those that were taken by force when the garden won a Massachusetts Horticultural Society award. So, an award for garden design in the 1930s. As part of winning the award, the garden had to be written about [and photographed] in a landscape magazine. So we have those, but those are mostly detail shots. So there’s nothing really showing the whole garden. And I have plant lists, I have blueline drawings, but it’s really difficult from the shots we have to tell what in that design was and was not implemented. But that’s not a huge deal. I have the designs, I know what they meant to put there.

The second most challenging thing is our site. So,the garden is located within a protected wetland area associated with the Charles River. And because of that, any decision we make will have the potential to impact someone’s garden 10-15 miles downriver. We are working with a local Conservation Commission, and, we file permits and they give us permits to tell us what we can and can’t do with the site. So right now what I am allowed to do is I can use any mechanical means, any physical means of removal I want. I can’t use any chemicals, I can’t use any stump treatments, which again considers that we’re so close to the water. And the river does have a really, really big impact on the people of who live here in eastern Massachusetts; it’s great, but being that close to the river does lend its challenges.

And we also have a really, really significant population of invasive species. So the site after Alice Cheney died in 1938, there was a minors seminary, so like a seminary but for children who used the site until 1971 and they practiced what’s known as mow and blow maintenance. So they would mow the grass, they would blow out the leaves, leave everything else alone. Then it was a tech school for a couple of decades until Massachusetts Horticultural Society took it over in 1996. And again, when the tech school was there, they didn't really do much in terms of maintenance of this area, especially because it's kind of out of the way of the main drag of the estate. So we have a ton of invasive species that were allowed to grow functionally unchecked for 60 or 70 years. What that means is that there's a lot of cutting, there's a lot of sawing.

There is a lot to do to just peel back the layers and find out what the physical boundaries and any physical features of the site would be. So there's stuff growing over that flagstone path that I mentioned earlier, which allegedly the flagstones were taken from the restoration of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in the early 19 teens. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but there's some big species everywhere. Our main issues are. Glossy buckthorn (Rhamnus frangula) and Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) round-leafed bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus), things like that. All but the bittersweet were introduced to the site intentionally as part of the original design. Which is cool. I mean, it's an interesting story to tell about how horticulture has changed, but trying to dig out the site from the growth has been a lot.

Catherine Cooper: What are your goals for the completion of the project?

Erin Fogarty: We are aiming for a really slow, really conscious rehabilitation. The traditional way things like this have been practiced are you pay an architectural firm six figures, they come in, they do a big plan for the site, and then you drop another six or seven figures in an all-in-one restoration where you take everything out and then you put new stuff back in. But the view we're taking is kind of gardening the garden back to life. So what that means is that we are just gardening it and making slow but meaningful steps towards turning it back into something, which allows us to use the area for education. So for training people in landscape remediation, landscape history, environmental stewardships, and it also allows us to find cool stuff that would've been lost if we were to rip everything out all in one go.

I found some mountain laurel and some snowball bushes that were covered by bittersweet for God how many years, and that granularity is really, really cool to be able to do. And also being able to get people out there, get them into the woods. It's a really once in a lifetime project, it's really cool. I want to retain the original feel of the design while adjusting for where it is now. Right now I am data gathering for the 198 species in the original design. So that means finding original descriptions in catalogs from the 1920s. That means figuring out where all the species are from, what kind of light conditions they like, both to figure out what that original design felt like and to propose potential replacements.

Catherine Cooper: Are you allowed to use invasive plants in remediation of a design?

Erin Fogarty: I don't think that the Conservation Commission would allow us to do that. Also, just because of the wet nature of the soil, it would be a bad scene. That's not to say we're dead set on using only native species. Because of the nature of the site, there are some native species that are really, really aggressive. I know I talk about dealing with bittersweet and buckthorn all the time, but one of our biggest tests have been native grapevines. Just trying to pull these huge, huge vines out of the canopies of trees. They're native, but that doesn't mean they're right for what is there. We'll probably end up using non-native species, but we most likely will not use any invasive species. That's not to say we'll be getting rid of some of our larger specimens of things like Norway maple (Acer platanoides). Those might stay, but I don't anticipate introducing any more invasives to the site.

Catherine Cooper: So how do you make recommendations for replacements in a plan like this?

Erin Fogarty: It all just depends on what each individual plant contributed to the landscape. What function it was playing, both ecologically and aesthetically. So I'll usually look at when it flowered or when it looked its best, which usually means flowering, but could be in foliage color and what textures and what colors it would be bringing to the landscape at that point in time. And finding something that would mimic that as well as it could for the site while not also causing an issue. How do you replace something like English ivy, which has something that non-invasives don't always have. Texture that was used as a ground cover that has the waxy leaves that's really, really low. How do you find something that has all of those things that won't stick out in the design but will also not be super aggressive and not climb up the trees?

Catherine Cooper: So what would you recommend for others who want to get involved in horticultural or landscape preservation?

Erin Fogarty: Truly the number one recommendation is to get out there and find a garden, and garden. You can find local historic landscapes through the Garden Conservancy. They're a really popular group that assists in preserving and transitioning private landscapes to public landscapes. You can also go on a website called Garden Visit to look for landscapes in your area. So find a landscape, find one that speaks to you, and start finding out how you can volunteer. That's the best way to learn and to understand landscapes is to actually spend a lot of time there working the land, engaging with it, learning its little quirks. There's a reason that if you're at a landscape for less than a year, you don't really know it. Your first year working at any landscape is just figuring it out. It doesn’t require a lot of skill and the gardeners would totally be thrilled to have you help out. I know I would. If you're in the Boston area, come hang out with us at Elm Bank.

You could also start studying the history of your area. One of the things that's really popular and that I like to do is in spring, go into the woods and go daffodil hunting. If you find daffodils in the middle of the woods, you're likely to find an old house foundation or an old sidewalk or a street. They're a pretty good indicator. So just learning the history of your area. But in terms of stuff you can do from home, looking at pictures and documents in the Smithsonian Archive of American Gardens, a lot of which is digitized for gardens that you might be interested in gardens in your area.

There are some good books by a person named Robyn Karson that you can check out at your local library that are a cool read if you're interested in historic landscapes from a historical design standpoint. If you're looking at colleges, looking at grad school levels, look at historic preservation programs. I'll always... University of Delaware's historic preservation certificate program. You're in an area with a lot of historic gardens, take a visit to Philadelphia so you can check out some historic landscapes, things like that. Number one recommendation is to just garden. That's the best way you can learn about plants, how they were used, is just to spend time outside.

Visit Elm Bank. Visit Gibraltar in Wilmington, Delaware if you have the chance. Gardens are cool. I mean spend time outside. A lot of people tend to overlook historic gardens as something for older people or something pretty traditionalist. But there's some really, really, really cool stuff happening in terms of historic landscape preservation across America right now. Check out places like Bartram's Garden, if you can. You're in the area. It's awesome.

Catherine Cooper: So if someone wanted to visit Elm Bank, are there particular hours or email in advance?

Erin Fogarty: We're open 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM or 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM depending on the day from April 1st through the end of October. We're also open at the Christmastime for a lights thing. But if you were to go on the website and sign up for the volunteer list, you would get emails when we are working in the water garden, and that is something that happens year round. You can find me on Instagram at @Old.Plants, I'm trying to put more of the gardening stuff on there. Also follow Massachusetts Horticultural Society at @Masshort, and that way you can keep on top of all the relay really cool stuff we're working on.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much for speaking with us and taking the time.

]]> Increasing Access to Primary Materials through Digital Portals ]]> Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/271C24B9-0B80-BF30-1880D926FD241237.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-272AB681-CC71-69E7-9B06F52721F4E5EC Increasing Access to Primary Materials through Digital Portals National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Jake Mangum about working on the Portal to Texas History. 400 no full 134

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Catherine Cooper: My name's Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Jake Mangum: Jake Mangum. I'm the project development librarian for the Portal to Texas History.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely. I'm happy to be here.

Catherine Cooper: I'm wondering if you could tell us what the Portal to Texas History is and how you got involved?

Jake Mangum: Certainly. So, the Portal to Texas History is a digital repository for cultural heritage and historic materials from across the state of Texas. We've worked with about 465-ish partners to digitize and make freely available over 1.8 million items. That includes over 800,000 issues of newspapers, 450,000 photographs. We have 80,000 maps, we've got legislative documents, we've got books. We've got journals. Basically we've got 36 different media types all available on the Portal to Texas History. Again, all of our print materials are full text searchable. So if someone is looking for a specific name or a specific event, they can type that in and it'll pull up all the print instances we have of that.

I got involved with the Portal kind of by accident. I was a graduate assistant here in the library, finishing up my Master's in Library Science, and I happened to be at an event the same time that my current boss was at the event. And we were talking, she said, "You're in the library, I'm in the library, so we should sit together and talk a little bit." So we did. And she mentioned that she had a position open, and if you're wanting a position in an academic library, you take every opportunity and apply. If you're being told about it, you apply. So I applied and it turned out that it worked perfectly because the position that I'm in, I act as a liaison between the digitization lab and partnering institutions. My areas of specialties in library science school were academic libraries as well as digital imaging and archiving, so I was able to bridge those two different areas together in this position.

The Portal to Texas History, like I mentioned, has 36 different media types currently available on it. As well as we've been working on a project called Texas History for Teachers, in which we've worked with a historian here in the university, some Texas history teachers to create course curriculum based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) standards, that the fourth and seventh grade... Well every grade has to teach to specific standards within the state. And fourth and seventh grade specifically deal with Texas history, so we are focusing on creating course units for those grades in particular starting with seventh grade.

And one of the cool things that we're doing with that is we actually have been able to do work with a camera system called Matterport, which allows us to do virtual field trips to museums with historical significance that touch on, like the TEKS . So we're able to take students and do a field trip when typically like you're not going to be able to go to Goliad. Those aren't the field trips that schools tend to send students on. So you can at least get a better understanding of what the museum looks like and what the area looks like through these Matterport virtual field trips. The Portal to Texas History, is at Texashistory.UNT.edu. Whereas the Texas History for teachers is education.Texashistory.UNT.edu.

So, we just added an education dot in front of the website address and that is still a work in progress. We initially did some materials for it several years ago, and as learning standards changed, things got quickly out of date. And so now it was a 2020 project that is turned into a really great long-term substantial project.

It probably wouldn't come as any sort of real big surprise to know that probably a third of our users are genealogists. Since we do have such a large collection of newspapers, like I said, over 800,000 issues of newspapers. There's a lot that can be gathered there. Genealogists, teachers, students, historians of all different levels and expertise can access it. So those are the main groups. My position, I don't typically interact with them a whole lot directly unless they're having issues or concerns and sometimes they will contact me and ask for guidance and assistance through their searches.

What I really want to see the Portal do and be able to accomplish is to continue to expand the understanding of what Texas history is. Right now, my goal is to tell the stories of underrepresented communities within Texas. So typically history tends to be told by the older white men and there are a lot of other voices that need to be shared as well to fully understand what the story of Texas is. There are a couple of different ways that we are pursuing adding those materials to the Portal. One, we recognize that a lot of history has not really been preserved properly through the official institutions that are responsible for preserving everyone's history. They haven't really preserved everyone's histories, so the communities have had to find other ways of preserving their own history. So it's materials that are in churches, materials that are in families passed down from family member to family member. And one of the ways that we've worked with this to reach those different groups that wouldn't necessarily have funding to do a digitization project is we have a project called Rescuing Texas History in which we offer up to a thousand dollars’ worth of digitization, metadata creation, and hosting of materials on the portal for board applicants. And we've specifically in the last few years, made it a point to target those groups that have been disenfranchised, basically, in the past. So we're actively seeking those out and trying to reach out to those communities. My email is Jacob (J-A-C-O-B) dot Mangum (M-A-N-G-U-M) @UNT.edu. And if you go to Texashistory.UNT.edu and scroll down, there's also a section called Rescuing Texas History. I think we got it covered with everything.

Catherine Cooper: Yeah, I'm sliding other questions in here. Okay.

Jake Mangum: Yeah, it was perfect.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us.

Jake Mangum: Absolutely, absolutely. I'm happy to do it. It was really good seeing you again.

Catherine Cooper: Good to see you too.

]]> Analyzing Art Materials Used by Franz Kline ]]> Tue, 18 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/1D1CF450-9ED7-5A50-095AA32502985578.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1D3A6AAE-F8A3-F366-2503AAD47637448D Analyzing Art Materials Used by Franz Kline National Park Service Catherine Cooper talks with Cory Rogge about Franz Kline's art and examining the materials he used. 739 no full 133

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with- Cory Rogge: Dr. Corina Rogge or Cory Rogge. I'm the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Menil Collection. Catherine Cooper: Thank you for joining us. Cory Rogge: Pleasure. Catherine Cooper: Could you talk a bit about Franz Kline and why his art is so important? Cory Rogge: So Franz Kline, who was born in 1910 and passed away in 1962, was one of what's often known as the big three of abstract expressionist artists. So he was considered on par with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and yet when you go to the literature and look at him, there's not very much written about him. So while you might walk into a gallery, a museum and see his art, there's not really a lot known about him. And so we saw him as important both for the reason that his art's hanging on walls and should be studied. It hasn't yet been studied, but also to try to bring his name back into the fold, to have him be recognized as an artist on par with these artists and others of his time, like Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston. We started the book with the nucleus of our own collection here at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, where we have four paintings and an ink sketch on paper by Kline. And as we began looking at artworks, we realized that they were all different. They were all aging differently. They were all made with similar materials, but he was using them in different ways. And we decided that we just couldn't understand our own works without extrapolating, without going to other works. And our works were from what we would consider his mature periods. So from 1950 to 1961 is our latest. And yet how did his early training impact how he was working later on? And so we began reaching out to other institutions who held works by Kline in their collections. And that included the National Gallery of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Harvard Art Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and asking if we could come visit and look at them. And what was really amazing was that even though some of these museums have conservation scientists on staff like myself, not all of them do. And even the ones that did, they're overworked. They don't have enough time and bandwidth to look at or do all of the work that's requested of them themselves. And so we were met basically with open arms where these institutions came to us and said, "Look, take the samples you want, do the analysis you want. Tell us what you find, but please take this opportunity to help the field, to help us and to help yourself." So it was really gracious and welcoming. And then at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where we were looking at more paintings by Kline, they had a greater concentration, including some of his early works from the 1930s and 1940s. Their scientists were actually able to work with us, and so they did the sampling and collected the data, and then we collaboratively analyzed it together and it really created a richer experience because we were finding things in Kline's works that we didn't understand and just the ability to talk that over with a colleague, "I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? Are we crazy? Is this an artifact," really deepened the research and led to new avenues of research and new findings that went up beyond Kline himself. It was a really wonderful chance we got to visit all these institutions. We got to make new friends out of people that we had only maybe known slightly before. It was great. And that's the wonder of conservation and conservation science, which is that we're kind of all in there for the objects and it's just a very collaborative and welcoming community. It's easy to write an article about maybe one artwork or two, and I've written papers on things that have hundreds of samples, but here we were telling not only a story about his materials, but his materials through time, and then also trying to contextualize him in his time period. So how he worked compared to his friends and colleagues who were also working in New York at the time. Then also in doing this research, we realized that there were so many myths surrounding the abstract expressionists. Everybody thinks that they worked like the famous Han Namath movie of Jackson Pollock, which makes it look like he's just kind of almost randomly applying paint to a canvas. And so there was this idea that abstract artists encounter a canvas and painting is all action. It's all un-premeditated, and that leads the public to the idea that this is slap dash. This is easy, that it's something a child could do. And what we were seeing in Kline's work was so antithetical to that idea. His works were carefully planned out. He did do sketches and he worked from them. He very carefully considered his composition, and that's what gives his word a striking power that they have when you look at them in the galleries. Most of them are black and white. Most of them involve brushstroke lines, but they are so carefully composed that there's tension and balance and it's really difficult to do something that way. And so all of these things combined, the science, the art history, the contextualization, the myth busting meant that it was just too big for a research paper. And we really felt that to give him and our findings their due, we needed to make it into a book. One of the things that we were struck most about with Kline's works are the variety of condition issues that they have. So they can vary from the very simple, like his early paintings were largely small, but he moved a lot. So he moved studio to studio to studio. As he kept getting evicted, they'd tear down the place he was living, and that resulted in just sheer physical dents and dings to his artwork. So we've seen some of that. Later on in his works, he begins using a lot of zinc white paint, and a lot of artists still do, and a lot of artists his contemporaries did. So it's very common. But the problem with zinc white paints is that the zinc in the pigment can react with the oil binder and make what are known as fatty acids. So zinc bound to a fatty acid from the oil. And this is in some ways good. Metals can promote drying of oils, give you a nice film. But these soaps can also migrate through the paint layers and then form laminar layers in between different colors of paint layers, or they can conglomerate into little almost ovoid or spherical pustules. It's kind of a painting acne and lead paints do this as well, and zinc soaps in particular then if they are forming little pustules, they can spall the surface paints off. If they are forming laminates, these flat plainer films, they can cause paint layers to split apart so that you'll lose the upper paint layers and leave only the bottom most paint layers behind. And they also make paint films more brittle. So paint we think of when it's dried as being hard, but it actually is a little bit plastic. It can respond to mechanical changes to dimensional changes of the canvas or to the panel support caused by temperature and relative humidity. But if the paint film becomes too brittle and it can't do that, it just cracks. So we have zinc soap problems in Kline's paintings. And to be fair, not all zinc soaps are bad. So it's the films and the pustules that are bad. But zinc soaps that are just kind of hanging out there mixed in with the paint layer themselves can be perfectly fine. So we have a painting, Corinthian II, which has zinc soaps, but they're dispersed throughout the paint film and it's in perfect condition. But we have other paintings where we're getting these films and then that's causing issues because we're losing flakes of paint. But then there are other problems like Kline used in some cases, paints that were under bound that have too much pigment relative to media, and that produces a paint film that's very coarse and brittle. It's almost like sand. It just wants to fall apart, and that's not very good for it. So most of the time when he kind of knew what he was doing when he painted let's say straightforwardly, his paintings are thin for the most part. They don't have very many paint layers, but we have a painting where there are 17 paint layers because he kept struggling to get his idea across. And the weight of that paint film on the canvas causes mechanical issues. So there's this whole diversity of problems that potentially face people that have Kline paintings. And it's only really by looking at them closely evaluating whether they have multiple paint layers, perhaps taking cross-sections, looking for multiple paint layers, looking for these under bound paint layers, doing analysis to see whether you have zinc soaps and what kind they are that you'll know what's happening. And in terms of research, I think for everybody across the board who deals with these modern paintings, we'd like to know why the zinc soaps behave differently. We don't understand the driving force behind their movement within the paint films. And so that's a big issue. If we could figure out why they were moving in certain cases and not in others, we might be able to stop it and help paintings stay in the kind of okay state of having zinc soaps. The book response, it's gone out into the world, it's still new and young, and you can read reviews of it on Amazon where some people are like, "This is the most important book about Kline ever written, and that makes us feel good." And other reviews that are like, "Well, if you want pictures, don't buy this book." Well, we have pictures. They're just small because it's a modest sized book. This isn't a catalog from a gallery show. But I think that in general, it's really informing museums and all the private owners who own Kline's work on how to think about them going forward. And hopefully it will also in the future change the art historical scholarships surrounding him. So we're pleased with it. The individuals who are specialists in the field of abstract expressionism seem to have welcomed it, so it's good. And in terms of research going forward, we looked at a very small fraction of Kline's works. There's obviously a lot more to be done. What's really fun right now is that coming out of the book, we were contacted by a gallery who had one of Kline's easels that he used in his studio, and it's got paint all over it. And so we actually purchased it for a relatively modest price and are starting to look at the paint on the easel. And then Kline's second partner's son contacted us, said, "Hey, I actually have one of Kline's palettes." And he mixed his paints flat on a table and would use paperboard as a palette. And he asked if we would like it, and we of course said yes, and he very kindly donated it to the museum. And it's covered with colored paints. So now we have paints on the palette, paints on the easel, and paints on the painting, and we're trying to coordinate. And the palette's marvelous. It's got huge globs of paint, like he just squirted paint out of a tube, was going to use it, walked away for the night and then just never came back. It's a very human object in that way. We don't know when he purchased the easel. It occurs in photographs from the late 1950s. So we expect he was using it then. And in fact, in some photographs, you can actually see the easel in his studio and behind it, leaning against the wall is one of the paintings in our collection, which is fun. And then the palette was probably towards the end of his life. He passed away in 1962 and had kind of had to stop painting because of health issues late in 1961, early 1962. Kline's marvelous. I joke that I've spent so many years with him that I've really grown to love him as a person, even though I've never met him. And if I could go back and have dinner with one historical figure, he'd be high on the list. He seems like he was a really good person, a person who helped others, who was good friends with the artists of his time. One of the few people that didn't have arguments with other people. He wasn't ego driven in the way that some artists are. And he loved cats. And my favorite painting of his is a painting in The Metropolitan Museum of Art from the 1940s, and it's of his cat Kitzker. And the cat itself was a tuxedo cat, but the painting got these beautiful blues and magentas and purples in it. And to me it's just the cat poised, ready to go out, out of town over the roofs of New York out hunting, and it's just paused and is staring back at Kline. It's marvelous, and I hope that someday it will go on view for people to see. But there are photos of it in the book, so you can see it there. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Cory. Cory Rogge: It's a pleasure.

]]> Stories of Colorado Women Serving in WWII ]]> Tue, 04 Jul 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/B9EBACC8-B341-83E1-C62E1E9E9CBE1F61.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-BA19F1ED-A759-C146-D53DBBF956B9FD8E Stories of Colorado Women Serving in WWII National Park Service NCPTT's Catherine Cooper speaks with Gail Beaton about her deep dive into collecting the stories of Colorado women who served both abroad and at home during WWII. 617 no full 132

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gail Beaton: Gail Beaton.

Catherine Cooper: So Gail, could you tell us what led you to deep dive into the history of Colorado women during World War II?

Gail Beaton: Well, I've always been fascinated with World War II and especially the Rosie the Riveter character, and then when I was a high school teacher, I wanted to present the home front to the students in a manner that would be very interesting to them. So I developed a character called Gail Murphy, who's a bullet maker in Denver during the war. One of our facilities here used to be a Remington arms plant, so I gave this presentation for years to my students, and then it kind of exploded on me and I started giving it to all sorts of organizations throughout the state. And one time in 2014, I was giving it to a 1940s Forever group, and a woman came up afterwards and said she loved the presentation, but I didn't say anything about the army nurses, and I said, "You're right. I concentrated more on the home front and just barely mentioned women in the military."

Didn't even say anything about the army nurses. So I said, "Were you an army nurse?" And she's like, "Well, yes, I was in France and Germany during the war," so I said, "Could I please interview you?" And she agreed, and after several hours I thought, “these stories have to be told.” I mean, there was so much I had no idea about that it was time for somebody to find out and tell the stories. So that's kind of how I got into it.

Catherine Cooper: Could you explain how you chose to create the umbrella of “Colorado” for Colorado women?

Gail Beaton: I was interviewing and finding more stories, I realized that there were women here in Colorado that maybe were from Tennessee and never touched base in Colorado until after the war, and I thought, "Well, their stories are going to be missed. A Tennessee historian probably isn't going to track them down in Colorado, so I need to include their stories too." So I kind of expanded into those who also were in Colorado perhaps after the war.

Catherine Cooper: How did you chase down all of these histories; how did you conduct the search?

Gail Beaton: A lot of it was done through the internet. Fortunately, many things are now digitized. Of course, I went to museums and archival collections throughout the state. There's oral history collections at the Library of Congress. The University of North Carolina has a wonderful one on women veterans. Of course, I looked at, it felt like all the books on the women in the Air Force, service pilots or defense plants, all the general books that one would expect. And then I found women through a number of different sources. One woman I interviewed that I'd met through a presentation actually was talking to a woman at her hairdresser and found out the woman was a cryptanalyst during the war. So there were all sorts of little avenues that I was able to make.

Of course, I did tons of reading between transcripts and newspaper articles, obituaries, the census records, ancestry.com, diaries, letters, so a lot of different sources were used. I chose the vignettes trying to show the breadth and depth of Colorado experiences. So I tried to get vignettes that were women from the eastern plains and the Western Slope as well as the front range. I tried to include Anglo women, Latinas, African American women, even a woman from Eastern Europe. So that was one reason to include the different vignettes, especially at the beginning of the book. I actually was able, I think, to make sure that I got all my favorite stories in there. Some of them, I had to push a little hard with the editor and the reviewers, but I managed to hold my line on that.

Catherine Cooper: You’ve organized the book by field of service; could you talk about how and why you chose that particular strategy?

Gail Beaton: It just seemed logical to me to split the women into the three major areas of their contributions, women in the military, and then on the defense plants and then in volunteer activities. In doing the military, a number of people said, "Just combine the Army Nurse Corps and the Navy Nurse Corps because they're military nurse corps," but they actually had very different experiences during the war, and so I wanted to split them out.

And then also it just seemed logical to me, I guess maybe I was thinking that the military women were so unusual. Let's start off with them. Then I organized them according to when that particular branch was organized. So the Army and Navy Nurse Corps were before World War II and then followed by the WAACs, which were the first ones with the Army Corps in 1942. Then I guess I chose the second most unusual, and that would be the defense plants. And then the third, the women on the home front was kind of typically women's work or women's jobs doing volunteer activities, whatever war it is or peace time, that seems to be something that women are especially told in to do is volunteer work. I also wanted to highlight a woman in each chapter so that the beginning of every chapter would highlight a woman and her experiences in that particular branch or volunteer activity and things like that. Again, trying to show the diversity of Colorado women and their experiences.

Catherine Cooper: Who do you hope reads the book and what would you like them to take away from it?

Gail Beaton: Obviously, I'd like everyone to read the book. I know that's not going to happen, but I think first and foremost, I would like that the children and grandchildren of this greatest generation read the book because I think it's very important for them to understand what women did during the war and their male relatives also. I put in the end of the introduction that when a person dies, it's as if a library burns, and I really feel that's true, and in writing the book, I interviewed a couple dozen women and a couple of men, and by the time I was done and the book was published, 10 of those had passed away. And then since then, two more have passed away. So I'm kind of down to three surviving women. This really saddens me, and so I hope that the children and the grandchildren would find out their parents or grandparents stories before they're gone, and then I'd like the younger generations to read it and kind of come away with two main ideas.

One is that women can meet any challenge. They just need to be given the chance and they need to grab the chance or force the opportunity. And secondly, I'd like them to know that Americans can set aside our differences economically, politically, social differences, and actually come together and do some pretty great things and accomplish a lot. So I think those are kind of my two main goals in it, and it's why I continue to do my Rosie character and do book talks and things because I think it's important. These women meant so much to me that I think it's important for their stories to be told. Rosie has changed so much, and I have gotten so many new things. First started out to be a 30 minute, "This is what bullet makers do and other women are doing other things," but now I can talk about the all-girl orchestra from Denver that traveled through the United States.

I can talk about women that were crop dusters during the war because the men aren't being crop dusters in Oklahoma. So it's made me so proud to know just the great things that women have done, and so many of these women that I interviewed became friends. My army nurse that kind of sparked this whole book just passed away in July at 100 years and one week, so I saw her two or three times a year until COVID, of course. And so they were always so humble. “We just did it.” “It wasn't a big deal.” “I'm proud of what I did, but it was just they asked us to serve, we served.” “They asked us to not go to school for the first two weeks of our senior year to pick skins off of peaches. We did it. We went back to school.” So it's made me very appreciative.

It's made me very proud. I think one thing that also really hit me is how much these women went through. We're sitting here in 10 degrees weather today, and I think of these women working on airplanes outside fixing the bomb mechanism and women who are washing their hair in a helmet out in Europe in the coldest winter in 1944 and 45. It amazes me, and I have to stop and think, "This is just amazing that these women did these things and I know their male counterparts went through the same thing also." Just the physical deprivations that they also went through as well. We also don't think about women with PTSD and things of that nature until we look at our recent female veterans, but the women I talked to went through a lot of that also and found that they couldn't talk to people about their war experiences, especially in the military.

Catherine Cooper: What would you recommend to people about trying to capture a bit more of these libraries before we lose them for the people in their lives?

Gail Beaton: I think if they would just ask them to maybe bring out the scrapbooks photographs, that generation has them. They're not on their phones, and that's what these women did for me. They brought out their yearbooks and their photographs and their medals and things like that, and let me pour over them and ask them questions. I think if you just get them talking, a lot of them will talk and they'll open up. Ideally, it would be wonderful if one could videotape it, but even to just have it on a recording and have that voice as it goes forward, I think as we lose our relatives, oftentimes we think, "Oh, if I just could hear their voice again," and so the women that I interviewed, I made a transcription, which was painful [transcribing is tedious work] of their oral interview, as well as DVDs to give to their families or to hold for themselves, and I think that's really valuable.

I could submit them to the Library of Congress's Veteran Oral History project. One of the gentlemen that I met in all of this regularly does that. He works up in Northern Colorado and he has gone to interview all sorts of male and female veterans for any war, and then he submits the DVD to the Library of Congress, so that would be something to do. I know a couple of the universities here also will accept those. I haven't asked the libraries, but I can't imagine that they wouldn't at least keep them in their archival things too.

Catherine Cooper: Absolutely. Gail, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Gail Beaton: You're welcome.

]]> Telling Stories in Museums ]]> Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/85D68BBB-CEF5-E7AF-0520AA02CABC7BE8.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-85EA7A53-0A8C-BA61-4D76ACA47632A8F7 Telling Stories in Museums National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Adina Langer about how people approach telling stories through museum exhibits. 851 no full 131

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Adina Langer: Adina Langer.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today, Adina. You recently published a book called Storytelling in Museums. Could you talk about how or where storytelling is in museums in the public awareness and then also in the GLAM fields [galleries, libraries, archives, and museums]?

Adina Langer: I would say that storytelling as an approach within museums has really come of age within the past 20 years or so. Museums have undergone a kind of paradigm shift from being places that are primarily concerned with connoisseurship and preservation of the most exquisite artifacts of the human experience or the natural world to one where they are primarily about education and engagement and helping people to understand their place in the world and how connecting with the past can enable them to better experience the present, to make sense of their lives. And so museums have become sites of communication, and storytelling is at the heart of that process; and GLAM fields are all related to each other in this endeavor. When I think about what museums do and where stories are captured, where they are preserved, where they are interpreted, where people make connections across that spectrum in the GLAM fields, each one has kind of a different piece of that puzzle.

So if you think about archives as sites of gathering and preservation and accessibility, the key being to make what is within a repository available to those who are seeking it, to those who can benefit from those kinds of connections. Many museums have their own archives or book special collections, same with libraries. Really it's this preservation to interpretation kind of spectrum. And then if you are on that interpretation side of things, how do you select what you are going to focus your energy on as an institution, and where do you draw your inspiration and how do you serve your community? Story gathering, storytelling, has increasingly become central to, I would say, all of the GLAM fields in that way.

The book project has its origin story. I facilitated a session at the American Alliance of Museums conference in 2016. And the topic of that conference session was personal narratives in museums, so how museums use personal stories to then engage with these larger public narratives. And that came from my own experience as a curator and museum professional having recently transitioned, relatively recently from working at the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City, which was engaged in a huge oral history effort and also the startup process to create its inaugural exhibition experience for the public. And I had transitioned into a role as a curator of the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University, where we were also engaged in an oral history project. And we were in the process of beginning to emphasize the narratives from that first person testimony that we were gathering, really amplifying and emphasizing that in our exhibitions and public programs. And I wanted to engage more deeply with the ethics of that. Who were we as institutions to be excerpting to some extent from people's narratives in order to engage with these much larger historical topics, to serve diverse audiences, to serve this inter-generational kind of bridge purpose, the burden of collecting contemporary history to some extent, and even older history, when you have first person narratives available to you, the burden is to make sure you get that before you can't.

And I had seen that already at the 9/11 Memorial and some of the folks that we interviewed who had been responders, survivors, had passed since I had started there in 2006. And of course, in dealing with the World War II generation, we were really approaching the end of their natural lifespan. So that pressure was on us. And then what do you do then? What is your fiduciary responsibility as an institution, as an educator in both being the memory carrier now for these people who chose to share their stories with you? And then also understanding what the next generation doesn't know, what purpose bringing in diverse narratives can have in helping them understand the past. So I didn't want it to just be me. I actually reached out back then to history Twitter or museum Twitter, which was very robust back in 2015, 2016, and found some wonderful folks to be part of that original panel. Margaret Middleton, who is an independent designer and increasingly a scholar of the LGBTQ+ experience, and especially in museums and in public history.

I had contacts from the Tenement Museum, from the 9/11 Museum, and I found wonderfully through Twitter a contact in Australia who had managed multiple museums that were dealing with World War I memory and the integration of Indigenous stories. It was a great group of people to talk through these issues together. And I felt that just that panel, that there was more to do, there was more to say. So of course, segueing into the pandemic, I remember the day getting just the normal sort of outreach from AAM, "Hey, do you have a book idea? Something you've thought about doing?" Just a proposal. So I went ahead and did that and said, basically pitched that it was the right moment to capture the state of the practice. There were so many people doing amazing things in this area, why not create a book of essays that helped to illuminate what storytelling in museums is like in the 21st century?

As we were starting to move into the sort of second-third even decade of the 21st century. When my initial pitch was accepted, they basically said, "Hey, develop this further. What are your chapters going to look like? Who's going to participate? What's the overall scope of your project? And we'll let you know if we want you to develop it into a full book." So from there, I kind of reached out through all my networks of contacts, and my goal was diversity writ large. So both from personal perspective, diversity of people's lived experience and also diversity of the kind of museum professional they were or are. Were they working in education, curation, collections, social media, even sort of museum adjacent fields that weren't necessarily just engaged in creating exhibitions, in public programs, geographical location, etc. Lucky for me, a lot of my contacts back from graduate school and from my time in New York City had moved all over the country.

So I had this sort of built in geographical diversity through that. I had a wonderful contact who I had worked with in Morocco who agreed to write a chapter about the changing museum practice in Morocco in the 21st century. And then other people gave me other people. So I ended up with a designer who's worked in the U.S. and Canada and in various countries in Asia, and Margaret Middleton had moved to the U.K. So I had a little bit of an international element to this as well by the time I gathered all of these authors together. I've worked with the National Council on Public History on their blog History @Work for over a decade. So that was kind of what gave me the confidence to say, “Hey, I can edit a book.” I've done a bunch of editing, and I'm used to working with people who live all over the place. But I had never undertaken a project this big before. There was a lot of learning involved certainly.

There has been a marked shift in the field toward looking past this notion of shared authority, which I think when I was coming up in graduate school that was kind of the watch word, institutions has a certain kind of cultural authority, and by reaching to community members, we are sharing that authority. And this is still a good thing. But moving past that even further and really homing in on what members of the community want, what they're going to get out of this relationship. It's not so much a relationship of institutional largess, but it's one of partnership. And if people want their stories to be told, how can you help facilitate that? If they don't want their stories to be told and if they don't want them told the way you've told them in the past, what's your ethical responsibility?

And a particularly powerful conversation facilitated by the National Council on Public History's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, (I'm not sure if that's exactly the name), on this notion of ethics of care, made a really strong impression on me [This event took place on July 8, 2020 on Twitter and was called “An Evening with Aleia Brown.” https://ncph.org/conference/other-programs/an-evening-with-aleia-brown-twitter-chat/]. This idea that it is more important to listen perhaps than to assume in your relationship with historical story keepers. But at the same time thinking through, “okay, well then as a museum, what are your ethical responsibilities? Who are the people who have a claim on that process?” And that includes the people who are entrusting you with their artifacts and their narratives, and those are deeply related, but also the future generations that you're holding this material for. And that you're changing your interpretation and you're looking to help people who are coming to you as a bridge between their own lived experience and that of others who they want to connect with.

They want to understand, whether that's the people of the past or people from cultures that are different from their own. So the chapters in this book all come out of that moment where there is a really deep reflection and orientation toward engaging with the institutional wrongs, certainly coming out of the pandemic and the period in 2020 when there was so much looking inward. And also looking across, and some people were calling for “death to museums,” right? This idea of “are these redeemable, these institutions?” Are they incurably colonialist? Are they incurably racist? Can you overcome your origins by playing a useful living responsible role in society today? And I can say, having written a book and connected with all of these professionals, that my hope comes from a place of seeing the deep desire among professionals to do that work and to use whatever privilege that they have in society to make the world a better place from where they are, and to repair some of the wrongs that were done to and within communities and across borders, and to do that by listening and by speaking, both.

This book is definitely for museum professionals, preservation professionals, public historians, art historians, all of us who are working in the fields using GLAM as a good basis there. But I do hope that it is accessible to people who are curious, who might not come from those fields. So that might include journalists, those who are used to covering museums in a particular way. And I've noticed this quite a bit. There's still a lot of assumptions being made in museum journalism about what kind of a hierarchy of museums there might be, the really big old institutions, are they more important than the small community institutions? And I hope that someone reading this book would see that within the field, things are changing in our understanding of what is important and of how we exist and why we exist, and people who go to museums and people who want to hear stories.

So if you've ever seen yourself in a museum and you wonder... Or you haven't seen yourself, and you wonder why, I would hope that there would be something for you in this book. And anyone who's interested in kind of that peeling back the curtain on a process. I know when I grew up, I loved going to museums. I never thought about them as places where real people work. It was sort of that magical, like, “oh, this stuff just kind of appears and oh, it's so cool.” And I think that there are still people out there and museums still do multiple studies, and they're still incredibly well trusted institutions within our society, which is increasingly challenged when it comes to trust. And so for people who want to understand how museums do what they do, this book can really provide multiple perspectives on that.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Adina.

Adina Langer: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

]]> Presenting challenging histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum ]]> Tue, 06 Jun 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/AF0AAA27-A904-83E8-9211E24196145132.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-AF31FFC1-FA57-8F53-EF80D14496DD2DCD Presenting challenging histories at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Felicia Williamson, Director of Library and Archives at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum about collecting and presenting challenging histories. 923 no full 130

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Catherine: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Felicia: My name is Felicia Williamson. I'm the Director of Library and Archives at the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum.

Catherine: Thank you so much for joining us today. Could you give us a brief introduction to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum?

Felicia: The Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum started as a small museum and education center in the basement of the Jewish Community Center in North Dallas in 1984. And it really was a reaction to what many Holocaust survivors in Dallas and the surrounding area saw as a misunderstanding, or even a lack of awareness, of the Holocaust. And they really wanted a place to educate mostly school children, but also the general public about the Holocaust, and also significantly a place to memorialize their lost loved ones. Because if you think about the eighties, traveling to Eastern Europe was not easy, and for many people, they didn't know potentially where their loved ones had been murdered, and there was not a place to remember or visit. And so there was a real sense of layered loss around that place. And so they established a memorial room and an education center and museum, and then that vision grew and there was a concept to move that museum and grow that museum, move it downtown into downtown Dallas, into a larger facility.

That took, I think, longer than they envisioned. And actually the new museum that we're in now opened in 2019, and we expanded to include human and civil rights, which was a really big jump. And with the understanding that the Holocaust was just a genocide of immense proportion, but also was the first time that human rights was legally recognized and protected in some ways. And tying that into our understanding of human and civil rights as a backbone, and then expanding our understanding of what does it mean to stand up for your fellow man or human, and how can we as individuals make a difference? And trying to actually embed the whole experience. So that's part of what we do. And then also trying to be a convener for tough conversations, which is another part of what we do at the museum. But that first group of Holocaust survivors was 125 people. The community was a little larger than that, but that was the group that came together then.

For a long time, the museum really was volunteer led, like many small museums, but we're professionalized now. So I'm the Director of Library and Archives, and in that position, I'm in charge of the library, which has about 3,500 volumes, and then I'm in charge of supervising and managing the oral history collection. We started recording oral histories at the very beginning. What's really cool about that is we have some of those early testimony interviews, and we've gone back and interviewed those survivors in their later years. Of course, they were already grandparents when we were interviewing them in the eighties, and now they're great-grandparents sometimes many times over, and they're much later in their elder years and have given their life even more reflection. So that's really an interesting piece of the puzzle. And so we have about 200 Holocaust interviews from North Texas Holocaust survivors, and then we have expanded our oral history collection to include human civil rights topics.

When I think about human rights, that's the human condition, and it really includes almost anything. But we do in the exhibit have 12 strands of human and civil rights that we really do want to tie that back to. Then we have 20,000 archival and artifact objects in the collection. So the foundational collection was Holocaust related, so going up until I started collecting human and civil rights in 2018, but up until then was all Holocaust related. And then of course, most of those things are archival materials, photographs, albums, letters, and so on. But now when you think about human civil rights collections, I'm getting cell phone footage of mass shootings, protest signs. It's really changed the way we collect what we collect and how for a while it was very much a traditional archives with three-dimensional objects and photos and letters. Now I'm having to expand my scope of how I deal with things, but it's exciting and good, and I have multiple donor meetings a week, and we still bring in Holocaust related collections all the time.

We brought in a journal from a litigator at the Nuremberg trial that went on display. It was really significant, we brought that in and put it on display this month. So there's still Holocaust related content coming in, and people find things from their great-grandparents or grandparents or great-uncle, that still is evolving and coming to the surface. And then the human and civil rights pieces evolve, and we're becoming more known as a convener for those conversations and collections and testimonies too. So it's all moving, but sometimes different speeds and some starts and stops, I guess.

I think in the archives world, the conversation is always based in trust. I think it is just multiplied when there's trauma at the root of that conversation with a donor or a donor's family. Same thing with an oral history interview. To get someone to share their story, you have to have a relationship built on trust to even get started. And then that's multiplied by some multiple over when there's trauma at the root of the conversation you're going to have and they need to trust that you're going to handle their story with care. Collecting Hard Histories

I think what's been interesting for me, managing the collections and then our educators working with the materials and then putting them on display. So I also manage the artifacts on display. My academic background is in the Holocaust. There's not really any way to have an academic background in the entire history of human rights. So what happens is I'll have a donor meeting or an oral history testimony, and I find myself preparing for, let's imagine the entire history of Rwanda. I don't happen to have a PhD in that. I haven't written my dissertation in that topic. But then literally that would be that morning and then that afternoon I might have a meeting preparing for a donor meeting or an oral history testimony meeting with someone who was involved with escaping the Cambodian genocide. Well, again, you could have written five books about that topic and still have lots to learn.

So that has been a real adjustment, and by no means would I ever in a million years claim to understand the Holocaust. That topic is so immense. But I am more prepared and conversant in general on that topic because that is my academic background. And so it has put me kind of really in a situation where I want to learn more and be more conversant and prepared. And I also want to understand the communities I'm working with more. And then there's also a sense of how recent some of the trauma is. So if you have a Holocaust survivor, it's generally 75 plus years since the trauma. So the current survivors were children, which brings its own challenges. So if they're still alive, there were children when this trauma occurred and that, again, has its own challenges. And our team has been working with these individuals very carefully and professionally for a while now.

But when you have someone who, for example, was involved with a mass shooting here in Dallas a few years ago, or was a refugee from a recent crisis. That is a much more recent trauma and it's much more likely that they are talking to me about this for the very first time that they've ever talked about it. Now, it does happen that someone talks about the Holocaust for the first time in our offices, but it's just much more likely with these more recent traumas. So you just have to be really cognizant of that and prepared, and you can't really be prepared for everything that's going to happen. We do a process where we do a pre-interview where we try to understand the basic outline of someone's story so you can ask the questions that have meaning for the individual and for the historical context that you want to gather.

And I had done that in the course of the interview, the interviewee revealed something that was 10 time more traumatic than he had revealed in the pre-interview. Which I think is actually not uncommon and not a bad thing, and it was extremely powerful and also significant historically. But again, how do you prepare for that? That's impossible and it's not like you can plan. That's challenging. And again, instead of that interview taking an hour and a half, it took four hours. That's another thing when you're thinking about managing a department and time and resources and things like that. So some of that is just really challenging. Until you've built a museum, I don't think it ever really occurs to you. The theory is that you are prepared to present a topic to someone with a PhD or with a seventh grade reading level. All of that is compounded by the subjects we're trying to present, which is, I would argue some of the hardest subject matter that could ever be condensed into 16,000 square feet, which is the exhibit space that we have.

One of the things that's always struck me is I have a degree in history. You're taught to write to the level of 15 pages, 20 pages, but when you get into professional life, my bosses never want to see anything longer than one page. And if you're writing for museums, it better not be longer than a paragraph. And if you're writing for exhibit copy, it has to be extremely compelling to be longer than a sentence. So then you have to take all that learning you've had and unlearn it. Then you have to get these extremely complex subjects, and you can't assume anything about what people know and understand about these complex histories. Condense it way, way, way down, ax 90% of what you want to tell people. Then simplify the language without making it condescending and then present it and hope that they leave with maybe 10% of what you are trying to present, not because anybody coming through our doors is unable to understand the concepts, but because no one going into a museum is able to retain everything, me included. I mean, I'm a deep diver. I'm a museum junkie. It's just human nature. You can't digest that whole bunch of information.

So it's really hard to take all of that. What I do is look at artifacts as a way to connect, grab attention and help convey a challenging part of that history in a way that helps people make sense of something that's almost impossible to make sense of. One of the artifacts we have in the museum that people talk about a lot is a backpack that was worn by someone in the Kindertransport. We hear about that a lot, I think, because everyone sends their kids off to school with a backpack on, and the kids look at it and they're like, "Oh, I know what that is." And then they know, "Okay, that was a kid. Well, I'm a kid." And then the parents look at that and they say, "That's a kid that someone had to send away."

And then they connect emotionally and intellectually with what that means. That means someone was so afraid that they sent their child away. So then that artifact is not just stuck in a glass case and just left there. It's helping tell the story. So that's my job, finding artifacts that help tell the story and so that they remember and it stays with them. If I find artifacts that do that, that's really the thing that matters a lot. And it's not automatic. There's lots of artifacts I love that I want to give their day in the sun. I really love them. But if they don't help tell the story of the panel work that we're trying to tell, then I can't put them in the exhibit. One thing I did when I was pivoting from being the Dallas Holocaust Museum to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and I know this isn't for everybody, I cold called the 9/11 Museum.

I just asked to speak with whoever built their collections and people were really generous. I spoke with other people who had done really front lines collecting and controversial topics. I spoke to the people who did the collecting in St. Louis after the protest there. I just called people and said, "Hi, my name is Felicia. I'm trying to pivot to collecting human rights collections. What have you done to be successful? What do you wish you'd known?" And I was humble. I didn't try to say, "Here's what I can tell you." I was very honest. I have these sets of concerns and I'm looking for help, and people are very generous with their time and spoke to me. And a big takeaway from those phone calls, which I have seen to be true and this was born out in my experience overall, is that it's always going to be about trust building. It's just harder.

If you're afraid you're going to get too many collections, that's not the fear. And that a lot of them had seen a very slow trickle that once that trust was established in the community you're working with, it would turn into a bigger wave. But that breakthrough had to happen over a longer time if there's trauma involved. And I think that's absolutely true, and that in a way, it'll seem like building those relationships will take longer and you'll have to build trust and have some positive exchanges before a more steady wave of sessions or testimonies comes in. And I've certainly seen that to be true. The other thing that's been interesting, if you think about Holocaust testimonies and even collections, it really seemed to escalate in the eighties. And if you think about legacy, that was when survivors were retiring. They're looking to their grandchildren. Holocaust survivors were not terribly interested, and they saw it as a burden. They didn't want to burden their children, but they didn't want their grandchildren to be unaware of this legacy or to not have access to this history. And so then you see these museums popping up and these collections being donated, and these oral histories being recorded when they have grandchildren. So sometimes it's not the best time to broach some of these subjects until people are ready to face it. If the history is worth preserving, then do the work. I just would encourage new professionals or younger professionals to have a creative sense of problem solving and to ask for help. If there's any defining characteristic of my life as a professional, it's that I've never been shy about asking for help. And I've been very fortunate to have received lots of help from very smart people across the field in all kinds of professional settings, whether it's academic, special collections departments, museums, all kinds of people who've really helped me along the way, offering their abilities and skills. And then I'm always willing to do the same because we're all really truly trying to get the same ball up the mountain, I think.

Catherine: Thank you so much.

Felicia: It's a pleasure.

]]> 50 Years of Remembering the Up Stairs Lounge Fire ]]> Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E1BEF780-CA7C-3776-04E51F41FB1CBD26.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E1D9F860-E1FA-AD26-30207757150F0E15 50 Years of Remembering the Up Stairs Lounge Fire National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Bobby Fieseler about writing "Tinderbox" and the importance of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire in LGBT activism as we come up to the 50th anniversary of the fire. 930 no full 129

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Catherine Cooper: Hello, my name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with-

Bobby Fieseler: Bobby Fieseler, and I am a journalist and queer historian, and the author of a queer history book called Tinderbox about the 1973 Up Stairs Lounge Fire in New Orleans.

Catherine Cooper: Could you talk about what the Up Stairs Lounge Fire was for people who may not know the story?

Bobby Fieseler: Historically, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire was a notoriously unsolved arson fire that took place at a gay bar on the ragtag fringes of the New Orleans French Quarter. The gay bar was called The Up Stairs Lounge, and the arson claimed 32 lives. It was the deadliest fire on record in New Orleans history and the worst mass murder of homosexual Americans in 20th century America.

Yet this event, this calamity, which was very significant when it happened, received just a few days of media attention in its time, due to its queer overtones, and thus was permitted to become the historic mystery that it remains now, the way it lingers. The Up Stairs Lounge Fire is still officially an unsolved crime despite a bounty of evidence pointing towards the chief suspect: an internally conflicted gay-for-pay sex worker named Roger Dale Nunez, a man ejected from the Up Stairs Lounge Fire minutes before the fire began screaming the word, "Burn," curiously enough and despite the presence of this chief suspect.

It was the Sunday night of June 24, 1973. Sunday nights were significant at the working-class gay bar called The Up Stairs Lounge. It was called the Up Stairs Lounge because it was on the second story of a building, and it was hidden from street view. You had to access it via a single staircase that was the lone entrance and exit that was winding, so you couldn't even see where you were going to as you were heading up the staircase. Sunday nights were the biggest night of the week at the Up Stairs Lounge. There was a drink special for working class gays and lesbians called the Beer Bust. It was $1 for two hours of unlimited draft beer. This was New Orleans in the '70s.

The fire itself, the calamity, was deemed a kind of political inconvenience in its time, a hot potato due to its queer overtones. That's left us where it is now. The Up Stairs Lounge Fire as an event on the map of queer history, and American history now, but it still occupies an uncertain place where people don't know how to speak about it exactly.

Catherine Cooper: You open the book with a question, and I'd love to hear your answer, what does it mean to remember?

Bobby Fieseler: This was the question that occupied me as I was writing the entire book. What is the significance of it? Is it just a recitation of facts? Do we remember for revenge? Do we remember for trauma porn so we can make ourselves feel sad or victimized in the current day and age? I settled on it in the last line of the book. The first line and the last line of books tend to have a relationship, and as an author I didn’t even mean for that to happen, but so “what does it mean to remember?” Then the last few words of Tinderbox is “speaking at last their names,” in reference to the victims.

What it means to remember for me as I've come to understand this crazy story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire that's occupied about 10 years of my life and continues to, and it's something I think about on a daily basis, is that we can't change the past by remembering it, but we can change the way we reflect upon the past through the manner in which we choose to remember it. We can reflect upon the past in a way that's nihilistic, in a way that makes us feel powerless, or we can reflect upon the past in a way that tries to honor individuals who might be our forebearers, and in a way to try to offer some sort of symbolic restitution to people who did not receive respect, or dignity, or equal rights, or equal treatment in the past.

That's what it means for me to remember. As I talk about the Up Stairs Lounge, the more that I understand it is that history, and especially queer history or human rights history, occurs in this space of malleability where there are events that transpired that are facts that predate us, that affect us all because we live in the stream of history. It's like the invisible person in the room whenever we meet and talk about queer subjects oftentimes, especially in New Orleans, the Up Stairs Lounge is just this persistent reality.

To remember it is an act of connecting ourselves to that lineage, and at the same time, transforming. I hate to sound like a motivational speaker, I'm weirding myself out here. But it's transforming acts of hatred, acts of confusion, acts of disrespect, acts of unbridled pain into some meaningful matter that we can then consider in a contemporary context and use in all sorts of different ways. It's manna then to offer restitution to the past, the 32 victims of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire who were denied respect and dignity in their lifetime. In their deaths, actually, many of the Up Stairs Lounge victims did not receive religious burials, say.

Or it can be used as a statement to say how far we've come. To talk about this now means that we are a society that can talk about these difficult queer topics as opposed to the society in the past in the 1970s that couldn't talk about it.

Or it's a statement of never again. What happened there? The conditions that created the Up Stairs Lounge Fire, the fire itself, the fallout, never again. It can mean all sorts of things. It's an active back and forth, isn't it, to remember. In what we choose to remember, and then what we choose to remember in a public way.

Catherine Cooper: How has memory or storytelling around the fire changed since the event, both within the local community in New Orleans and outside of it? Because it did have that national feature to it as well.

Bobby Fieseler: In its day in the '70s, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire when it occurred, it was this literally explosive event that involved fire bursting out of the windows of this second story gay bar that was positioned like a castle keep where people who passed by it every day didn't even know there was a massive gay bar up there. And they were forced to all stare and reckon with this calamity and this violence and people literally burning before their eyes.

That drew a lot of attention in its span and in its time period. There were a few days of national coverage of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire because national media was suddenly interested in this. It was like a true-crime story, this high scope of death. 32 people dead, we have to devote coverage to it. The LA Times makes it a front page story. The Chicago Tribune makes it a front page story. The national TV news covers the Up Stairs Lounge fire. Then it became understood the type of bar that had burned and the character of the individuals, the qualities of the individuals, who had died within it. Then national media suddenly understood that this wasn't a typical true-crime story where the victims would be allotted all the ordinary sympathies.

In the '70s though, queer folk were considered to be of a criminal class. State laws and also local ordinances meant to clamp down upon what was considered a very dangerous subpopulation in the United States. So the idea that attention had been paid to this freaked the media out, freaked authorities out, and they diverted very quickly. It's what happens when anyone gets awkward, they scattered. Even though national media scattered, there was a persistent group of local and national queer journalists that tried to continue the story for about a week. They kept at it. There were activists that kept at it, and then those activists formed what was called the National New Orleans Emergency Task Force. They created an emergency fund and all sorts of things like that. They kept at it for a few months, and then that all faltered. Then there was local silence.

There had been an older institution that had regulated queer life called Euphemistic Living, or The Closet, or The Gay Underworld, or Open Secret, The Social Compact, however you want to reference it, and that clamped back and the Up Stairs Lounge was then foisted locally as this example of what happens when you out yourself. What are the dangers of outness, it's violence. It's you being subjected to dangerous living and a miserable death, that sort of thing. The Up Stairs Lounge was then utilized as this cautionary tale by semi-closeted New Orleanians, people from Louisiana, that would say, "This is an example of why we shouldn't be out, open, using our real names, showing our faces, fighting for our rights. And we certainly shouldn't be involved in politics saying that we're homosexuals."

That was the majority voice, but then there was a minority voice locally of activists that were activated. They were like the slow burning embers stoked by the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy who kept chatting about it, and they would do so for years. They became some of the most important gay New Orleans and lesbian New Orleans activists. Then they, in turn, became some of the most important gay activists in Louisiana.

A classic example of someone who was inspired to activism by the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy was the lesbian bar owner in New Orleans, Charlene Schneider, who operated the lesbian bar Charlene's. In her outrage over the way that the Up Stairs Lounge victims were treated in death, she became convinced the myth of live and let live in New Orleans, the idea that I can do my dirty thing in my corner and you can do your dirty thing in your corner and we're not going to get punished for it, the idea that that was a ruse because gays were consistently still being targeted within that atmosphere, incensed Charlene, and motivated her to open up ... It was a radical act. She, in 1977, opened up a bar for gay women and used her real name, and that was directly connected to her experience with the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy.

Then, there was this long battle, I could talk about this forever, decades where New Orleans fought itself about whether or not it was even okay to talk about the fire. There were parties for and against, and people like Charlene were saying, "We needed to talk about this and we need to connect it to a legacy of political action." People like the former Up Stairs Lounge bar owner, Phil Esteve, would say, "No, New Orleans Live and Let Live is the way that makes things safe. There's no gay activists in New Orleans because none are needed."

That was ongoing up until the first scholarship of the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy, which happens in the late '80s, and early '90s. There are local writers then and journalists that try to revisit the story. Then that continues into the 21st century where there is a tremendous explosion of scholarship and interest and discussion, first locally, then nationally, then internationally of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. Where now it's not just debated whether we should talk about this event or connect it to a legacy of queer rights or queer wellbeing, et cetera, but it's the subject of musicals that are touring internationally. That there was an U p Stairs Lounge musical called The View Upstairs that recently played in Tokyo, translated into Japanese. These are folks in Tokyo, in Japanese, singing about something that happened to closeted gay folk in the 1970s French Quarter. It's insane when you think about it.

There are German feature story writers right now that are writing stories about the 50th anniversary of the Up Stairs Lounge and thinking about what does this mean for the legacy of international queer folk. That's a tremendous growth. The seed of activism and interest was like, I hate to use the biblical mustard seed allusion, but I am a gay Roman Catholic, so it's like it grew into the largest tree where there has never been more discussion. That sort of exponential growth will continue to happen with the Up Stairs Lounge Fire. But first, in a natural storytelling city like New Orleans, the Up Stairs Lounge Fire for a long span of time was the one story that was off limits. No more.

Catherine Cooper: We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the fire: June 24, 2023. Does the Queer, LGBTQ community have any plans to mark the event in New Orleans?

Bobby Fieseler: Yeah. There's a tremendous amount of public programming internationally and locally that's going to happen. I'm a board member of a local organization called the LGBT Archives Project of Louisiana, and we have a planning committee that's putting on a conference symposium for three days in New Orleans to be held at the Marriott Hotel, which is across the street from the historic site of the Up Stairs Lounge Bar.

We're going to host three days of discussion, of meetings and of tribute where there's going to be all of the authors who've written books on the Up Stairs Lounge, we're all going to get together and have a confab. All the people who've done artistic interpretations, people who've made musicals, created dance pieces, written screenplays, they're going to all get together and talk about things. Academics, religious folk, who've preached, elegized in some way the victims of the Up Stairs Lounge tragedy, their input and their impact. It's going to be an extensive thing.

It's June 23rd through June 25th. Then, of course, June 24th is the actual 50th anniversary of the tragedy. On that afternoon, there's going to be a very meaningful service at the historic St. Mark's Church, which is the church that on July 1, 1973, held the first Up Stairs Lounge memorial in the French Quarter. Then there's going to be a second line that leads us to the Up Stairs Lounge historical site, where there's going to be a small ceremony at the plaque where the Up Stairs Lounge existed, where the Up Stairs Lounge fell on the map, and there there's going to be a meaningful service.

There's going to be a combination of conversation, tribute, et cetera, to recognize this important event, to educate the public, to offer respect to the victims. Also to try to, as much as we can, continue to tell the victim's stories. The victims of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire were not just significant because of the way they happened to die, a lot of these individuals led fascinating lives. Each of them, you could make 32 movies out of each and every one of the individuals who perished at the Up Stairs Lounge. So fascinating was that the way that these were individuals who moved between worlds, who figured out how to live in very difficult circumstances. All of them had a unique way of coming to the Up Stairs Lounge that night, that bar that they considered their safe haven.

Catherine Cooper: If people want to get involved-

Bobby Fieseler: I would go to the LGBT Archives Project website, and you can find more information there. There's an Eventbrite page and all sorts of stuff like that.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Bobby.

]]> Sharing the Memoir of a Japanese Draft Resister of Conscience during WWII ]]> Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/05E87792-B6EC-9CD5-D7CAC8FDF01999AE.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-05E8F234-AB27-F74B-0D50067689F4FC33 Sharing the Memoir of a Japanese Draft Resister of Conscience during WWII National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Gail Kuromiya and Art Hansen about the importance of Yosh Kuromiya's memoir and sharing it broadly through publication. 1179 no full 128

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Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gail Kuromiya: I'm Gail Kuromiya. I'm the third-oldest daughter of Yosh Kuromiya, who is the author of the book that we'll be discussing.

Art Hansen: And I'm Art Hansen, and I'm the editor of the book that we'll be discussing. I'm a retired professor in History and Asian American Studies at California State University at Fullerton.

Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today. Could you talk about why it was so important to have Mr. Kuromiya's memoir, Beyond the Betrayal, published and made available to the greater public?

Gail Kuromiya: Well, if you look in the appendix of the book, you'll see that dad made a lot of appearances at conferences, universities, high schools, and whatnot, sharing his history of being a draft resister during World War II. He really wanted to get the story out to people who are interested, in particular, Japanese Americans and the younger generation. And he was actually hoping that that generation would spread the news. He felt the Japanese American community itself needed to clean its own house first and to acknowledge what happened during the war because it wasn't often shared from generation to generation. Thankfully, that's changing now, but he wanted to acknowledge what happened and learn from it and understand our own responsibilities for what happened.

Art Hansen: And from my perspective, I think Yosh Kuromiya's memoir is exceedingly important because although there were 300 plus draft resisters from the War Relocation Authority concentration camps during World War II, this is the only book-length memoir. There have been articles written, including ones by Yosh himself, but this is the only book length one. And most of the resisters have passed away. So, this was something that was exceedingly important. It was important to me too, because since 1972 when I started studying the Japanese American World War II experience, I have focused my attention on resistance activities by the Japanese Americans themselves. Not people who did things for the Japanese Americans, ministerial people and the like, but actually the Japanese Americans themselves. They had been depicted as being passive and not taking control of the situation and not defending their civil rights and their human dignity. In fact, I have found out that they did. And so, I wanted to showcase those kinds of stories. I think this is a very important story that is emblematic of this whole idea of victim self-representation of the wartime experience.

Gail Kuromiya: I was the one who was probably most interested in dad's work all along from the time he got involved in the early nineties, actually. He would send me printed copies of the talks he gave. But as a daughter, it was a juggling act. Some of the challenges were just dealing with internal family dynamics. Dad himself was pretty darn stubborn. And in some ways, he was his own worst enemy because obviously as a resister he had really strong beliefs and opinions. And as a daughter, that balance of power was a little different. A lot of good came out of that as well. My sisters and I all live far apart, so that was a bit of a challenge. And this was all when we were working on the first family version. Communication was pretty constant. That was one of the good things that came out of it. But that was also sometimes a challenge.

Art Hansen: In my case, to give it some context, I met Yosh Kuromiya in 1995 at a conference that was held in Powell, Wyoming, and focused upon the topic of remembering Heart Mountain. And it was a big conference and everything. And I met him standing in line waiting for some lunch together. And I was immediately struck by what a remarkable person he was. And we just really hit it off and we had some very good common ground. And then years later when Yosh wrote his first draft of his memoir, he picked three people to read it and to provide some commentary on it, and I was one of the three. And I told him that I thought he should consider getting it published by a university press. And I mentioned two presses. One, the University of Washington Press. And the other, the University Press of Colorado. And the reason was because both of those presses dealt with a hybrid audience. Not just academics, but also a general audience as well.

And I thought this was a story that needed to get beyond academia and out to the larger public. Yosh Kuromiya was able to tell a very powerful one. And then I didn't hear much about it again until years later when I was contacted by Lawson Inada, who has written the poetic forward and the poetic afterward to the book as it's published by the University Press of Colorado. And he said, "Art, I have been working with the Kuromiya daughters on a family history that Yosh has produced. And I would like maybe to have you help in some way." And I think he was suggesting that I might write an introduction or something for this family book. And so, I got a copy of the family book and it was very good. And as I read it and everything, I said, "This book needs to be out in public, and it needs to be something that a lot of people can read. No matter if they live in the United States or wherever they live, they need to read this book."

Then I decided I would like to be able to edit this manuscript, but there were a couple of problems. One, apparently Yosh had proceeded with submitting his memoir for publication consideration by the University of Washington Press. And the University of Washington Press had turned it down. One of the so-called anonymous peer reviewers of it remained anonymous, but the other one became known to me. And it was somebody that was very important to studying the draft resistance, which was Eric Muller, a professor of Law at the University of North Carolina. And Eric Muller wrote a book called Free to Die for Their Country, and it was all about the Japanese American draft resisters during World War II. And so, I decided that I would like to see the evaluation that Eric Muller wrote of the book. So the Kuromiya family, Gail in particular, sent it to me.

And when I read it, I could see why Eric was positive about the book, but at the same time, he had reservations. And he had 14 different points that he raised about factual mistakes that Yosh had inadvertently made. And so I felt that one of the things I had to do was to provide a firewall to these errors that he had made. In my endnotes, I was able to hitchhike off of Eric Muller's critique that he did for the University of Washington Press and plug in his comments and his objections to what Yosh had said. So that was one of the big challenges.

And the second big challenge was that Yosh Kuromiya was very infatuated with a book that came out by Robert Stinnett, and the title of the book was Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor. And this was a book that was very controversial. In a sense, it said that Roosevelt knew when other people didn't that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked. And he let it be open to attack because this provided a back door for the United States getting into war against the Nazis in Germany and against the fascists in Italy. That was the premise of the book. Yosh believed that this was the case. And so, when editing it, I had to go through many, many book reviews of that book by diplomatic historians and get a sense of their critical opinion. And I was able to show in the two-pages long endnote that there were book reviewers, for instance, that supported what Yosh supported about this conspiracy of Roosevelt's and the dastardly act of Roosevelt. And then there were many other reviewers of it that felt that he had not proved his thesis, that he had a warm barrel, but not really a smoking gun.

The other challenge I had was that a good friend of mine and a superb historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Diane Fujino, who had put a lot of time into putting forth the manuscript that was submitted to the University of Washington Press. And so, I didn't want to proceed with this project unless I had Diane Fujino's blessing. And she is one of the most gracious and nicest women. And she willingly said, "Art, go ahead with it." Diane Fujino was willing to take it to a second university press, but Yosh was not. He said, "I'm old. And at this particular point, all I want to do is to get this book out. And I'll get it out as a family book." Anyway, those were the main challenges that I had as an editor. Otherwise, there wasn't much of a challenge at all. It was a great opportunity and I was working with great people.

Gail Kuromiya: There's a lot of other people he didn't name that were really important to him, but primarily it was Lawson Inada, who Art mentioned, retired professor and former poet laureate from Oregon State. He's the one who connected Art with the family. Martha Nakagawa is a journalist in Los Angeles and close friend of both my dad and my stepmother. Art, of course. Without him, this book would probably be sitting on a shelf somewhere in the family version format. And of course, he acknowledged his daughters. My oldest sister, Suzi, is a retired professional graphic designer. She did the original layout for the family version, which was retained for the final version. My next oldest sister, Sharon, from New York, was dad's editor from the very beginning when he first started sending us files. And in the final version when we were working with the University Press of Colorado, Sharon was the one who tracked down all the images that we had used in the family version to verify that we had permission and copyrights and all that kind of stuff.

And although all of us are graphic designers, all of dad's four daughters, we weren't very familiar with the whole final publishing process. Design and layout are two things, but all that technical stuff is beyond us. And then my youngest sister, Miya, she's the only one of us who's still working. So, her involvement was minimal in the beginning, but she provided a lot of emotional support for all of us. And then dad acknowledged his second wife, Irene, who was not only his wife, but his personal assistant, his typist, secretary, driver, groomer, all those things. And I would add a lot of other people. My mother, Haru, was family cheerleader and supporter and all-around good sport, my husband Paul, for being so patient since this became my retirement job, essentially. And many other people.

Art Hansen: In most cases, the things that have come out on Japanese Americans have not put a premium upon the resistance of Japanese Americans themselves to their unjust incarceration during World War II. And their pauperization, really, as well as anything else. The loss of property, but also the loss of personal dignity and civil rights in the sense of being an American. I think that this adds to the array of other books that have come out that have focused on this resistance by Japanese Americans themselves. But the main narrative before was essentially that Japanese Americans were so desperate to be able to affirm their American citizenship that they would do anything that was necessary. Their attitude was, this is our government, right or wrong. And therefore, many of them gladly decided that when they had the opportunity to be able to be drafted into the military, they said yes.

And then they became part of the great 442nd Battalion and it is one of the most decorated units ever in American military history. And I think that's what the American public wanted to hear, the fact that no matter what you do to people, America's so important that you would never hold it for account. And I think what the Japanese American draft resisters did and what Yosh does in his book is to hold not only the United States government to account right up through the President of the United States, but also to hold into account the leadership of the Japanese American Citizens League, because they were corroborators with the US government in the incarceration of their own population. I think to have somebody like Yosh Kuromiya, they would like to look at him as being unpatriotic when in fact his whole act of draft resistance was patriotic. He believed in the Constitution of the United States, and we need to live up to that. And that's what he tried to do along with the other draft resisters of conscience is to make the United States live up to that. So draft resistance was exceedingly important.

Gail Kuromiya: The overall interaction I had with my father through this whole process, actually, he had been writing all through the years of his public speaking. And he told me that he had always intended on consolidating those writings into some kind of format. But I asked him at one point when my two boys were young to document all of these stories and these experiences that he had gone through for his kids, grandkids, and future generations. And a lot of his friends and colleagues encouraged him as well with his writings and his appearances. So, dad came up with this idea to make it a cooperative family project, which I don't believe we've ever done before in our family, but we all had our own families and we were living in different parts of the country. And his hope was that it would increase and improve our communication, which it did for me.

And so, in 2010, he sent me his first chapter out of the book. And one thing I do want to mention is that once he had his manuscript where he was comfortable with it, and we had done the family version, he was adamant that nothing be changed from his original manuscript through all of the publishing process. And other than grammatical errors and things like that, Art, to his credit, maintained that. The final book that people will read are dad's words. So, from 2010 until dad died in 2018, constant phone calls with dad, conversations that I probably never would've had the opportunity to have with him because it went beyond his experiences during the war as a resister and all the stuff surrounding that before they went into the camps, afterwards, my childhood, that type of thing. And of course, not all of that is in the book because it's not a tell-all book. But it was really valuable and it got harder and harder because dad started losing his hearing, and that made it really difficult. He didn't use the computer, so I have all his long hand-written notes. I took notes when I talked to him on the phone, which I'm kind of going through now and coming up with these little pearls of stories that I would not have known had I not been having this ongoing conversation with him. So that was the primary memory of this whole process. And even though the book itself is quite an accomplishment, I still think that the phone calls are what I will cherish the most out of this experience, because a lot of Nisei dads are not typically very talkative about their personal feelings and emotions. But I think, through this process, dad got more and more comfortable sharing that type of stuff. So that was a real positive that came out of it.

Art Hansen: In my case, I just have one story that I'd like to relate. It has to do with Yosh's widow, Irene Kuromiya. And when this edited version of the manuscript was being considered to be published by the University Press of Colorado, Irene had registered a protest. And it came to me and it hurt me a lot because I regarded and still regard Irene as a very close and dear friend of mine. She said, "Art Hansen, he was sent the manuscript by Yosh years ago, and he didn't even read it. He didn't even say anything about it," which was absolutely untrue. Not only did I read it, I wrote about a seven or eight-page critique of it, including even a copyediting section to it. And somebody reminded her of that fact. And I think she somehow rather had blanked on it.

What she was upset about more than anything is she felt that what Yosh wanted really was not a published book, but just the family edition for family and friends. That's all he wanted. And I had to, in a sense, go against that, by talking to Gail in particular, to find out at bottom what Yosh wanted. He might have said, "I want just the family edition," but he really wanted something that would get out to a much larger group so that this important story of not just himself, but the story of himself in relationship to the draft resistance movement would become public knowledge. And then almost to the end, Irene still wanted just the family book. But she came to the book event that we had at the Japanese American National Museum. And I think she was very gracious at that event. And you could tell that she was bubbling over with pride. She loved her husband so much and was so proud of his memoir and her own involvement in it. But I think all of the other stuff was washed away.

Gail Kuromiya: Dad wanted to present his manuscript as a personal account. He didn't want it to be an academic document. And he did want to get it out to the public. But at the same time, I think he had a mistrust of the commercial printing process. But one of the themes that he was trying to get across in the memoir, and we talked about this before he passed, was the role of the Issei, his parents’ generation who immigrated here from Japan. So, he attributes a lot of his decisions as being influenced by my grandfather and the morals and integrity he had.

But overall, I think the takeaway from the book is included in Cherstin Lyons' condensed review on the back of the hardcover version. And I believe it's a quote out of dad's text. It reads, "What is a citizen's rightful response to constitutional transgressions? What indeed is a citizen's responsibility when racially-based civil rights restrictions are imposed by an errant government?" I think that sums up the gist of it, even though Dad always told me that he didn't intend this to be a portrayal of him as a resister. Because he said even though that was a pivotal decision in his life, it wasn't his entire life. And that's why he insisted on including all of the rest of his life in the book as well.

Art Hansen: I think that the major takeaway of Yosh's book has been expressed nicely by Gail in that quote that she read. Actually, another important thing that I'd like readers of Beyond the Betrayal to take away is Yosh's entire life, not just his time in camp or in prison, et cetera, or fighting for the rights of the resisters against the JACL and others after the war. But really to see that his entire life is a tribute to not just his acts, but to the man himself and the character, the deep and abiding character of that particular person.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much. This was wonderful.

Gail Kuromiya: Thank you.

Art Hansen: Thank you so much, Catherine.

]]> The Past and Future of UNESCO World Heritage After 50 Years ]]> Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/3802971D-9C7B-2945-0B324353A1F66B96.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-3802EF0B-FB05-759E-7D682CB49BF4908B The Past and Future of UNESCO World Heritage After 50 Years National Park Service Sadie S. Whitehurst speaks with Lynn Meskell about the past and future of UNESCO and World Heritage Site designations. 669 no full 127

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Sadie Schoeffler: Okay. So this Sadie Schoeffler, and I'm here with--

Lynn Meskell: With Lynn Meskell. I'm a PIK professor, which is Penn Integrates Knowledge professor at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations in a School of Design here, Historic Preservation, Penn Museum, and in anthropology.

Sadie Schoeffler: Wonderful. Okay, so we're here talking with you today about your publication, A Future In Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. And it's a great time to be talking about this book because a lot of conversations right now are centered around world heritage, with the 50 year anniversary of the World Heritage Convention coming up. So Lynn, could you tell us a little bit about your publication, A Future in Ruins?

Lynn Meskell: The book started really because I was fascinated as an archeologist that world heritage sites, I'd worked at a few myself, were seemingly so important, and yet as archeologists we knew so little about UNESCO and its processes. How it works, the politics is behind it, and so on. So that's why I embarked on that ethnography. And in fact, I'm still working on UNESCO a decade or more later. It's one of those things you can't really get away from. And in a world of conflict and human rights violations, UNESCO is still central to those debates.

Yeah, I think what the drafters of that convention would say, one of the most significant things is that they put natural and cultural heritage together in one document. And so the conservation itself wasn't simply monuments, but also landscapes. And I think as we approach serious issues around climate change, for example, and environmental justice, that was actually very farsighted.

Sadie Schoeffler: So you see the future of UNESCO focusing more on topics such as climate change and environmental justice that come up now when we're focusing on sites that are already on the World Heritage List, and maybe future sites?

Lynn Meskell: I think climate change is very, very important, and we're going to see that debated pretty hotly with the Great Barrier Reef coming up this year being discussed as being potentially put on the World Heritage List in danger. But given the capacity of UNESCO, which is severely limited, particularly after the US withdrew its funding from the organization, there's not a lot that UNESCO can really do. It is a standard-setting agency. It does look after the World Heritage List and inscriptions, and I think we're just going to see more of the same.

It has really grappled with conflict, perhaps not as effectively as other agencies. And I think its resources, its personnel, its funding is severely depleted. So the glory days in some ways are kind of behind, like the Nubian campaign or Angkor. And now it just faces this raft of challenges, whether it's conflict or climate change, Indigenous rights, things that it's really not particularly well set up to do, wasn't designed to do, and has not mobilized very effectively. Hasn't even harmonized very effectively with other UN agencies.

Sadie Schoeffler: So now we're talking a little bit about the challenges that world heritage is facing, has faced, and continues to face, and how those challenges are evolving. Do you think that the processes for addressing these challenges are going to be something that'll be brought up at the coming up convention? And how do you think professionals like yourself are incorporating the legacies of UNESCO's convention into your own work?

Lynn Meskell: So to answer the first part of that question, given the structure of UNESCO, this is the United Nations. So the nations are the most powerful decision makers. And as you might imagine, they are not very amenable to critique. So anything that would change the convention, that would add additional oversight or scrutiny is going to be vetoed by the member states. So think of the power of the UN Security Council. It's that sort of mechanism.

And so the committee, which is made up of 21 nation states, are the most powerful players in the room, and they're the ones that are going to decide whether to put a site on the list in danger, whether to adhere to human rights policies, and so on. And states are very reluctant to do that. What they really want to do is inscribe more and more sites on the list so that they can garner this social and economic prestige of doing that within their own territory.

In terms of the second part of your question, what can academics and practitioners really do? I think it falls to us to work in the interstices, really. To work on issues like human rights or conflict. To do the things that UNESCO really can't do. So we have this incredible list that draws attention to sites, but in fact UNESCO is not a research agency and they don't really read our work for the most part. So we have to just go on independently and hope that some of our findings can be useful.

But we do additional work. UNESCO always wanted Civil Society to be involved, and it is very keen on academic networks. So I think it's really up to us to just carry on and do the best work that we can and realize that they can't do everything, and they certainly don't have the funds or personnel to do that. And I think that's a popular misconception about the power of UNESCO, particularly in the United States.

I have two fairly new projects since I came to the University of Pennsylvania. One is with the Arab Barometer, which looks at public opinion. And in fact it's the first large scale public opinion around cultural heritage for Iraq and Syria. And it's based in Mosul and Aleppo. And that's garnering interviews, long-standing interviews with 1,600 participants in each city about how they feel about the destruction of sites, the reconstruction, who should be involved, responsible, who should fund it, what are their priorities for heritage reconstruction. A lot of very emotional responses, too, about what they prioritized and what they felt most upset about during those sort of conflicts.

And so that's been very telling. You may not be surprised that heritage and its reconstruction comes quite low in priorities compared to other humanitarian concerns like health, security, stability, employment, education and so on. And that's a wake-up call for those of us who think that heritage is all about world peace and brings repair. That it's not enough to reconstruct a museum or an archeological site that we're interested in. We have to think about what people on the ground actually want and to try and make heritage much more about socioeconomic benefits and social goods as it were, and perhaps link more with other UN partners, in International Committee for the Red Cross, other sorts of things if we actually want to do something meaningful.

And the second project is with my colleagues at Wharton Business School here at Penn, looking at the 1,154 world heritage sites around the world and how they are positioned in terms of cooperation and conflict. And unfortunately what we're finding is that evermore increasingly the nomination of world heritage properties leads to increased conflict. And that's around everything from working with NGOs to the environment to the presence of rebels to bad labor practices and so on.

And that's a study that's done on every world heritage site and is a AI data scrape that includes 80 languages and sentiment analysis. And that's actually a pretty depressing set of results that show that world heritage has become less about cooperation and peace-building and benefits and more about the scramble for economic advantage, for exclusion, for moving people out, alienation, and so on. So it doesn't actually necessarily bring sustainable development and all the promises that are made by so many agencies. And also archeologists think that we're doing great things, but in fact we may be exacerbating tension.

Certainly, my colleagues in historic preservation here at Penn work very effectively with communities. And I have colleagues that have worked in the southwest, in the Middle East, and also in countries like Rwanda. And I think they're very impressive. In fact, if anything, I think maybe archeology could learn something from that historic preservation perspective. Archeologists, and particularly American archeologists, have traditionally thought, "Past subjects are dead, so we don't need to really worry." But in fact, a preservation angle is much more community-driven in living communities.

And that's what we're getting also clearly from our more global research as well, that this is not something that's anchored entirely in the past. This is absolutely a living heritage that matters to people. So I think there needs to be more interdisciplinary crossover too. And most of my work has been with people in other fields, including political scientists and economists and international lawyers. And the sort of work that heritage is so complex now that you do have to work across disciplines. That you can't do it otherwise. We need to understand how all this is playing out. And the last thing I'd say is that heritage is increasingly being used in the security sphere.

So there's the nexus around cultural property protection and the military. And we see that playing out in Ukraine most recently, but it has also been the case across the Middle East. And we've seen that also in Thailand, Cambodia, Mali, Afghanistan. Plenty of other places as well. So our materials are being taken up and considered and given some priority, and we're not part of that conversation. So I think we need to learn how others use our material or see its value or see it as a liability, and so on. So that heritage security nexus is I think our next big challenge, and it's already here.

I have another project that looks at not just world heritage, but other sorts of heritage sites in India. And I should say that, whilst UNESCO wants to privilege, obviously, the 1972 list, and the media take up on that, and that, in the popular realm, is obviously the thing that people think of when they refer to cultural heritage. They think of the pyramids or the Acropolis, or the Taj Mahal, and so on. But there are of course so many other thousands of sites.

So I'm interested in what's happening in India, particularly around heritage and conflict. India doesn't have to be a war zone to actually have conflicts or social conflicts, or those around gender, caste, and class. And so I think that's a whole other project in a country that has some 4,000 official sites on a register, and then 10,000 unofficial, and then many other thousands that are not necessarily reported. There's nothing like India for the scale of monuments and heritage. And so I think we need to diversify also and look at how other people are doing these sorts of preservation projects. Other countries, other sorts of living heritage, and so on.

Sadie Schoeffler: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing with everyone your perspectives and experiences.

Lynn Meskell: Thank you very much.

]]> Exploring Non-Destructive Analysis of Ceramics ]]> Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/FC4F5754-AAE3-B8F6-B46A0BFA21434655.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-FC4FD4D1-F5F4-C1BB-1E0B83489EEAB379 Exploring Non-Destructive Analysis of Ceramics National Park Service NCPTT's Sadie Schoeffler Whitehurst speaks with Chandra Reedy about her project to test the applications of Mirage OPTIR microscopy to non-destructive analysis of ceramics. 554 no full 126

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Sadie: My name is Sadie Schoeffler.

Chandra: I'm Chandra Reedy from the University of Delaware, and I'm director of the Center for Historic Architecture and Design, which is a research center within the Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration. And I also run our laboratory for analysis of cultural materials.

Sadie: Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with us today. I understand you just received a grant award from NCPTT to do some research on non-destructive microanalysis of ceramics. If you want to tell us a little bit about this project and how this project started?

Chandra: I'm really excited about this project. It's using a relatively new instrument that's currently being used mainly in industry, and as far as I know, it's only been used with one or two cultural material projects and those were with paintings, so I think it will be very useful for ceramics as well. And it's called Mirage OPTIR microscopy, and that stands for an infrared and Raman microscope with optical photothermal spectroscopy. And basically, what it does is it allows analysis of very tiny slots, less than a micron in spatial resolution, with no surface preparation or sampling needed and there's no surface contact. And you can get analyses of both crystalline and amorphous or glassy phases. It directs a laser onto a surface and that causes a photothermal effect when the sample absorbs infrared radiation, and it's reflected back with a spectra that's called an OPTIR Spectra that's collected using a photon probe.

And what's important is that this OPTIR Spectra is a really good match for FTIR Spectra, and that FTIR is a very long-standing analytical technique and so there are a lot of databases already available that allow you to identify what material you have. And the photon probe also acts as a Raman excitation source so you can get simultaneous Raman analysis, which means you have a lot of data to help you pin down what material you have. And again, with Raman spectroscopy, there's already large databases available so you can compare your spectra to those. Why this technology could be a game changer

But with this technique, we can get less than 0.45 nanometers spot size, compared to FTIR, which is about 10 microns spot size. So we can get very, very tiny spots and that means when there are little crystals in glazes and slips and paints, we can identify what those are, and that tells us a lot about the technological processes that were used in the past to produce these materials. And we can also identify clay minerals and particles in the ceramic, so that tells us about geological sources or materials. And then we can also analyze spots on accretions that develop during burial, and that will allow someone to tailor a conservation treatment to specifically the mix of materials they have there.

I guess I got interested in this because I was already working in a shared analytical facility that our university has where there's a lot of instruments, and that's very helpful for small labs like mine. We don't get multimillion dollar grants in our field so I can't afford most of these instruments or technicians to keep them maintained and all that. So I was working in there on another project and they got this new instrument recently, and so they held a workshop to show what it can do and I attended that. And it looked like a lot of potential applications to ceramics so I decided to give it a try and this grant allows me to experiment with it.

If you're working in an art museum, you have intact ceramic vessels, and so you're not going to take a sample from that. It's not advised. I think in the past, people drilled little samples from the bottom, but nobody would do that today. So in a museum then, they're looking at the entire large object. And there are techniques you can do such as X radiography to look at manufacturing method, and there are some surface analysis techniques like the FTIR and Raman that I've just spoken about. There are some that can be done without sampling to try to identify decorative areas, the materials that were used there.

In archeology, it's a little bit different because we have sherds, and if you've been at an archeological site where there are ceramics, you have a lot of sherds, bags and bags and bags full of sherds. So one might think, well, who cares if it's destructive or not? But actually, it's very helpful to be able to analyze a sherd non-destructively so you still have it intact at the end of your analyses, and then you can use it for other methods of analyses and that can be very helpful to do multiple methods on the exact same piece so you know that your results, if they vary, it's not because you have different materials. And so this could be very useful because we could get a lot of information and then we still have the object at the end. And if somebody wants to come and replicate your analysis later, they can on the exact same piece, or if new methods of analysis become available, you can use the exact same piece.

If you want to take a slice off that piece for thin section analysis, which many archeologists do, then you can analyze it first and then you can compare your thin section with the original analyses. And if you don't cover your thin section, if you just polish the surface, you can use that for microscopy and then you can use the same technique to analyze all of the tiny little crystals in the glaze and analyze specific spot or to do phase analyses of the entire thin section. So there's a lot of advantages to non-destructive analyses, even with archeological sherds. The goal of the project

My hypothesis is that I will be able to characterize very tiny phases in glazes, which is extremely important for being able to determine what the original recipes were that the potters used and what their firing regimes were. You can reconstruct that if you understand the different crystals and glassy phases in the glaze. You can also develop an idea about what the potters were trying to achieve aesthetically, if you can analyze the materials, and how they were going about doing that. And I also think we'll be able to analyze sherd surfaces that have undergone deterioration in burial so we can understand the extent of that deterioration and characterize burial accretions that might need to be removed by conservators.

So I think based on how this technique has worked for other fields and other kinds of materials, I think it should work for this and I will find out soon, but I'm pretty sure that it will.

My real goal is to be able to better understand the knowledge and experimentation history and technological achievement of past craftspeople to see and better appreciate how they learned to control their materials and their production processes to make objects that met specific functions with better and better performance. And I think that understanding that past technological history might help us in understanding today's technological challenges and how to overcome them. And so I think this project might be a major breakthrough because it's going to allow us to do things that I haven't been able to do before in terms of fast analysis with no preparation and identifying nanometer size phases and materials, so that will give a lot of clues about these past technological processes that were developed.

And also, I think it will help us to better understand deterioration. Another goal of mine is to be able to better preserve these past materials for the future, and so understanding what deterioration they've already undergone in burial and how they might better be preventively preserved or treated in conservation approaches will help keep those objects into the future so that others can use them for analysis when new techniques become available to them.

Sadie: Well, I'm excited about what this means for the future of conservation and laboratory analysis and archeological assemblages, and what this is going to do for the archeological record. And I want to say thank you so much for talking with me today about your project, and I'm just really excited.

Chandra: Thank you for talking with me, and I hope to be able to report some positive results a little later on.

]]> Interpreting History with the Slave Dwelling Project ]]> Tue, 28 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/9D1F4F00-E0FC-D66E-DE412ACDD21FDF9F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-9D413795-F9DB-E12C-51CB83BD1859B75E Interpreting History with the Slave Dwelling Project National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Joe McGill about the Slave Dwelling Project and the importance of how we interpret and share history. 737 no full 125

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J. Church: Good morning, Joe!

J. McGill: Good morning, how are you?

J. Church: Very well, how are you doing?

J. McGill: I’m well.

J. Church: Be brief if you want but how you got started in this project.

J. McGill: The stars aligned, a lot of things came together at that time, ten years ago when I started the project. At the time, I worked for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and I would visit places associated with the Trust and on my own. Sometimes these are antebellum sites, you know, prior to the Civil War that could tell many stories. But usually the stories that were told at these sites were of the architecturally significant buildings on those sites and missing from that element of the story were the buildings where enslaved people occupied, where enslaved people did the cooking, where they functioned in the carriage houses, none of that was there. No element of people whom I derived my DNA from, was there.

I was also at that time a Civil War reenactor; I was at least fifteen years into being a Civil War reenactor. So, I know the joys of visiting historic places and sometimes sleeping at those places. And then of course, having that DNA that I have and knowing that something needed to be done with the lack of information out there and making that statement that somebody needs to do something about this. Of course, that somebody was me.

I took it upon myself, I got lucky. I was part of a team to monitor the work of the carpenters that were actually restoring the slave cabins at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, where I am now employed on a full-time basis actually. So, in doing this and seeing the opportunity for these cabins to now tell that element of the story at that place, I wanted to take it a step further and sought permission to spend the night in one of the cabins when they were finished. Well, they thought it was a great idea and then I said well if they think it’s a good idea, maybe others will too.

So, I sought a list from the state Historic Preservation office here in Charlestown, South Carolina, told them my intent. Of course, they got it because they think a lot like I do, it’s about preservation. So, I got the list from them and started making phone calls. And surprisingly, you know after I made my requests and after that awkward calls, of course you know, such a request is not usual, most of them got it. And because most of them got it, I started making a list of where I would go in accordance to those yes’s. Now I got a few noes along the way, but I had enough yeses to step up on faith and make it happen.

My intent was to stay in the state of South Carolina, you know, sleeping in these slave dwellings because that’s where my limited resources would take me, but even with that filling in the list was not a problem. So, I started out on the journey at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens. The media was there, they did what the media does and then a few sleepovers later, NPR did a piece on it and there was certainly no turning back then. I had already realized that this was a project much bigger than myself and others saw the value. In fact, a lot saw the potential that I did not see initially because I started getting these calls from other states.

Now luckily for me, at the time, I was employed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and I was traveling to the states of Alabama and Louisiana. Knowing that I was going to these places and putting the word out of this new thing that I was doing, some of my clients or contacts through the National Trust would start seeking these places for me, because they were getting a bonus. See I was traveling there anyway for my job, and I was just tacking one extra day onto that trip, you know just spend the night in these places in these other states. So, again the stars aligned all this came together.

Now, ten years later we’re still at it. I say we because we’re now a non-profit organization functioning as such. We have a lot more checks and balances to ensure that you know what we’re doing is proper and in order. So, again ten years later, I’m at this thing and here we are, you and I Jason about to go into a mutual endeavor.

A lot of folks think like I used ten years ago. A lot of people try to keep slavery on southern plantations. Well, you’ve got to expand that way of thinking. Because if you keep it there, you’re going to miss the urban slavery that happened and you’re going to miss the slavery that happened in those northern states. So, so far, it’s been twenty-five states and the District of Columbia. If you limit it to agriculture, you’re going to keep it at you know, at those larger plantations but you’ve got to also think, you know, even in those northern states there were some plantations. You know, less so than the south, of course, its economy was that agrarian effort to extract from the land all that they could. And that worked better in the south than it did in the north.

Now that northern slavery was more of body servants and people of this nature. You know that structure that usually survives again, near the big house as you just stated, that structure is usually made of better material than the structures for the field hand because it’s by your nice, beautiful big house and it’s about aesthetics, it’s optics. If you have that building near your nice beautiful big house, you want it to look good at least. Not saying that the enslaved people who occupied that space got any better treatment, but at least the materials that that house was made out of was usually more substantial, it certainly looked better, and it was a status symbol.

You know, my first three sleepovers, I was all by myself, all alone and that’s how it started. So, now I’m back to that but not by choice. It’s because of the Coronavirus that we’re back here. But I’ve been at it long enough to embrace the technology that exists and that is one of the reasons you and I are talking right now. I’m seeing your face and you’re seeing mine, you’re likewise. Well, we’ve taken that same technology to apply to the slave dwelling project. I’m sleeping in the places alone, but we also give folks the opportunity to interact with me through Facebook live and before the actual sleepover, we also have a zoom call that folks can take part in. And the zoom call is more real time interactive when we do the Facebook live, you know it’s me talking a lot then I get an opportunity to scroll through the people who are signed in and try to answer any questions that they may have posed to me. Less interactive than zoom, but interactive enough to still let folks get a feel for the place. They see the place through my eyes, they hear about the place through my ears.

You know it’s fun. I’m kind of getting used to this, but you know, it’s good and bad. It’s good because people can do the social distancing and stay where they are and still learn about that place, but it takes away that face to face and eye to eye, that campfire atmosphere where they can have that interaction with everybody around the campfire. So, we want to try to get back to that as soon as the science will allow us to. We plan these things as if I’m going to be there physically and there are going to be others there physically with me, we planned it as such. But we know that at some point, if the science says, “Well you know, that’s not the way to go,” then we are going to have to pull back and make it these social distance learning type activities and we are prepared to do that.

You know in 1787, when we were in our nation’s capital, which was back then, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, considering the ratification of that Constitution, the fact that you know, the southerners demanded that they needed twenty more years to still import people into this nation for the purpose of enslaving them because their economy depended on it. You know it’s the agriculture that we talked about earlier, that was that opportunity right then to snuff out this slavery that exists now in these United States. They could have ended that chattel slavery right then and there. But they did not. They kicked it down the road, kicked it down the road, and they kept doing that and because they kept doing that, and even after freedom came, all those things that replaced slavery like convict labor and KKK and lynchings and white citizen councils and you know, they were always doing these things to disenfranchise the African American population.

You know, take Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the massacre there. Take your Rosewoods and if you look at compile a list, that complied list of people who were lynched, you will see that there were a lot of businessmen who were thriving and because they were thriving and competing with the white population, there were these efforts to silence them and making a public spectacle of what was done to them.

So, I want folks to know that, yeah, we should be angry, but we’re still dealing with what we should have dealt with historically that we allowed to persist, the slavery and the effects thereof and we are still living with that legacy. But yet they’ll make a statement like, yeah, get over it. You know it happened, not in their lifetime so get over it. They got to understand what that is. That “it” is more than slavery. That “it” is all that period you just described. Disenfranchisement are when these African Americans were pursuing their happiness there was always something, a law or a group, or something to take it all away again, take you right back to zero.

So those things continue to persist, and we say that if you know, if were going to learn history or you’re doomed to repeat it or something to that effect. I know I butchered that, but the thing is we know the history, but we still repeat it. I was given a tour yesterday at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens and my question and answer period now tend to focus more on connecting those dots, what we’re going on today, you know George Floyd’s death, what we’re dealing with now, monuments coming down at an alarming rate and they’re not just confederate monuments anymore. I mean they try to, throw everything, everything into that bucket.

Well, it is because that we’ve been telling a distorted history for so long. Some of these public sites, you know they kind of fit into to it. They kind of went along with it, whereas they should have been just doing the opposite. I think had they been telling the real history, I think we would be in a much better place because if you ask a group of people if they’ve visited a plantation, many of them may say no. But then if you ask that question another way, you know if you ask them if they visited Montpelier or Mount Vernon or the Highlands or Mount Vernon, they may say yes. Well, those are plantations. And that’s that indication that we were trying to hide this, hide something on these properties. And because we were hiding it, prolonging it for so long, we still have people who come to these sites seeking out that sugar coated version of the history, you know the Gone with The Wind hoop skirt version of that history, but now what they’re finding out is that some of these plantations and some of these historic sites are doing what they’re supposed to do, what they should have been doing all along. And it disappoints some people because again, they still come for that fantasied version of the story. But the number of sites that are doing right and doing it the right way, that number is increasing and those who are still doing that glorified Gone with The Wind version of history, that number is getting smaller. So, we’re making progress.

J. Church: What would you like to tell people that you maybe haven’t gotten across yet?

J. McGill: One thing, I think that if anybody should come away from a plantation thinking that slavery was a good thing, I think they need to seek a refund. If they paid anything for that, to have that story told to them. Working at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens and giving people choices as to which tour that they should take and knowing that there’s a value to each tour. In other words, you pay an additional fee to go on the tour that you want to go on. Well, the tour that we give from slavery to freedom, our cabin tour is taking the least. And that speaks to the bigger problem that we have as Americans, wanting to stay in that comfort zone and not wanting to deal with the atrocities that we committed along the way to obtain this greatness that we are as a nation. But we must understand that in obtaining this greatness, we relegated the natives as less than, we relegated the enslaved Africans as less than and because we label them as such historically, we’re still dealing with the residuals of that today. So, I think people should be open minded enough that you know, the white privileges that are granted that are beneficial to whites. You know it came at the cost of making others less than. I think we should stop resisting. The demographic shift of what’s to come in the near future, you know the white population is not going to be the majority anymore. Of course, now the majority is a good mixture of others because when you fill out forms these days, you see black, white, other. And we’re getting a lot more others and there’s a lot of pushback against that and you can see it you know with the building of walls, or the banning of Muslims or voter suppression. We need to be mindful that resistance to this demographic shift, it tends to divide and conquer. And I don’t think that’s the way that we should go in our pursuit of happiness and forming of a more perfect union.

J. Church: It’s a nice way to wrap it up. Well thanks for talking to us Joe, I really appreciate it.

]]> Cherie Quarters ]]> Tue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/7A795970-E9E6-2A11-111C47652E802E5A.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-C6DE72F2-C1A9-F51C-739DE45983ED2BB7 Cherie Quarters National Park Service Jason Church talks with Ruth Laney about her book, Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People who Inspired Ernest J. Gaines. 926 no full 124

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Jason Church: Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jason Church. I'm the Chief of Technical Services at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. And today, I am here talking to author Ruth Laney, who has just released her book on Cherie Quarters. And I loved the book, Ruth. I really enjoyed reading it. I'm a fan of Ernest Gaines, so I wanted to read it because of that, but you really have three books put together. It's an amazing amount of research, very impressive, but let's start, and how did you get started with Ernest Gaines?

Ruth Laney: I write about it in the book. I had never heard his name, and I was working at LSU Press as a copy editor on the second floor of Hill Memorial Library, which is now not used as the press anymore. The press is in another location now. But at that time, the press was located there and Charles East was I think director at that time, or possibly assistant director. He brought a man upstairs where the copy editing department was, and I believe there were four of us in four different offices. And he kind of wrapped on the door jam and I went to the door, the door was open, I could see. There was Ernest Gaines standing there. He had a couple of books and he had a brown beret in his hands. And Charles introduced, "This is Ernest Gaines. He's in town to help scout locations for making a movie of his novel, The Autobiography of Miss. Jane Pittman. And he will be giving a reading this afternoon at Lockett Hall," which was very close.

"If anybody up here wants to take an hour off and go over and hear him read, you're more than welcome to do so." So, I went and Beverly Jarrett, whose office was across the hall from mine, walked over there. It was a classroom, and Warren Eyster was the creative writing teacher. So, it was a group of his creative writing students and some professors who maybe wandered in and us, and we were all sitting in desks. And then he stood up in the front of the room and he read short story called Just Like A Tree, which is the last story in his short story collection Bloodline. And I remember Warren Eyster saying to his creative writing students, "We've been studying point of view, so I want you to pay special attention to point of view in this story because it's told from multiple points of view."

So, it starts out with they're driving in a wagon, in the mud, in the cold mule drawn wagon, and it's the little boy in front with the dad holding the reins, the mother-in-law who's got her sitting chair in the wagon because she insists on bringing her own chair, and they drive up to Aunt Fe's house. Aunt Fe is an elderly woman who is going to have to leave. It's not called Cherie Quarters in the story, but in my mind that's where it's taking place, and civil rights activities are beginning to happen. And so, it's felt that her life is in danger. They are going to send her up north, they might even mention Chicago, and she will be leaving. And so, they're all gathering together to have kind of one last gathering to more or less say goodbye to Aunt Fe. And so, we go from some funny things about one mule won't pull, he just kind of floats free and easy while the other mule does all the pulling.

And the mother-in-law is complaining and moaning about everything, so there's humor. And then you get to the real crux of the story, which is Aunt Fe, Aunt Fe we're going to miss you. And I think the story's been out long enough for me to reveal that in the end, Aunt Fe finds her own way of not being moved. And then the title, Just Like a Tree is taken from the spiritual, "Just like a tree standing inside the water, I shall not be moved." And so, just like a tree, and there's that wonderful, wonderful section that I use as kind of an introduction to my book, Aunt Clo saying, "When you take down a beautiful old oak tree that's been here all these years, you never get the tap root. You jump down in there and you chop at it, but you never get the tap root. And what you're left with is the hole where the roots were, and then the big hole up in the air where all those lovely branches have been all those years."

And to me that said, preservation, these houses are just as much part of the landscape as these old oak trees that have been here all these years. And that to me is like a cry to arms for preservation, not just the old oak trees, but the houses too. And I think today people are more inclined to look at those houses as valuable. We were a bit ahead of our time in wanting to save them, but that was an inspiration to me. But I didn't actually Cherie Quarters itself until 82. I got an assignment from Louisiana Life Magazine to write an article about Ernest Gaines, and they assigned Philip Gould to take the photographs. So, Philip and I think we drove over together from Baton Rouge, but I'm not sure. He may have driven alone from Lafayette and I drove in from Baton Rouge, and I guess Ernie would've come from Lafayette because he was teaching there.

So, the three of us met and we walked up, it was February, it was a cold gray day, and people were still living there, smoke coming out of the chimneys. People would come out on the porch, and kind of wave. They called him EJ because that's how he was known as he grew up there. And then we got all the way down to the end of the lane, and there was an old man working in his garden, and Ernest Gaines and Aunt Reese. Reese looked over and he's like, "Who is that?" And Ernest Gaines said, "It's EJ." And then he smiles, we walk up and we meet him and we talk to him, and he's got this big old vegetable garden. He's in his eighties, and then he had this little dog with him, that little sweet legged dog missing one leg. So in my notes, I found later Philip Gould had gotten down on his stomach in the gravel, and he was asking Ernest and Reese to walk toward him over and over again.

He asked Reese to walk down his front steps over and over again, and I reminded Philip later, look and see if you can find these photos. I was picturing it being taken from the front, but when I realized it was taken from the side, I'm like this is exactly what all these houses look like. So, seeing it in that way was really special. And even though I was writing about Ernest Gaines and I was reading all of his work, I had never been Cherie Quarters until that time, 10 years later. Then in 1992, Rick Smith at LPB and I decided it's time to do a documentary about Ernest Gaines. Of course, we asked him and he agreed. So, we spent two and a half years working on this documentary and we were able to film some of it in Cherie Quarters. There were still houses there when we made the documentary.

And we even had the church service, which at the time there were really only two ladies who would attend church, Suge and Carrie, who were the last two people. And then there was a man named Willie Aaron who still lived there. They would go to church like every two weeks, preacher from Baton Rouge would drive up, hold a service. Sometimes it was just these two women all dressed in white with white hats for the documentary. They invited some of their relatives to come, and they did. So, the church was more or less filled up as it once had been every Sunday. And so, we were able to get one last church service filmed for the documentary. So, that's when I realized how special a place it was. And by now, I had read all of his work probably many times, and it's all about Cherie Quarters.

Every setting it's clearly based on Cherie Quarters. So, it's his inspiration. It's this place that even though he left when he was 15 years old, mentally that was still home and that's what inspired him to write I think, was to try to capture that place where he grew up. As I write about it in the chapter, The Friends of Cherie Quarters, it sounded like the impossible dream, but Suge's house was still standing. In fact, she was still living in it. So, it was in good enough shape to be lived in, and then it was right next to the church. And then right next to the church was a small shed that Ernest Gaines said his grandfather had built. So, those three buildings right together still existed. Then all the way down to the other end was Reese's house. And my idea was, first of all, Reese's house even then was in terrible shape.

It needed repaired drastically. And we even did a little bit ourselves like, let's buy a two by six and prop up the overhang on one side and that kind of thing. My idea was could we create a building in between these, on the outside looks like these buildings. Cypress grade, doesn't have to be painted and look new, but then inside it's more like an open space. We could show the documentary there. In my dream, Ernest Gaines cuts the ribbon, our first we gather in the graveyard to remember those who are no longer with us. Then he cuts the ribbon. We'll have teacakes and what he called [inaudible] , the kinds of things that people used to give him to pay him for writing a letter or reading a letter to them if they couldn't read, and then maybe a little gift shop where his books could be sold.

And of course, I couldn't make it happen on my own. It would take more people and it would take a certain vision to see a value there. But we brought people there. Greg Osborne, who's with New Orleans Public Library, Chuck Seiler and his wife Rhonda. We would take different people there and say, "What do you think?" And these were African American people, and they'd go, "Oh, this could be great." I mean, they'd get really excited about the possibilities. Sid and I together created the lecture, Cherie Quarters The Place and The People. He would talk about the actual physical components. I would talk about the people, which of course, starting with Ernest Gaines, the most famous person to come from there. We gave that lecture at least half a dozen times. We gave it Upstate Archives where I asked "Would everybody who has a connection to Cherie Quarters, please stand up?"

And half the audience stood up. So, the message was understood by the people who heard the lecture. I think people understood what we were trying to do. And like a title of the chapter, Time is The Enemy. All it takes is time. You don't have to do anything but just demolition by neglect. You literally don't have to raise a finger, and sooner or later, that building will be gone. So, we did as much as we could. We really did. We tried, but ultimately we failed. So in a way, the book creates what we were unable to create as a physical presence. And also I created a Cherie Quarter's Facebook group, and we've got 300 members now, many of whom have a Cherie Quarters connection. So in a way, the internet has made it easier in some ways, especially for people who have moved away. They can at least keep up.

Jason Church: Well, thanks so much for talking to us today, Ruth. I highly recommend anyone interested in southern history, vernacular architecture, African American history, plantation system, any of that, this book will check those boxes, and I highly recommend anyone go out and read it.

]]> Dutton's Dirty Diggers ]]> Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/02714F5F-0D8D-75D6-1178411383292011.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-02724444-F3FA-A6D9-E7ECBD930C785E43 Dutton's Dirty Diggers National Park Service Jason Church talks with Kay Fowler about Bertha Dutton's Girl Scout Archaeology Camps of the 1940s and 1950s. 729 no full 123

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Jason Church: Hello, my name is Jason Church. I'm the chief of technical services here at the National Center of Preservation Technology and Training. And today, I am here interviewing Catherine Fowler, who's the author of Dutton's Dirty Diggers, a book that just came out about Bertha Dutton and the Senior Girl Scout archeology camps that were held in the American Southwest from 1947 to 1957. Let's talk about your book.

Catherine Fowler: Several of us had met, and we all felt that we owed a debt to Bertha Dutton. We're basically opening up the world of archeology and generally anthropology to us, and also the possibilities that we too could go into that field and we could have successful careers as Bertha had done just that through the University of New Mexico where she got her BA and MA degrees, and then also went on to Columbia to get her PhD and was employed at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe for almost all of her career. So, we thought that was quite neat. And at that time, the opportunities for women to go into something other than being a secretary or a hairdresser, or if you had an inclination towards science, you could be a nurse, but never a physician. So, she just really opened our eyes. And so we decided something more needed to be told about the program.

In addition, of course, she introduced us to a very vibrant region of the country that most of us knew absolutely nothing about, and many became so enchanted that they even moved there or had second homes there most of their lives. So, it was certainly a multicultural experience too. Bert was very well known among a Pueblo peoples and Navajo and Apache peoples, and they welcomed us. And we tried to act like ladies most of the time when we were in their presence. And of course, we visited lots of national parks, especially in the southwest because many of them contained very important archeological sites or now under protection, and were then, or some were transitioning to it. So all the way around, it was a marvelous experience. Some close to 300 girls went through it, including the two week on the road camps where we traveled to various regions of the southwest and camped out while doing so.

And there were sometimes several of those per summer. And then also the archeological excavation camp, which was held south of Santa Fe in the Galileo Basin at a site called Pueblo Largo. And there were six of those camps. They ran two weeks each, but only one in the latter part of the years that she ran the program. So all around, it was wonderful. One girl came back 11 times. Several others came back two, three, four, five times. I came back twice, but then the program was ended. I was in the last two years of the program. As a result, quite a number of us did stick with it and became anthropologists, and also others got PhDs in related fields at a time when women could hardly expect to get much beyond a bachelor's degree. So, we think that the program had a lot of very good results.

There were four of us who became very close. I had started the work with a paper, a visit to basically to the archives at the Museum of New Mexico Laboratory of Anthropology, and that paper was presented to the Society for American Archeology. And one of its meetings about the topic of the symposium was how the public can get involved in archeology, and I thought that that fitted quite well. And while I was there, I met another person who was beginning to work on the archives, the Bertha Dutton archives, which are at the museum and the archives there. And so we kind of linked up and thought, well, we'd at least do a monograph on the material maybe. And then that next summer, through a mutual friend in archeology, Alexander Lindsay, who was at the Museum of Northern Arizona, I met two more of the diggers. So, we teamed up and decided to push forward and do what we could to tell the story.

Jo Tice Bloom and I did most of the archival work. The other two pulled together some of their diaries. Suzanne Martin had Bert's little black books that had all our names in them for each adventure, and also I suspect a positive or negative evaluation of our behavior. And so she pulled together a roster basically of all the names that Bert had in her little books, and that's what added up to the nearly 300 names. Some others we heard about. We tried to contact a few, certainly those that became anthropologists, I knew of. And so they were partly involved, like Vorsila Bohrer, who became a botanist, but also an archeobotanist, and others. So, it was a collaborative effort on all our parts. And we certainly owed a debt of gratitude to the archivist at the Museum of Indian Arts and Cultures, Diane Bird, herself, a Rio Grande Pueblo native. And she bent over backwards to provide us access to the materials and help us out and wherever we needed.

One summer, we had a kind of get together with six or seven of us and looked at photographs in the collection, many of which were not identified as to who the people were, and we were able to help Diane with some of that. Otherwise, all of us worked together. Took quite a while. I think we started somewhere in 2007, and the book didn't come out until 2020. So, of course that includes a couple of years at the University of Utah Press, which did an excellent job in getting it formatted and getting it out. So, that's sort of the story of all of us. And two of those individuals have passed away already. Actually, three, Vorsila Bohrer passed away as well. So, there aren't many of us left, and I suspect not a lot left out there either, especially from the early years, 1947 or so.

I have a whole house full of not only the ones that I collected first were purchased, I should say. Of course, Bert cautioned us. There were no collecting of materials for many of the parks, including sherds or anything else. She was very insistent on that. But many of us fell in love with the Native American art of the region. So, I think with my $20 that my parents had given me as spending money, I bought a small Navajo rug, a basket, and a San Ildefonso pot. And the second trip, I bought a nugget turquoise necklace. But I know several of the other girls, Maryanne Stein, and also Susan Martin, had good collections that they accumulated through the years. So, introducing us to the art of the region, which is of course exceedingly vibrant and still attracts all of us. We did indeed collect. In fact, she knew the owners of trading posts that we visited, as well as the individuals in Pueblo communities.

And toward the end of the trips of which I was on, she would send out information ahead of time as to whether we might be interested in materials. And then she would advise us as to, "Yes, this is a good purchase. No, wait a while. You'll find better quality materials." And she always looked at the quality to make sure that we were getting something that was very nice rather than just particularly tourist art. Although of course, one could say that many of the materials developed as tourist art, and then went way beyond that, certainly to the present day. In the second of the last chapter, the sort of summary chapter, I think we pulled together data on about 60 girls, especially those who attended Bertha's, either her memorial service or her 80th birthday. And we were able to track them down through cards that are in the archives and find them and see what became of them.

And quite a number who didn't go into an anthropology, went into other fields. At least three that I know of got PhDs in history, including Jo Tice Bloom. And then Susan Martin became a biochemist and had a very successful career at that. Maryanne Stein got her PhD in anthropology, but also a law degree in addition, and worked in Albuquerque as an environmental law person after she went out of anthropology and into law. Others did become nurses, but often master's degree level rather than just a BA level. And many went in or stayed with girl scouting because they had daughters, or they knew of the value of the program in general, as a building program for confidence among young women, and the idea that they could do what they wanted, be what they wanted, and nobody should tell them, "No, you can't because you're a woman." We traveled in the caravan of vehicles. We had one male with us at all times, and he was the car wrangler. The National Girl Scouts, of course, course had liability and some medical insurance. Our parents would pay, I think it was a dollar and a half for a policy that would ensure our survival, basically. But I think that the Museum of New Mexico didn't realize perhaps what the liability situation was fully in terms of them because they didn't carry any specific or special policies. And I think today, given where we were going, how far we were going, how many of us there were the state of the roads in those days in New Mexico, all the adventures we had climbing into and back out of different Pueblos like Mesa Verde. We all climbed the ladders up into balcony house. And even the park service has become a little bit jumpy about that and other such issues.

And so, I don't know. I think you maybe could do it on a small scale. I know the Boy Scouts, they did do some travel adventures, but not, I don't think, on the scale that we did. Bert always pre scouted everything, so she knew exactly where the hospitals were, where the doctors were, all kinds of facilities. And we did have a certified first aid person with us the whole time. She introduced us pretty well to the desert. We stayed up above the Mogollon Rim. She not only told us about rattlesnakes, but also about cholla cactus and how to get that off of us if we ever had the misfortune of running into one, scorpions in our sleeping bags, and anything else that might be hazardous. She was pretty thorough in her training. Also, we had a botanist with us most of the time, who could identify the flora and fauna. That was also exceedingly useful. Bert also was trained in geology, so we got quite a bit of that in our travels in addition.

We had several adventures in different camps. And Morefield Camp flooded one time, and our sleeping bags went floating down the ways. We had to retrieve them and dry them all out, but we were prepared. We also had a lot of fun in addition. But Bert was quite clear that it was meant to be an educational experience, not just a fun in the sun situation. But teenage girls being teenage girls, we had a lot of fun too and did a few things that Bert didn't know about. She was a lot of fun, but also very strict. We knew who was the boss. We did and saw a lot of things that those of us who went into anthropology and other fields related to the Southwest look back on with great pride. Some of the greats in southwestern archeology were enlisted to speak to the girls, and they did. We didn't know who they were necessarily at the time, but in retrospect, we certainly found out if we went anywhere near their fields.

Jason Church: Thanks for talking to us today, Kay.

Catherine Fowler: You're most welcome.

]]> Stewart Butler's Legacy of LGBT+ Activism ]]> Tue, 14 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/BDE0D821-AE99-C4D7-6AD3F3B6DFD251CB.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-BDE1D2CF-FF49-46D6-0D6D328C7F4D0764 Stewart Butler's Legacy of LGBT+ Activism National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Frank Perez about Stewart Butler and his LGBT+ and Civil Rights activism. 754 no full 122

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Catherine Cooper: Hi, my name's Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Frank Perez: Frank Perez, the author of Political Animal: The Life and Times of Stewart Butler.

Catherine Cooper: So could you tell us how you became Stewart's biographer?

Frank Perez: The very short answer is he asked me to do it and I said yes.

The more complicated answer is that I first met Stewart when I was researching my first book, and he was very gracious with his time and very knowledgeable and helpful. In addition to that, he and I just hit it off on a personal note and became friends. And I got to know Stewart really, really well when he and I and a few other people co-founded a non-profit organization called the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. And we would have our board meetings at his home, which is known as the Faerie Playhouse. It was the site of many, many organizational meetings for the queer community in New Orleans in the late 20th and early 21st century.

And Stewart, when he read my first book, he called and made an appointment with me. We hadn't really become that close yet at that point. And this really is what kind of cemented our friendship. He called me over to the Faerie Playhouse, and I got the sense that I was going to the principal's office because he took out a yellow pad and just went through all the things that he thought could have been done better or more completely, or little errors he felt that were in the book. And I thought, dear God, this man hated this book, but he didn't. He wanted to let me know what I had missed. And it was a little strange at first. I've since then learned that he does that often with people. He used to do that with his pastor. He would criticize the sermons. It's just what Stewart did. And he didn't do it in a mean-spirited way, he was just curmudgeonly that way. And at the end of that critique, he countered it, balanced it, I guess you'd say, with a lot of affirmation and love. And then I realized, okay, I can handle this.

And he didn't ask me to write his biography immediately. We got to know each other. And in the meantime, I had worked on a few other books. I published, I don't know, five or six. And somewhere in the course of all those books, he realized maybe he does know what he's doing. And he had mentioned to me that some years ago he had secured someone else to write his and Alfred's story. And that did not pan out, but that he still was interested in having that done. And I say, "Well, you've led a fascinating life. I would be more than happy to do that. I do have some other works in progress. But once I complete those, I'll be happy to tackle this." And he said okay.

And that is how I came to be Stewart’s biographer.

It differed greatly from anything I've ever written. And I've written a lot, but I've never written a biography. So it was an intellectual challenge, which was kind of exciting for me. I told him early on when we first started working on the book, I said, "Stewart, if I do this, I'm not going to sugarcoat you. I'm going to include the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything else." And he said, "That's the way it should be." And he said he trusted my judgment to portray him the way I saw fit. And so it was easy in that regard.

Alfred was his soulmate, and he loved Alfred very, very much. And you couldn't talk to Stewart about anything without Alfred being a part of that conversation, even years after Alfred had passed. And so, fortunately, Stewart had friendly relations and was on good terms with Alfred's remaining family, who he put me in touch with. And they were very helpful as well. And then Stewart kept every paper ever associated with his life, and that goes for Alfred as well, so that made it a little bit easier. But I did have to do some independent research on Alfred and the Doolittle family. But Alfred's sister and his niece were very, very helpful.

Stewart saved everything. I mean, really a biographers dream. He kept every letter he had ever received, seems like, anyway. He would often keep copies of letters he sent to people or ask them to return the letters back to him. And he had a big trunk and a couple of other boxes filled with just personal correspondence.

He had terrible handwriting, I can tell you that. But those letters, thousands of them. And I spent about 18 months just reading all those letters and taking notes. And probably over half the notes that I took, I did not need. The hard part was creating just an index for myself to know where to go to kind of organize everything. But the letters were very valuable because those were his thoughts at the time that they were written. And they were very, very insightful into his life and his thinking and his attitudes and his emotions. He struggled with depression, which he writes about and whatnot. So the personal letters alone were overwhelming, but the personal letters paled in comparison to his personal papers. And by personal papers, I mean papers from every organization he was ever a part of. And he was a part of a lot of organizations, just about every major queer organization in New Orleans from the 1970s on.

And by papers, I mean agendas from board meetings, minutes from board meetings, personal notes, membership rosters, internal organizational memoranda, you name it. He just kept everything. He also kept a calendar. This is before the internet, which Stewart never embraced even though he was alive when it was out. He kept a handheld folding calendar for every year. And I was able to go through, I guess maybe 25 or 30 years worth of those. So that helped clarify questions I had in terms of dates and places and times. And he wasn't just meeting with so-and-so, he would make notes. He was a very big note taker, which was, like I said, a biographer's dream. So the hardest part was just going through all that material and getting a sense of what was there, and then going back and culling through the notes I had taken and re-looking at this and re-looking at that.

And to me, it just boiled down to, does it advance the story I'm trying to tell, or does it bog it down? And I think I'm a pretty good self-editor, but I'm not perfect. So when I finally sent the manuscript in to the publisher, they had other thoughts about some things I included, so I had to cut and chop. So it was just really a matter of, is this really necessary? Does this add to an understanding of Stewart and his work? So that was the question I used, the internal metric, if you will.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of great stories that really didn't make the book. There was a correspondence exchange between Stewart and a friend, this would've been back in the seventies, about how to make homemade poppers. And for your viewers or listeners who may not know what poppers are, in the 1970s and eighties, poppers were basically amyl nitrate that you would break a little vial and sniff it, and it kind of gave you a head rush and a little high. And it was very popular during sexual activity. It enhanced the experience, I can say it in a G-rated way. And they still have them today, but they're different today. They're called record cleaners now; you just uncap it, smell it. But they were different back then, and it was like you had to know a little bit of chemistry to make them. And so there was this hilarious exchange of letters between Stewart and a friend of his. And the friend is sending a recipe and instructions on how to make poppers. And there are all these interesting little arrows and footnotes. Don't do this or it will explode, or there's a chance that this will happen. I mean, it was just hilarious. And there were a lot of letters that spoke to his sexual exploits, which I didn't really feel were relevant to the book, although I tried to include a few. And the publisher kind of ixnayed that. But yeah, I would say most of the more salacious material involving his sex and drug use. He was no saint.

I think first and foremost, Stewart's life is an example of how just an ordinary citizen can have such a profound impact on so many people and on the world in which they live. Stewart never held office really. I mean, he dabbled in politics, but he never wanted the limelight or the spotlight or the leadership position. He was much more satisfied to remain in the trench and do the unglamorous work and avoid getting all the credit. And whenever people tried to give him credit, he would pass it on to Alfred, because it was Alfred's money that enabled him to do what he did. So that speaks to his humility, which I think is an example for people. But just his determination and his commitment to social justice left the world a much better place than the one he found.

And I think it's a great example, and hopefully an inspiration, to just regular people to make the most of what they have and what they can do, so there's that. I also hope that the book inspires other researchers to dig deeper, because one of the things that frustrates me as a historian of queer New Orleans is the fact that no one knows anything about it. It's only in the last several years that people started writing and researching about New Orleans' LGBTQ+ history, and there's a lot more that needs to be done. So I hope people realize that, A, there is a lot of history here. And B, keep digging. So those would be the two main things, I suppose.

The organization that I work with is called the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, which Stewart and I co-founded with several other people. And right now, we have just put out a call for proposals for a book to be written about the people of color community, queer communities in New Orleans and Louisiana, because that is a major gap in the historical record. And the Archives Project has partnered with the Historic New Orleans Collection, who has agreed to publish the book. They're also going to give a stipend to whoever ends up writing this book. And right now, the challenge is finding someone to write that book. So we just got the call log for proposals together and we'll be publicizing that communities of color, queer experience, and history needs to be researched.

I will also say that I think there needs to be a book written on the lesbian history of New Orleans, because every book that's been written so far are written by cisgender, gay men. And I think a lesbian voice is important and necessary, but also a work or a book that focuses on lesbian history. Now, there is a book on second wave feminism written by Janet Allured, who kind of touches on the fact that many of the feminists in the seventies in New Orleans at least were lesbians, but the focus is not lesbian history, so I think that's one.

Unfortunately, much of our trans history is still in the closet, and I think that needs to be excavated. I mean, I could go on, but those would be the two or three big ones, I would say.

I've written the book on the history of Café Lafitte in Exile, but there are a lot of other bars that could use books too. Bar history played such a crucial role in queer history everywhere because it was the only place you could go to find like-minded people for a long time. And in New Orleans, we were a drinking town. We had so many. And just a book tracing the evolution of these bars and these spaces and when they were sold and what they became and the new names and what their owners were like and so forth. I mean, I think that would be a fascinating book. That could be a whole volume of books.

I would just like to remind people that it's very, very important to get our history out of the closet. And so I'm glad that people are reading the book. I hope they enjoy it. Even if they don't, it's okay because if we don't remember our history, we're doomed to repeat it. The events of the last several months, I think, really raise a red flag about the fact that all these hard fought rights that we won can easily be lost. And we need to be very vigilant about that. And I think a knowledge of our history will go a long way into inspiring people.

October is national LGBT History Month. And at the end of September, I met with city council member JP Morrell here in New Orleans. And I said, "LGBT history month is coming up in October. And the last time I testified before the city council, it was obvious that some of your colleagues were completely ignorant of some major events that affected the queer community in New Orleans. And I think you all need to come take my queer history tour in the French Quarter." He agreed to do that, but then he said, "Why don't you come and testify again before the council about New Orleans' queer history?" And I was happy to do that. I only had about 20 minutes, so I had to focus on something very specific. And what I chose to focus on was how horrible and homophobic the city was in the 1950s through the 80s, and cited specific examples and so forth. And all their jaws hit the desktops. I mean, they had no idea how horrible the city was. And a lot of people are like that because today New Orleans is so tolerant and it has this reputation of anything goes, but it wasn't always like that, for us anyway. So I would just encourage people to familiarize themselves with history and to support the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana, which they can do at lgbtarchiveslouisiana.org.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much, Frank.

Frank Perez: You're very welcome.

]]> Practicing Engaged Archaeology ]]> Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/5A47A85B-0C3B-D395-581D840F918B45F6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-5A590B36-0136-CA52-A41D6A0A5DD2F8E7 Practicing Engaged Archaeology National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Sarah Herr and Kelley Hays-Gilpin about different ways archaeologists are practicing engaged archaeology in the American Southwest. 630 no full 121

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C.Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper I am here with-

S. Herr: Sarah Herr, President of Desert Archaeology.

K. Hays-Gilpin: Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University and Curator of Anthropology at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona.

C. Cooper: Thank you both so much for joining me. You recently had a book released called Engaged Archaeology in the Southwestern United States and Northwestern Mexico. Could you tell us a bit about what the impetus was for putting the book together?

K. Hays-Gilpin: Well, this is part of a series that the University Press of Colorado has been doing for a long time. We have a conference about every other year called the Southwest Symposium and the organizers pick some themes and invite people to take part and then the expectation is that a volume will result.

C. Cooper: Could you talk a bit more about what engaged archaeology is as a practice and why it's so important?

S. Herr: There are multiple definitions of it for sure. Like archaeology is so fragmentary, when we're in the field, you know, we have such partial remains of the past and then we're asked to interpret whole life ways based on, you know, what we can hold in our hands and so that's not a very rich understanding of the past. If we're willing to kind of share authority and talk to other anthropologists, talk to people who work in the physical sciences and most importantly talk to other communities and have these, like, human conversations around what the materials of the past are, we think that's a way for enriching archaeology and our understanding, bringing the past into modern conversations. And with physical scientists who, you know, can help us describe the land and the resources that the people of the past were engaged with, because you know the land-people relationship is so important in the past. And with other ways of doing anthropology language, culture, kinship systems, all of that became part of our conversation too.

K. Hays-Gilpin: So I would say: Who are we engaging with? Not just other archaeologists, not just other anthropologists although they have a lot to offer. For example, historical linguistics is something that Indigenous people are interested in but archaeologists have not engaged with that very much. But we also want to engage and benefit by engaging with descendant communities, with physical scientists, chemists, geologists. And important for this group historically has been cross-border engagement, so working with our Mexican colleagues across the border, their heritage resources.

C. Cooper: How did you select or solicit papers to include in the publication?

K. Hays-Gilpin: We both have a pretty broad network. I work in museums and universities, and Sarah works with a private cultural resource management--heritage management--firm, and we both have colleagues in Mexico. Sarah also works with a lot of public archaeology, public education, private foundation advocacy kinds of work with Desert Archaeology, Inc. (desert.com). So we already had a broad network to draw on and we would get together with our third colleague, Patrick, and say who do we know who's doing the most exciting work and what's everybody talking about, what do we need to bring to the table?

S. Herr: We really wanted the people doing the hands-on work, and I think that's what shows in this book is that it's the people in the labs, for example, that did the work.

C. Cooper: I noticed that many of the chapters talk about the importance of NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Could you expand on why NAGPRA is so important and has such an impact on engaged archaeology?

K. Hays-Gilpin: We've had several decades of working with repatriation and I think at first archaeologists were skeptical. At least the older… the older generation, including many that are no longer with us, would say “Oh but science is more important than anything” or “We need to have everything we excavate curated in perpetuity and it needs to be available for future scientific research.” And the response from Native American communities was pretty strong: “We don't understand why science is more important” and “We don't know what benefit our communities have had from bioarcheology, osteology, archaeology” and “How would you feel if we were digging up your grandparents in a Christian cemetery in Tucson, for example?” And the conversation got started.

So what the passage of this law did was open doors for communication among scientists, Native American descendants, Native American heritage managers, tribal museums, as well as museums that tend to be more science oriented or broader in their scope. And the law is very clear that it's human remains, funerary objects—even ones that are no longer associated with human remains. It is objects of cultural patrimony, which can't be owned by individuals or by outside institutions, and it's sacred and ceremonial objects that are necessary for the continuation of cultural practices. I think most archaeologists understood that this was necessary and important and that we wanted to do it. And now it's happening and what we wanted to do here was show some of the good that has come out of this process of working together to get repatriation done.

S. Herr: I think I would add a little bit about why NAGPRA is important in this book and I guess there's a couple of comments about that. One is that I think it's not the kind of work that really gets published and so in terms of showing models of how this works, it's such an essential part of the conversations that I think anthropologists and archaeologists are having with descendant communities right now but it's not in the kinds of spaces that, you know, other people can witness and see. But for people who are willing to put this into a book form, this provides like now a nice set of case studies that, you know, show the full range of work from bioarcheologists and how they balance what they record with tribal interests, to tribal voices that talk about the trust relationships that happen in these spaces and when things have gone well and when things haven't. That is particularly clear in the chapter on the San Carlos Apache work with the Smithsonian. And so having this published is important. The other piece that I think is important in terms of the impact of the NAGPRA that also shows up is that I think it's really changed bioarcheology careers a lot. I feel like now such interesting questions come in terms of asking people about identities and the more focus on the human body and the individual.

K. Hays-Gilpin: We have several examples in there of the bioarcheologists asking the representatives of tribal nations “if we do this documentation before repatriation, what are the questions that that you'd be interested in?” and sometimes people say “no, they've been handled enough. Let's just put them back in the earth so they can continue their intended life cycle, life journey.” But in a number of cases tribes said “well, we're interested in migration and we're interested in these dental markers that are markers of genetic populations and gene flow and we want to know who moved from here to there because we have oral histories that describe that.”

C. Cooper: Much of the work that's presented in this book was done around 2016 or up until 2016 when the conference happened. Have you seen a shift in the field or in practice since then and if so how?

K. Hays-Gilpin: Well, I definitely have in terms of what our master’s students are interested in; they're coming right in talking about “I want to work with communities,” and maybe it's their own community or maybe it's tribal communities in the region or “I want to know more about the daily lives of people who lived here that were here in our area in the late 1800s,” for example. What was the effect of colonialism and in some cases even Spanish missionization? You have the formation of new ethnic identities and new kinds of communities and some of that history did not get written down, so archaeology is part of that. So, we have more archaeologists I think wanting to do ethnohistory. We certainly have an interest in public archaeology with education; I get a lot of people who want to do museum education in the area of archaeology. And then the job market is really good right now in heritage management and so they're looking for “what's my career going to be?” It's not just “I want to be a professor,” and it's so refreshing to see people recognizing there are so many more careers than that, most of which you can do with a master's degree or even a bachelor's. Sarah, if you want to add about how the practice of CRM is changing?

S. Herr: I mean one thing that we're seeing changing, I think, is the way that we work together with tribes and so I think a piece that we're seeing right now is that everybody's more open to conversations and hearing how to be inclusive in a project.

K. Hays-Gilpin: So, it seems like you can build more activities into some of these large projects than we used to be able to do. Now you can build in cultural competency trainings where tribal members instruct your field techs who may be coming from anywhere and they're coming into this new cultural environment and they don't know what's respectful and what isn't. And they're curious and so let's answer questions, let's have a discussion, and let's lay a foundation for working together. And then on the other end, or really at any point, some communities might ask Sarah’s company “you know, could you do a workshop for our high school students?”

C. Cooper: What do you hope people will take away from reading the book or listening to our conversation?

S. Herr: I think one thing we want the people listening to take away from the conversation is to realize that the paths into archaeology now are a lot more diverse. You know Kelley’s speaking as a professor and sees the future of our profession. But I think we want people to see that regardless of their background, there's a place in archaeology for them. There’s a lot of ways to be involved in the heritage management and the cultural resource management and to help tell the stories of the people and landscapes of the Southwest. We want people to see that there's jobs there. And so there might be a traditional path that you go through grad school, you need to get your MA often, BA sometimes, but it's not it's not just a course to a professorship. We value the very good professors who can teach this, but there's far more jobs than that.

C. Cooper: Thank you both so much.

S. Herr: Thank you for inviting us.

K. Hays-Gilpin: You’re very welcome, our pleasure.

]]> Archaeological Exploration of Material Production ]]> Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/17D8CEC9-92F9-0FBD-DE7D781F8AE87BB6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-17EE7F7B-A6D0-C023-59BFF4420510A359 Archaeological Exploration of Material Production National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Dr. Chris Fennell about industrial archaeology 778 no full 120

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C. Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper I am here with—

C. Fennell: Hi, this is Chris Fennell and I'm a Professor of Anthropology and Law at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

C. Cooper: So you recently had a book come out called The Archeology of Craft and Industry.

C. Fennell: I'm an academic archaeologist so when I start a project I usually plan for a multi-year project and it’s research and education interwoven. We'll have field schools, we train grad students and undergrads on how to do archeology, and then we go back year after year and do the research. And I really concentrated on African-American archeology and seeing the way in which African-American culture and practices interacted with Europeans in the colonial period and later period. And having done a lot of that, I asked a couple of key scholars, John Vlach and Robert Farris Thompson, whom I collaborated with on earlier projects, and I asked them at one point, and this is going back over a decade ago, “If you could unleash an archaeologist on an interesting site where archeology hasn't been done where would it be?” And they both said, independently, “there's something very interesting going on in the Edgefield potteries in South Carolina.”

And they were known. They've been studied extensively by historians and museum specialists and collectors that there's a very aesthetic, beautiful stoneware that started to be produced in this region in like the first decade of the 1800s. As an academic archaeologist you consult with all sorts of local landowners, descendants, historians, ceramic specialists, museum specialists who knew about this pottery. It's a big collector's item. The type of pottery that came out of this tradition is called the southern alkaline glazed pottery.

So we approached it initially with a different host of questions. But the very first field season, we knew the location generally of where the kiln would be where they would burn the pots. We had a first field school led by my doctoral advisee, George Calfas, who's now Dr. George Calfas. And so he led a team of undergrads, and as the field school went on through six very hot weeks during the summer, they uncovered a kiln that was over 100 feet long, 10 to 12 feet wide, that ran in a slope, even the floor was sloping, running up the hill. And it being an academic process, we have both the burden and the benefit of being able to really dive into a topic like this.

Industrialists were very secretive, so they had created this thing but had never written it down anywhere. So historians who have looked at this process before had no idea about it. It was only revealed through the archeology. And the only counterpart is that they had copied the design of an industrial scale kiln that was only used in southeast China. And the Chinese had factory towns there at industrial scales producing porcelain and stoneware for centuries. And they developed this form of really high resource-consuming kiln called a dragon kiln. The dragon references to the fact that it was subsidized by the monarchy and the dragon is the symbol of the monarchy and a kind of government investment in these factory towns. But they are enormous tube kilns, basically a barrel vault going uphill, and they only worked if you could expend an enormous amount of resources. And as the process continued and we were working with other collaborating archaeologists in the region and looked around, we found that this extended family of Scots Irishmen who are using before the Civil War mostly enslaved laborers.

And so I began just to read the context, see what's going on in industrial archeology at large. And so I ended up you know really learning industrial archeology to understand what was going on in this multi-year project, and then I produced a first book for the Society of Historical Archeology; they have a reader series. So we did a first book where I just kind of organized a set of articles that have been published in their journal by theme. So now it wasn't just pottery, it was ironworks and textiles and pottery. And then a colleague of mine had a book series on the archeology of the American Experience and he approached me and said “I've always been looking for someone who could tackle this topic, what kind of studies have been done?” and that was the origin of this book that's called The Archeology of Craft and Industry.

There's a very robust literature of historians looking at this process and saying “what is industrialization? What is the main sort of impetus behind it?” And one author David Landes has this very poignant title; he calls it Unbound Prometheus. You know has this mythological character to the name and he wanted to take the approach of saying “You know there's this technological impetus that takes off.” So if you want to understand what happens in moving from small-scale craft into these factories, you can really view it by each innovation as it happens in technology. Because it's going to be so attractive to profit-making entrepreneurs, it's going to spread and diffuse very quickly. So he developed a story that other historians of industry have been in comment with, and they will label this, in a way that Landes wouldn't, being technological determinism. It's like this technological juggernaut that, once you have the desire to produce more, to sell more, and then you have a new technological development—a better way to make a weaving machine, better fuel to use for burning iron—that it will just spread rapidly because everyone's motivated to implement it. And the other simplifying description, if you take that more technological phrase, would borrow like comments and critiques by analysts like Karl Marx. [They] would say industrialization, as you move from engaged skill workers who are doing all sorts of tasks and creating a finished thing, like a finished piece of pottery, and they're fully engaged and have ownership in it and pride in that work and they go from soup to nuts so shaping the clay to burning it to help run the Kiln and so they are fully engaged and fulfilled in that process as an artisan; and that when you move to an industry, according to critical views by people like Karl Marx, you move to the machines are doing everything. So instead of people using tools to create things and being engaged, now the machines are using the people. The only thing the people do is they're viewed as being unskilled now and they're just tending the machine, so the machine stops working properly they'll figure out how to kick it in a certain way to keep it going. So he says you move from people being the users of tools to people being the tools used by the machines. So in general, craft is someone who's doing a variety of skilled endeavors to create a thing and that industry would mean that you’ve lost that.

And instead, what we see is, one, tending to those machines was highly skilled labor and you see this in places like the textile industry before child labor laws came in the early 1900s. A lot of the textile mills in the United States employed young women who had smaller and more dexterous hands. And that was very useful because these big spinning machines were very crowded and dense, so if something went wrong and a thread was going the wrong way or a spindle wasn't working, you wanted someone with very small, dexterous hands who could get in there and fix it very quickly so the machine would keep working. The workers are engaged in their own innovation and their own sort of craft artisanal efforts to figure out how to make the assembly floor run, to modify machines.

Archeology has been terrific and also at times it's material culture studies. If you have the ruins of a factory and the machines are still there rusting in place, you can analyze them in a standing ruin the way you would analyze an archaeological remain. And much of this is not recorded in the archives. Historians do a fabulous job of seeing what's in the archives. But the archives we find industrialists were, one, they weren't interested in keeping detailed records, they wanted to make products. But, two, they were very secretive so they didn't want to write down exactly what they were doing. And so when you actually look at the material, whether it's in a standing ruin or buried in the ground, you'll find the modifications that were made. The iron foundries, so blast furnaces and then foundries are enormous assembly plants, particularly a blast furnace. A blast furnace is: the exterior is made of stone; these are often like 25 or 30 foot square at the base, and they'll be like 30 to 40 feet high depending on what fuel they were using, if it was charcoal or coal. They usually built them at the base of a hill because just the way a blast furnace was run was you would pour all the contents in from the top and then all of that would be burned over a series of weeks. When they got it up and going, because the fuel was so expensive, they would try and keep it going. So you keep pouring in iron ore and other agents that'll mix with it. And you would do that from the top so that people would bring all the materials in at the base, they would move around up the hillside, come across a bridge to the top, dump it in the top. So you can imagine what that ruin looks like. You know, this would be an enormous structure left behind, and people can go visit these.

But there was an amazing expression of how active the archaeological record is. There was a case of, in Tennessee, the Bluff Furnace it was called, along a river in Tennessee. It was built at the base of a hill, it was operated in this way before the Civil War and then pretty much fell out of production right after the Civil War. But, by the time the archaeologists started looking at it in the 1980s, that enormous structure had actually been buried because later roads came in over the hillside and graders had pushed an enormous amount of fill.

But textile mills have been studied quite extensively, blast furnaces, potteries extensively. What was so intriguing about the South Carolina example is much of the pottery is on smaller scale in the United States. So most of the archeology is more on the craft end of the continuum than on the industry side. But the other thing is quite a lot of endeavors of the construction of the transcontinental railroad, so there's quite a lot of projects that look at the construction of canals and the workers camps for doing canals, for building different types of railroads. So those are really a lot of the principal areas that are outlined in separate chapters in the book.

Industrial archeology is very active. There's an estimate that 90% of the archeology conducted in the United States is by commercial, professional archaeologists. So this is in both federal and state law, if you're going to do some new construction you typically hire an archeology firm to go look at the space you're going to be building in to see if there's any cultural, historical remains there that need to be dealt with in some way. Once you start looking for what's out there you find it’s a really vibrant field with tremendous debates.

Those case studies that I highlight in the book, I chose to get ones where I knew the readers could get to the underlying literature pretty readily. So at times it's professional archaeologists who went out of their way to post their reports on a website or make them more broadly available. But it is really the tip of the iceberg that there's a tremendous amount that you would learn from the reports that are in these agency archives. But the nice part about it is that if you're reading the chapter on iron production and you say “this is fascinating, I'd like to learn more about that bluff furnace in Tennessee,” it'll cite you to things that are readily available through libraries.

I think very much the theme I've been speaking to, which is really congratulations to Industrial archaeologists showing how fascinating this history really is! Quite often people think of it as, you know, it's an industrial site so they just think of the owners and the designers and then on the production site itself there's no real thought that there's agency by the workers. They're kind of forgotten because people have this notion of industry—it's unskilled, they're disaffected, they're alienated from what they're doing. What industrial archeology has shown is so much that in-place pride and innovation and skill that they're using.

It's another aspect of the book I should point out as a general matter is a lot of the archeology thinking about industry in the United States goes to the domestic places of the workers. So like Boott Mills in Lowell, they were very much looking at the boarding houses and the refuse of the boarding houses where the workers lived. And they didn't have access to really do archeology at the mills themselves in great detail.

And the focus of this book is to try and get into the space of production itself and how have archaeologists teased out the worker agency within those spaces. So I hope they take that away and also this theme of really seeing this tremendous integration of there’s continuing innovation by common workers in these sites even as you have these technological advances in increased mechanization.

So we now know we had these four dragon kilns operating for several decades run by a skilled African-American laborers funded by Scots Irish entrepreneurs. There's a very famous outlying potter, an African-American individual who was enslaved and then continued working after the Civil War who took the name of Dave Drake and he would write poetry on these enormous stoneware pots. You can now go visit the pots that we excavated, and particularly George Calfas and his students in 2011 excavated; they are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. There's an exhibition that's starting there and it's going to move around the country and it's called “Hear Me Now: the Black Potters of Old Edgefield South Carolina” and there are existing pots with the poetry of Dave Drake on display. There's a quite a lot available on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website right now about this exhibition and the history. So if you're visiting New York City please go see the “Hear Me Now” exhibition. You'll see our work and other collector items of this pottery on display. It's a very rewarding, engaging project with multiple players involved. And you can read and learn much more about it now not just from a university website, but from a museum in New York, and then it's going to move to Michigan and other locations during the year.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much.

C. Fennell: My pleasure, thank you.

]]> Reimagining Historic House Museums ]]> Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/45E7BC21-B92A-7021-445A8EFE0F6FFCB0.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-460A6C67-AD8D-F844-4682FD0CA4109A80 Reimagining Historic House Museums National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Max van Balgooy and Ken Turino about approaches and solutions to solve challenges facing historic house museums. 1013 no full 119

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Catherine Cooper: My name is Catherine Cooper, I am here with—

Max van Balgooy: Max van Balgooy, I am an Assistant Professor at George Washington University in the Museum Studies program and I’m the president of Engaging Places, a design and strategy firm that connects people with historic places.

Ken Turino: Hello! And I’m Ken Turino, my day job is with Historic New England. I also teach museum studies at Tufts University and currently president of the board of the House of Seven Gables Settlement Association.

Catherine Cooper: You both recently published a book: Reimagining Historic House Museums. Could you talk a bit about the impetus for writing it?

Max van Balgooy: Ken and I were invited to be on a panel at Gunston Hall, which was hosted by the Historic House Consortium of Washington D.C. Afterwards Ken and I got to talking about our sessions and noted how nicely they meshed together and approached AASLH about doing a series of one-day workshops based upon what we did, which we did for a while. I'm not quite sure though, Ken, where did the book come from?

Ken Turino: These workshops that Max mentions, done for the American Association for State and Local History, brought us around the country. And they actually still will bring us around the country. With Covid there's been a hiatus but starting next year we should be back on the road. We're very pleased about that, so stay tuned.

During those workshops that we do—day-long workshops—we met with people from a variety of different kinds of historic sites, houses, history museums, and one of the things that we always ask them is: What are the biggest challenges facing your historic house or your historic site? And Max and I would make a big list of those, and in the workshop, we try to cover as much of that as possible. And as we did more workshops, we tried to incorporate more because we saw that there was a real need to talk about these things that revolved around sustainability, that revolved around being relevant, engaging with your community and so on. And from that, Max, that's the sort of the birth of this publication.

And we also were doing some sessions, for example, on best practices on community engagement at AASLH conferences. Max did one with another group of people; we did one together. This got us thinking: What do we need to include in the book, what do people know, or need to know. That's how I think it started.

Max, anything you want to add?

Max van Balgooy: We both were part of the Kykuit conference that the National Trust and AAM and AASLH were involved in—gosh, was that 15 years ago? —where we identified some of the challenges, the sustainability issues of historic sites and house museums. At that point, I could identify the problems and challenges, but we didn't have many solutions. I think one of the reasons we put together the book was to provide some solutions for people so they could move forward.

And so this book that we put together has 36 chapters dealing with fundamentals of management operations to thinking about different approaches to familiar topics, as well as how to rethink common methods that we use for interpreting historic sites: the school tour, the regular public tour, or exhibitions. So it's an attempt at a very high level to sort of rethink how house museums operate, how they should operate to be more successful.

Ken Turino: And one of the things we kept in mind is we wanted to get people thinking very very big, but we also wanted to be very practical and give people some of the solutions.

In fact, that is the subtitle of our book, Max.

Max van Balgooy: Yeah, “New Approaches and Proven Solutions.”

Ken Turino: You know there are many of the authors in the book who I think did outstanding jobs. I think one of the best chapters on working with boards is by Donna Harris. I think she did an amazing, very very practical job of the steps, what you need to know really succinctly. I mean there are things available on websites, but I just loved how she pulled that all together. And you know we had a great chapter on community engagement by Dawn DiPrince, and it was really at a very local level, but the lessons that she learned you could apply to institutions across the country, and I just loved that about it. And there were some people who were going in different directions: what Katherine Kane was doing with the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center at that time to really reinvent the tour, and at Lincoln’s Cottage where they actually allow you to sit on furniture and engage more in conversational tours rather than being just talked at. When the book came out many people still had not heard about these case studies. I think that was really good to get that out in the field along with again the workshops.

Max van Balgooy: Well, you know, one thing we discovered when we put together the index, which if any of you have ever done a book before, is one of the awfulest parts of the job. You have to read every page and look for keywords and put the page numbers in… And anyway, as Ken and I were sitting at his dining room table assembling the index on three by five cards, we noticed there were patterns across all these chapters, which are written all by different people, with different case studies, different museums. There were certain things that kept rising to the top as making a big difference and one of them was having a mission or a vision that was meaningful and relevant, and how much that is a fundamental element for making an historic site successful and to really rethink what you do.

And we have several examples in the book about that and different ways, but one of the most interesting one is from the Trustees of Reservations which looks at the spirit of place, an idea that comes from the National Trust in the U.K. but I think increasingly can be something that helps historic sites and house museums think more holistically about what they interpret and how they go about it to make it not just about the names and dates and facts, but that these places have emotional resonance to people that can be very meaningful.

Catherine Cooper: So when drawing on the workshop material and putting the book together, how did you expand on or change the material, solicit chapters, or invite submissions?

Ken Turino: A lot of the same things came up over and over again that were needed. Part of our charge was finding who's the best person to tackle these topics. And I think Max and I drew on the large network from the American Association for State and Local History, from people we heard presenting at conferences, people who we knew were doing outstanding work. Our workshop continued to evolve, too, as we heard from people at these workshops, what their needs were. We also learned of other good case studies or examples or models, so it constantly was and constantly is evolving, as new studies come out we try to incorporate that.

When Max and I published the book, the studies from AASLH and the National Park Service’s humanities indicators had not or were just coming out to talk about how the fact at historic site visitation was actually increasing. After years and years of decreasing, they were on the move up, and I like to think Kykuit, these workshops, and what other people were doing in the field were really helping people reach out to new audiences, to tell new stories, all things that we, again, were incorporating in the workshops as they progressed.

But we did try in the book, and I think that all led to the fact that we were increasing visitation and then Covid hit of course, and that changed everything for a while. And I like to think we're on the rebound from that.

Max van Balgooy: Ken and I both have very large networks in our realm of the world and it's great to bring those people together. It's like having a big dinner party in our book we bring all the smart people together and talk about these challenges facing historic sites. That's one of the reasons Ken and I love doing these books and we're working on another book again, this one on Christmas, and we're taking a very similar approach: just bringing in lots of diverse ideas, diverse people, sites that are large and small, to see if we can find commonalities and distinctiveness in the kind of work that we do in our field.

Historic sites and house museums are the largest form of museum in the United States, but they're also the most under-resourced: smallest number of staff, smallest amount of revenue annually, but they're almost in every community and they can make a tremendous impact on our thinking about history and the value of American culture in lives today.

Catherine Cooper: Is there anything that you would change or recommend after having gone through the pandemic in a new edition of the book or the workshop?

Ken Turino: We've actually thought about that. I am a firm believer that online programming is here to stay. We didn't really cover much of that in the book. I think we would definitely include more of that if we do a revised version of the book in the future. I think there'll be plenty of opportunity. I think that online programming as I said is here to stay, but I think the verdict is out yet on how effective it will be over time.

Susie Wilkening and others have done studies on this. I think there's a real place. I mean I’m here in New England, we have pretty horrible Januarys and Februarys, and if I can avoid driving out in a blizzard to go to a program, I’ll do it online. Where you are regionally will make a difference on that in the future. That's one thing I think right off.

And Max, you have some thoughts about technology?

Max van Balgooy: Now there’s a demand for doing a lot with technology thanks to Covid. If there's anything good about Covid and the pandemic that's maybe one of the good things.

When we put this book together we actually had a placeholder for a chapter on technology and virtual programming and we couldn't find an author for it. Other than people doing a website or maybe a blog; it was pretty rudimentary no one really did any programming on the internet when we were putting this together in 2018. But boy has that changed.

The smallest organizations, thanks to Zoom and good internet connections are doing great programming online now they sort of figured it out. And so, yes, as Ken mentioned if we were to do this book again we'd have a chapter, or the chapters we already have the topics will probably incorporate already an element having to do with virtual programming. That's just my guess.

However, in our book I would say that just because there's not a lot about virtual programming or activities in the book, most of the chapters are written at a very high level. It’s about rethinking what you do. So we have a chapter all about very common methods: the adult guided tour, school programs and exhibitions. The ideas in them, like if you're going to do a school program you need to be aware of the state standards for education or learning, that doesn't change whether it's in person or virtual. If you're going to do an exhibition, don't just be hands-on, be minds-on. And so that's not going to change whether it's an online exhibition or it's an in-person exhibition. So those ideas can be scaled to the different environments.

And while Ken talks about the virtual experience is here to stay, and I would agree with him, there's still a great value in the real place and the real objects. It's very difficult to understand some historic places without actually being there--that again is that spirit of place.

Ken Turino: One of the things I think that I would want to emphasize, you know that came out of the pandemic for me, was just how creative and resilient our community of museums was. And we talked about that in the book, but I think it might be worth even a chapter because people really did adjust and were very creative in how they did things.

We at Historic New England did a lot more outside as people did and invited people into our landscape. This is what you were talking about earlier, Max, looking at our sites holistically, and I think for some people that was a real change and an important change. Again, I don't think that's going away at all.

Max van Balgooy: Most historic sites as I mentioned are small and people always seem to sort of think that, oh someday they'll grow up to be a big place like Colonial Williamsburg or Mount Vernon. It's just the wrong approach to take. Small museums are just small institutions and they have certain advantages to them, and one of the biggest ones is that they can turn on a dime much faster than a large organization. And so when we moved to virtual, if someone had some experience with Zoom and could find an author or historian that's willing to talk to the group, they were able to provide that program quickly and reach more people than they would have conventionally.

Catherine Cooper: So what would you like readers to take away from your book?

Ken Turino: We would like readers to take our book!

To me, it's really about how to make your site more engaging for your community, because your community brings your volunteers, most of your money; it supports you, it comes to your programs, and I could go on and on and on. But also if you want people to engage it has to be something that relates to them. It has to be somehow relevant to them.

Max van Balgooy: When we put together the index, there’s a couple ideas that flow to the top, and I think those are the ones that are really important for people. One of them is to have a mission that's meaningful and relevant, and that mission can't be the traditional “collect, preserve, and interpret” and then just plop your name in there. That's a description of what you do, it's not what you want to achieve. Nor can it be a slogan like “a hidden treasure in your community.” That is not helpful; that's not a description of a vision of where you want to go. So you need to figure out what that is, and every place is different; every community has a different history so you need to figure out what that is. Please don't write us and ask us “Please tell us what our mission is.” You need to figure that out; it's hard work.

The second thing is, is that you have to be willing to experiment and take risks. And the history field tends to be one that's pretty conservative in its thinking. I’m not talking about conservative and liberal in terms of political sense, but we tend to be we look backwards. But we need to look more forwards in our field: so why are we doing all this stuff? Why are we collecting all this material? What do we want to preserve in our communities and what do we want to change? That's the kind of vision we need to think about and that may require experimentation and risk. And we need to be able to feel comfortable failing on our work to try something new in order to reach new audiences and to become more meaningful and relevant to our communities.

Ken Turino: I really want the readers to get models they can use. I want to give them ideas that they can adapt. I want them to see that they're not alone in some of these challenges that we're facing, and again, give them some good practical information that they can take and cater to their own communities and their own needs.

We're hoping with our next book to do the same with Christmas—interpreting Christmas at historic sites and museums. We're trying to be inclusive and look at winter holidays in this book. We're going to give people some best practices on how they might decorate their historic sites, what are some of the things to consider. So we're just following through on this first book and we are taking this into other areas.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today.

Max van Balgooy: Great, thanks for inviting us.

Ken Turino: Thanks for having us.

]]> The Mystique of Florida's Key Marco Cat (Episode 118) ]]> Sat, 29 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/6D7864F5-A854-5917-623A24186F9F0E4F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-6D8B6029-E16A-432B-687A729CD6ADD0BE The Mystique of Florida's Key Marco Cat (Episode 118) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Austin Bell about the Key Marco Cat, an artifact from Marco Island Florida with a long and storied history. 850 no full 118

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C. Cooper: Name is Catherine Cooper I am here with—

A. Bell: Hi I'm Austin Bell, and I'm the curator of collections for the Marco Island Historical Society.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us today. You just had a book come out called The Nine Lives of Florida’s Famous Key Marco Cat. Can you tell us who, or what, the Key Marco Cat is and why it's so important in Floridian and American archaeology?

A. Bell: Sure, and I love the way you worded that question—the who or what—because the Key Marco Cat really is thought to be anthropomorphic, meaning it has both animal and human characteristics. But it's called a cat because it's generally feline in appearance, especially in its facial features. And essentially, it's a six-inch tall wooden carving that was likely modeled after—in part at least—a Florida panther and it's seated in sort of a crouching position resting on its hind legs, which are folded under, while its forelimbs stretch all the way down to the front of its torso and come to rest on its upper thighs. It's very small. It weighs less than half a pound, so about as much as a half-empty soda can. It's delicate, but despite those things it still holds enormous power and mystique.

It was likely carved by the Calusa people of Southwest Florida or their indigenous neighbors or predecessors. We don't know exactly who with certainty, but we do know it was likely carved at least 500 years ago because of the lack of European goods found at the site in context with the cat and other objects, but again are unsure of its exact age. It actually could be as many as 1500 years old. And it's extraordinarily rare because very few items of this sort of ephemeral nature have survived from that time period, let alone works of art like the cat made by a native artist at a time prior to the European invasion of the continent.

It was preserved in this oxygen-free environment at a muck site on what is now Marco Island where the museum that I work at is located. It sort of reminds me of those ancient peat bogs in Europe that preserved human remains in the level and the type of preservation. They found wood, plant fiber, gourds, even paint pigments still on objects in near perfect condition until they were excavated in 1896 by a Smithsonian anthropologist named Frank Hamilton Cushing. And they’re so important really because it’s the most complete and comprehensive assemblage ever discovered in a pre-Columbian Florida archaeological deposit.

And meanwhile, in the hundred-plus years since its discovery, it's kind of become one of Florida's most famous artifacts and it's had a sort of a fascinating history even since its excavation: being on exhibit in different museums and changing hands several times and all of that [is] sort of outlined in this book. On Marco Island, here it's also become sort of this source of local identity and pride because its image and likeness is really everywhere: it's on street signs, it's in jewelry, and it’s in local businesses. So, it means a lot, especially to the people of Marco Island. Writing the Cat’s Biography

C. Cooper: You called your book an object biography. Could you explain what that is and why did you decide to write it about the Cat instead of any other object?

A. Bell: You know, all museum artifacts and all material culture really has a life cycle and from the moment it's produced by human hands to the moment of its inevitable destruction. So, an object biography is basically the story of an object's life from its very beginning, or its birth if you will, all the way sometimes through to its end or death, which of course we haven't reached with the Key Marco Cat, thankfully. And so, I don't know if object biography is an official term or not and really I don't know a whole lot of other object biographies, quite honestly. The one that immediately comes to my mind is the film The Red Violin, which traces that object's history through time.

But it's something I thought was appropriate in telling the story of the cat because when I was thinking about it, I couldn't help but imagine all of the different sets of human hands that had held it over the centuries and how different contextually many of those hands were. And it just really struck me that the cat must have lived many different lives especially depending on the people and the circumstances surrounding it, which again vary greatly. So partially, you know, honestly for the sake of humor and intrigue, I organized the book into nine different chapters each representing a different life in what is this feline object's history. But, you know, of course, the true number of lives that it’s lived is not so easily defined. I started with the cat's origins and nature, really as part of a tree, you know it's a piece of wood, and went from there.

C. Cooper: Can you talk about the various meanings that have been ascribed to the cat over its various lives? One of the words you used in the book was transformative.

A. Bell: Well, I call it transformative for a couple of reasons and the first is, you know, going back to that idea that we talked about that it's anthropomorphic. It may actually represent a figure in transition from a human form to a feline deity form or vice versa. We don't really know. The interpretations of its true meaning really sort of range from the mundane like a piece of furniture to the mystical like a living deity but we can look to ethnohistoric and ethnographic records for some ideas. And of course, the Calusa and their ancestors didn’t keep written records, so really the only first-hand accounts we have are from Europeans, who were clearly prejudiced in a lot of their descriptions. But they're still the best-known eyewitness accounts of the Calusa – from the Spanish in particular - when it comes to observations you can't make from the archaeological record. And so, the most frequently cited account comes from the translations of a Spanish missionary named Juan Rogel in 1567 and he interacted with the Calusa at their capital Calos, which is now known as Mound Key, and he describes “A temple of idols there, which were some very ugly masks, which some Indians donned delegated by it and they went out into the village with them and the wretches performed their worship and adored them with the women singing certain canticles.” Obviously, this language is very biased and prejudiced but it gives us important clues. It talks about these idols that they worshipped and the cat really may very well have been one of these idols, making it an object of possible religious or spiritual importance.

Also, you know, aside from these ethnohistoric accounts, archaeologists can look to the ethnographic record for observations from living cultures for clues to the importance of the panther in modern Native American society. And I have a lot of those possibilities laid out in my book. But going back to the idea of it as transformative I also called it that because it's really been transformative in an entirely different way as sort of a modern cultural icon if you think about it. Because this little carving that was carved hundreds of years ago by an artist and was probably admired communally at least for its spiritual connotations above all else is now this symbol of native American history and culture in Florida. And it's traveled almost 12,000 miles since it was excavated, all around the country on different exhibits. It’s moved millions of dollars. It’s used as an educational and promotional tool for various museums and it’s produced jobs. You know, our whole museum actually was built in 2010 around the idea of one-day housing this cat on loan. And so now we have it here on loan through 2026, which is just a really big deal locally. So, in a sense we kind of worship the cat in a new and different way that is, of course far, far different than was originally intended. And to me is just something that's really interesting to think about.

C. Cooper: So you mentioned that the cat has been on display more than 60% of the time. It is currently at your museum. What are the plans for the cat once it returns to the Smithsonian? Has there been any discussion?

A. Bell: I really don't know. There hasn't been much discussion beyond our use for it, which is incorporated into a larger exhibit right now, but that's something that will be up to the Smithsonian. I assume at first at least it will get some sort of well-deserved cat nap because it's been on exhibit for so long. And of course, one of the roles of museums is to extend the lifetimes of objects in their collections as long as possible so that future generations can benefit from them. So, you know, each museum is different I can't speak for the Smithsonian but I'll give you an example. The Penn Museum, for which I'm a consulting scholar, as an example they loaned some artifacts to us as well from the Key Marco site – equally as fragile and delicate – and their policy is for every one year that they're on display they need to rest for an additional 10 years. So, they're that fragile because they're sensitive to fluctuations in light levels, relative humidity, temperature, things like pests, and even vibrations from construction projects going on nearby are a threat to these fragile objects. And so, they're just trying to help preserve them as long as possible while educating people and making them accessible to people along the way. So, it's a balance but for the cat specifically I don't think it's going to be back in storage for long just knowing how in demand it is. You know, I imagine it'll probably be incorporated into other exciting new exhibits over the years, just as it has been for the past century. And you know, as the fields of anthropology and museum studies kind of evolve, which I talk about in Chapter 8 of the book, so too will the standards and practices for exhibiting this sort of material culture. And I just would be excited to see what those new exhibits look like and how they reflect those changes in these evolving disciplines.

C. Cooper: What would you like readers to take away from your book and will you continue to follow the cat’s progress?

A. Bell: I feel very connected to the cat and invested in its interest. I first learned about the Key Marco Cat when I was in school at the University of Florida studying anthropology and I worked at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where they have part of the collection of the Key Marco artifacts. Of course, the Key Marco Cat is at the Smithsonian Institution and then a large portion of the collection is there as well and also the University of Pennsylvania Museum has a big portion of this collection has been split up over the years. But actually, one of the things I worked on as a student assistant at the museum was to inventory and move all of the Key Marco materials. They were undergoing some renovations at the time in their collections and so I got all into the Key Marco stuff. Meanwhile, they’re building the museum here on Marco Island unbeknownst to me and then years later after the museum first opened they decided that they needed a curator to talk about the Key Marco artifacts. And I was just getting out of school. My advisor, you know, recommended me for the job, and so it all just sort of came together and I got to keep working on Key Marco and build exhibits around them and pursue loans of the original artifacts. And so, the cat’s been a part of my life now for about, I don’t know, 15 years or so, and so I hope it continues to be, even from a distance.

I think the thing about this that I would like most people to take away from it is just the fact that Southwest Florida, and really all of North America, was home for thousands of years to indigenous peoples that were complex and sophisticated and producing beautiful artwork that rivaled that of more well-known cultures, say in Central America, or Asia, or the Middle East, all around the world, right here in North America. And the difference in this case is that the cat, of course was made out of wood, a material that decays at a relatively fast rate comparatively so you don’t see it usually in archaeological sites. It makes you just wonder about all of the work that they did create across what we now know as Florida that didn’t survive in this miraculous archaeological context, because really it was. Key Marco, the site was sort of an anomaly to people. Archaeologists have been hoping for sites like that in the past hundred years with very limited success and it's really representative of just a tiny sample of the whole, vast expanse of material culture used every day by the Calusa and their ancestors. So, it's really one of the most important sites in the history of Florida archaeology, if not North America. You know, [it] just demonstrates that artistic complexity that I was talking about and so that's what I would like people to take away from this book.

The Marco Island Historical Museum is located on Marco Island, Florida and it's open from nine to four, Tuesday through Saturday, and admission is free, even ’to see the Key Marco Cat and the other artifacts. We’re actually undergoing a major museum lobby renovation this week so even if you’ve been here and seen it already come again because there’s now new stuff to see. We’ll have the cat on loan through April of 2026 and we’ve also got artifacts from the University of Pennsylvania through 2024 and are rotating in the almost-as-famous deer figurehead is coming next April. Right now, we have the pelican figurehead which is incredible because it’s got paint still visible on it. The deer does as well so that’ll come next April to join up with the group [and] be reunited in a way here on Marco Island, where they came from the earth originally more than 100 years ago. So, we're very excited about that.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much.

A. Bell: My pleasure, thank you for having me.

]]> Sharing the Birthplace of Kermit the Frog (Episode 117) ]]> Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/92BC9E68-BBAB-4C5C-B81C14D8CF0B24B8.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-92BDE3F7-C63F-EB25-B77E040B6D72F09F Sharing the Birthplace of Kermit the Frog (Episode 117) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Stephanie, a volunteer at the Jim Henson Boyhood Exhibit, Birthplace of the Frog. 862 no full 117

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Catherine Cooper: My name's Catherine Cooper. I'm here with...

Stephanie Park: Stephanie Park.

Catherine Cooper: And we are at Jim Henson Boyhood Exhibit.

Stephanie Park: Birthplace of the Frog.

Catherine Cooper: In Leland, Mississippi. Can you tell me a bit about this museum? And why it's in Leland, Mississippi.

Stephanie Park: Jim Henson was not born in Leland, he was born in Greenville; I don't think Leland had a hospital at the time. But his father was a research scientist at Stoneville, which is an affiliation with Mississippi State University. He had a PhD in agronomy and he worked out there from the time Jim was born until he was 12. They had moved here from the University of Iowa. After he finished his research project here, they moved to the University of Maryland and that's where Jim Henson actually went to college, but he spent the first 12 years of his life in Leland.

He went through the fourth grade here and then moved up to Maryland. And it is here because they wanted to do something to honor the native son, so to speak. And this started out as the Chamber of Commerce building. I don't know exactly the order, how this came about, but I think they got the frog first, the big frog back there. And then people started bringing in their, for lack of a better word, stuff that had to do with Kermit and Sesame Street Muppets and the regular Muppets. And we got the family involved, or the family became involved. And that's how we got these two display cases, those were donated by the family as were a lot of these pictures. And it just sort of grew into this. The Chamber eventually had to move, because we got to the point that we needed all the space. And here we are.

Catherine Cooper: Jim Henson created The Muppets and the Kermit in this display, is special. Correct?

Stephanie Park: He's special because he was built specifically for us. It's a replica of the opening scene from the original Muppet movie. And it was built by the people who built the set for the original Muppet movie. So he's a one of the kind. And the animals behind you were also from the family. They are prototypes for a movie that came out in 1989 called, Song of the Cloud Forest. It was a cartoon aimed at three to six year olds on ecology. And I've tried to watch it. I can't really get interested in it, I guess, because it was aimed at three to six year olds and I'm in my seventies, different viewpoint altogether.

But the workmanship that went into those with the smocking and the detail work, I think is absolutely terrific. If anybody's ever done smocking, you have two basic kinds of smocking. The pulled smocking and then the English smocking, where they put it through a pleating machine. This is the pulled smocking. This is the hard kind to do. And he did it with one of his daughters. So they were handmade by Jim Henson and one of his daughters. To my knowledge, that's the only thing we've got here that he actually touched.

Catherine Cooper: How did Jim Henson get involved in making Muppets?

Stephanie Park: He made Kermit out one of his mother's old coats and he liked puppets. His grandmother had given him a love of creating things and he created Kermit. And he did it so that he could make different expressions, you know marionettes are all strings but the expression stays the same. In fact, on most puppets, expression stays the same. But on Muppets with your hand in it, you could actually make smiles or frowns and they had facial expressions. And if anybody looks at it and compares a Muppet to another type of puppet, if it's pointed out to them, they'll realize the difference once they start looking hard.

Catherine Cooper: Did he get permission from his mother to use her coat?

Stephanie Park: I would guess not at that age. I don't know. I don't think I've read that one way or the other, but I know when my son was pretty young, he didn't ask for permission to do anything. He might have been a very good child though and asked for permission, who knows.

Catherine Cooper: We always have this idea in our heads that it's Kermit green.

Stephanie Park: Right.

Catherine Cooper: So I'm assuming that coat was Kermit green.

Stephanie Park: All right. If you look back there, the picture of the two Kermit's, the one on the right was the original. He lives in the Smithsonian now. And I think he's a little bit lighter than the other one. And I don't know what the reason for the color change was. Maybe the one on the left was as close as they could get to that. But if you're from anywhere in the south, we have those green tree frogs and I personally think that's what he's based on. I might be dead wrong on that, but he looks like a green tree frog. Same color, green tree frog.

Catherine Cooper: Jim Henson lived in or nearby Leland until he was 12.

Stephanie Park: Right. His dad worked at the experiment station out at Stoneville and at that point in time the campus out there was small enough that they had bungalows. And if you look at these pictures, you can see the little houses that were out there with the experiment station actually in the back. So he lived on the Creek basically in Stoneville. Just about everything out there is affiliated somehow with Mississippi State University.

Catherine Cooper: How did he turn his love of puppets into a career?

Stephanie Park: He didn't think he could. He thought that would not be a way to support a family. And he made a trip to Europe and saw the puppeteering going on over there. And when he came back, apparently decided let's give it a shot. And he and his future wife did Kermit and this little hardheaded puppet named Sam. And when he was still in college, I think this is correct, he had a five minute show before the Steve Allen show, which was the predecessor to Johnny Carson, just in the Washington DC viewing area. And it was so popular by the end of his college career, he had made enough money to buy a Rolls Royce to drive to graduation. A used one, but still a Rolls Royce. He found that he probably could make a living doing that and pursued it. And of course everybody's thankful for that.

Catherine Cooper: Out of curiosity, how did he get involved with Sesame Street? Was that his brainchild or did he get invited in?

Stephanie Park: He got invited in. There was a girl named Jane, she had seen Kermit and she asked him to develop some puppets for Sesame Street that would interest the kids. And Sesame Street, they created it thinking that this would be a preschool alternative to inner-city children that didn't have access to preschool. And so they concentrated on the alphabet and counting and shapes and colors like you get in preschool. And then it just evolved from there. His first Sesame Street puppet was actually Ernie. And Ernie was followed by Burt and then it just grew from there. And I think he developed... And in fact, I know until his death, he developed all of them that were on Sesame Street. Now Julia's come about since then and a couple others.

Catherine Cooper: Did he train other puppet makers and puppeteers?

Stephanie Park: He worked with a man named Frank Oz who is still in puppetry and according to his biography, yes he did.

Catherine Cooper: Why do you think The Muppets have had so much staying power? Cause they still are part of our cultural consciousness.

Stephanie Park: Absolutely. I think, my opinion on that, is that they catch the kids' attention. And parents know that it's good television, that they don't have to worry about the kids watching and it's educational. It's come out in movie form and television. Originally The Muppet Show at night was produced in London because nobody in the United States wanted to do a puppet show for adults. They didn't think it would go over, but it did very well. Actually Europe got The Muppet Show a little before we did.

Catherine Cooper: And Jim Henson continued to work with the European market.

Stephanie Park: Right. He had an office in London and he had one in New York and I'm going to say he had one in Los Angeles and Florida.

Catherine Cooper: That's a lot of work.

Stephanie Park: All over. You know, everybody loves The Muppets.

Catherine Cooper: How long have you been working at this museum?

Stephanie Park: I want to say since 2014.

Catherine Cooper: What made you start?

Stephanie Park: They needed somebody and I had just retired and I had figured out that I didn't like keeping house. They contacted me after I'd been retired about three months and I thought “That would be fun.” A whole lot better than wrestling with third and fourth graders or eighth graders or whatever I happened to be teaching at the time. I started coming over here part-time and I've been here ever since and meet absolutely fascinating people.

Catherine Cooper: Do you mind telling us a couple stories of fun or favorite interactions you've had since working here?

Stephanie Park: We haven't had as many since COVID hit because of the ban on tours basically, but I've met some really interesting people from overseas. Last week, we had a couple from Switzerland. And we've had school groups, usually the teachers end up enjoying it more than the kids, but the kids like it too. And we've got the little playroom for the kids and the older kids can sit down and read. Catherine Cooper: So people come here from all over the world?

Stephanie Park: Literally. I thought it was very unusual the first month I worked here. And then after that first month, when a third of the people made... Because it was during the summertime when I started, at least one third of the people were from overseas somewhere. I was just, "wow." I had no idea that it was that far reaching until then. I knew that he was known worldwide, but I had no idea that they watched The Muppet Show and they watched Sesame Street and everything like our kids do. So that was enlightening. And then like I said, nowadays, most of the parents like this probably more than the kids do because they grew up with The Muppets and Sesame Street.

And anybody, I guess from 40 to about maybe 55, before they had just a huge choice like Nickelodeon and all that. That's what they watched, mama and daddy made sure that or mama did. That's what they watched in the afternoon. We'd like to have more tourists now that people can travel again. And it's not that far off the beaten path. I mean we're right on the main highway coming to Mississippi and this is one of the three main bridges from Memphis down. And so we get a lot of people coming through here just to get to Arkansas or Louisiana or whatnot. And we are just right here.

Catherine Cooper: What hours are you open?

Stephanie Park: From Labor Day until Memorial day during the winter, we are open from 10 to 4. During the summer hours, during school vacation, we are open from 10 to 5. We take donations in the form of Sesame Street memorabilia, any kind of Muppet memorabilia at all. And we will keep it for the donor on display so people can see it.

Catherine Cooper: Have people just walked in the door with donations and said, "Here."

Stephanie Park: Absolutely. In fact, we had somebody last week. And I came in one day and if you look back on that display case with the black hair, Ms. Piggy, I came in and there she was. I've never seen one like that before. But we have people coming in several times a year and we welcome them and we will take care of the stuff and display it for them.

And if they absolutely want it back, we give it back to them. We encourage anybody because some of the things are just absolutely fascinating. And since they started producing it, which I would guess would be since maybe 1965 ish. There's no telling how much has been produced on Sesame Street and on The Muppets.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking with me today.

]]> Uncovering the gardens at Amache (Episode 116) ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/2AF7B86C-C0C4-BAEE-AB8B12F95A03A820.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-2AF99C1E-079B-C6F1-C29BB1A8C7171DEC Uncovering the gardens at Amache (Episode 116) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with Dr. Bonnie Clark about excavations of the gardens at the Amache WWII Incarceration Camp 843 no full 116

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Dr. Catherine Cooper: My name's Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Dr. Bonnie Clark: Dr. Bonnie Clark of the University of Denver. I lead the DU Amache Project, and I am a Professor and Curator of Archeology at the University of Denver.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Dr. Bonnie Clark: Happy to do it.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Could you tell us a bit about how you started working at Amache, and why are you focusing on the gardens?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: I will say that the gardens are one of the reasons that I started to work at Amache because I've always been interested in the way that people live out their identity on a day-to-day basis and especially when that identity is under siege. I think that the way that people make places is one of the ways that you can really see that. So I had read through a report that was done by a cultural resources firm here in Colorado for a grant-funded project that was actually co-sponsored by a group of former Amache incarcerees.

I saw that there were a number of remains of gardens that were there. So I think about the fact that here are these people who were being incarcerated in large part because they don't seem quite American enough. So then they're building a number of different gardens, including some that are very traditional Japanese style gardens. I just was fascinated by what we might be able to learn about these gardens and the stories that they might tell to a larger public.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: So you've worked at Amache for a number of seasons. Can you talk about why you decided to write the book at this point, and are you continuing the study?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: I wanted to get the book out because, for those of you who read it, it's called Finding Solace in the Soil. I worked with a number of Amache survivors on the book, whether it was because they shared with me their stories, they shared with me family photographs, their own remembrances. So I really wanted to get it out while those folks could see it and appreciate it, and also give me some feedback on it, so to be my ethical peer reviewers.

I had six field seasons worth of data at that time, which is a lot of data. I knew if I waited until the project was all the way over, it was too long. So I was excited to be able to pull together the information that I had from the over a dozen gardens that we've excavated and the hundreds of gardens that we've surveyed. So I felt like we had enough data. But I will tell you that there will have to be a second edition because of the new information that's coming out, both through our survey, through some of the digitization of our digital imagery, and also through this just blockbuster excavation that I just got back from.

I will say we have worked on lots of different kinds of gardens, lots of the entryway gardens that people built for themselves as you're coming into your barrack. We've also looked at some of the public space vegetable gardens as well as public space sort of center-of-block gardens. What we hadn't looked at before this field season in terms of excavations were mess hall gardens, which are really important because people stand in line at mess halls. They spend a lot of time there, and gardens really relieve some of that…sort of the boredom of standing in line. They also in the High Plains importantly provide shade, which is particularly important during the summertime.

So this summer, we identified a mess hall garden that wrapped all the way around a mess hall that used lots and lots of pieces of concrete that are left over from the process of building the camp because all of the buildings are on concrete foundations. So they're taking some of these, and in some places, they're just using them to make the walls that are just set onto the ground. But in other instance, we had this amazing feature that takes these and then put them all together with fresh cement into what we first looked at and thought was a pond. As we investigated it more, we've decided that at least on some occasions it was a waterfall.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: In certain parts of the book, you've mentioned the concept of giri How does that relate to the archeological practice you've set up at the site?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: Well, so giri is really interesting. It's a set of relationships that people find themselves in. They have overtones of both gift and obligation. I kind of learned this in just being at many community events where I showed up. There were always like gifts to be given away, and then the expectation that you will send a thank you. Then these relations kind of continue on. I started to think about the remains that we found at the site as giri. So that they are a gift from the past, but they're also an obligation to the future. So we exist in relationship with them.

Then if we think about them in this way, by teaching my students this concept of giri, I think it helps them understand that it's more than just data, right? It's more that working with these things obligates us to both them and to the people who made them and to the people who care about them.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: From what you said about why you wrote the book, when you wrote the book, the book is giri too. What will people see of the gardens if they've visit Amache today, as opposed to what the survivors would've experienced when they built the gardens?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: You're going to have to have some imagination. Because the vast majority of the plants and the vast majority of what we would call more hardscaping, so limestone walls and things like those, are evidenced by relatively subtle... You might have some decaying limestone that suggests that underneath there, there would be a limestone wall.

The thing that is the most striking and that people will see are trees. There are thousands of trees at Amache. Every single one of them either was planted by an Amachean or is the descendant of one of those trees. Because it's up on the High Plains on a sort of terrace up above in like these sort of stabilized sand dunes, so no trees belong there. So each of those trees that are in the original location, and many of them are still alive. Now, some of them are dead, and they're standing. Some of them are dead and fallen. But the ones that still survive, I like to think of them as witness trees. So they were there at the time. And now we can be there and have a relationship with them.

We have a few other things. There are some roses that still survive 80 years later out at Amache. A few other plants that were transplanted that are survived, especially the cactus. So there's some Cholla, which is a type of cactus that doesn't really grow right there in that part of Colorado that has been transplanted. Those have survived. So it's the very hardy plants that have survived. But you're not going to see some of the other stuff that I get through pollen. You're not going to see the lilies. You're not going to see the cattails. You're not going to see the dogwood or the plum trees.

So those, again, you have to kind of use your imagination to know that when you see these trees, they were also accompanied with all sorts of other rich plantings. There were wooden fences. There were pergolas. There were benches. There were bird houses, just a lot. There's definitely hints of it. You can see little concrete ponds, like the one that I was talking about, it's very visible. It's right there at the mess hall. But others again, are going to take a little more imagination.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Amache has recently become part of the National Park Service. How does that affect your work going forward?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: Well, it means that it's going to be even more collaborative than it is already, which is kind of amazing given that I work with such a broad variety of stakeholders from high schoolers to Amache survivors. So now we'll roll in another partner in terms of thinking about our planning, and how we're going to curate the collections that come out of it. So we've got a lot of conversations that have happened. But every National Park is, as you know, and all parcels of land that are managed by the federal government, are supposed to have a full archeological survey. And most of them don't.

So the fact that we are systematically slowly going block by block through Amache to do this means that we are helping the Park meet an unfunded mandate. I actually was just on a Zoom call with the Park Service staff today. So they are really hoping that we can continue this really robust collaborative research program and kind of roll them into the planning of it and the management of it.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: What do you hope that readers will take away from the book or do with what they've learned, even if they can't visit the site in person?

Dr. Bonnie Clark: Well, first off, I think that reading through the book and just looking at the photographs and spending a little time even going to the Amache website, is to think about how when you're singled out, that you don't have to respond to inhumanity with inhumanity. Like you can do something beautiful and humane in response. Like you can build a garden in your prison.

In fact, you probably ought to build a garden in your prison because it's going to make you feel a whole lot better. It's going to keep you in tune with some of those natural cycles that being out of control like kind of spins us into unhealthy patterns. That gardening in particular can kind of help us be literally grounded in a way that's much more healthy for us. So that's kind of one of the, I think, the takeaways.

I also have a sort of recipe for an Amache-inspired garden. This is just based on the hundreds of gardens we've surveyed and the over a dozen gardens that we've test excavated. You need to find something that’s value has been overlooked. So maybe it's a pot that is already cracked. You're going to still use it to plant something in. Or maybe it's a corner of your yard that has been underappreciated. Or maybe it's some other castoff that still might have some beauty within it, if set in the right way.

Then you want to include something that relates to your heritage, so maybe it's a heritage plant. Maybe it's a stone from a home place or an important location. Maybe it's even an object that has some of that kind of connection for you. Then you want to do something that's local to where you are, to where the garden is. So maybe that's a native plant. Maybe again, it's a stone that you've gathered from nearby. Then you incorporate all of those into some kind of a little design.

So I actually have a little Amache-inspired garden in my backyard that I sort of took that template and made. It's in a broken pot. That then I take where the broken part is, and that's where I trail out the trailing part of the plant so that it flows over and kind of looks like it belongs in there. Then my local thing is I have a stone that I actually picked up at the Arkansas River, which is what flows nearby Amache and also is in the southern part of our state. I also planted a native plant in there. Then I have a piece of stone that I actually picked up from a favorite family fishing hole in Utah, which is where I'm from.

So something that I want people to hope, to sort of embrace, from the Amache story is about how the Asian American heritage and Asian American history is American history. In terms of the vast impact that, in this instance, that Japanese had or on farming practices throughout the United States. The way that as they were dispersed across the country during World War II, that they made all of these different connections. I am out there at the site or even telling the story, and people come up and they talk to me about like, "I know someone who was at Minidoka, and they are a family friend." Which is the National Park Service site and former incarceration camp in Idaho. Or, "I grow this particular type of vegetable that I found out recently was developed by a Japanese farmer." Which is so true of so many of our really important varieties of both sort of vegetable crops as well as flowers.

So that's kind of one of the things that I think these gardens help us see is the way that there's this deep history of horticulture and connection to nature that sort of flourished in Japan, was brought to the United States, and then flourished here in this very interesting and complicated way and in a complicated time.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for sharing all of this with us today.

]]> Book Publishing in Cultural Heritage (Episode 115) ]]> Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/9C1AA960-B45B-8A11-F5762667BF76BC29.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-9C3303B3-0E3B-FD32-F53E183EC6AA2B11 Book Publishing in Cultural Heritage (Episode 115) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Mary Puckett, associate acquisitions editor at the University Press of Florida 697 no full 115

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Dr. Catherine Cooper: I'm Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am here with

Mary Puckett: Mary Puckett. I'm an associate acquisitions editor at the University Press of Florida.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved in publishing?

Mary Puckett: I have probably a similar career trajectory of a lot of people in scholarly publishing, which is I started working at the Press while I was in graduate school just as a part-time job. And I just really liked working at the Press, that career appealed to me more than an academic career path.

I really liked that I got to work with scholars and scholarly ideas, but I also got to do fun things. I got to go to conferences and talk to other people about their ideas a lot. In academia, a lot of times it feels like you're limited to thinking about whatever you're working on specifically, but publishing is a great opportunity to be able to talk to other people about what they're thinking and doing and working on. That's what really appealed to me about the publishing process and working in book publishing.

So, I just stayed at the press. I graduated so that was great, I was proud of myself for finishing, but I just stayed at the press and I was lucky enough to have job opportunities open up to me here. Your career in scholarly publishing is an apprenticeship model where you start out as an assistant to an editor and you learn the basic things you need to know about making a book and all of that and then you start to gain knowledge about different parts of the process and for me, that's the acquisition side of publishing.

So, I started to learn more about how to acquire book projects and how to talk to prospective authors and how to deal with situations that can come up that are kind of tricky and how to negotiate those things. So you just learn gradually on how to do it and then a job opened up for me here at the Press and so I just stayed; and I really like working at UPF specifically

Dr. Catherine Cooper: When you select manuscripts or proposals, what are the things you're looking for? Is there anything in particular?

Mary Puckett: The books in my subject area are archeology books. Part of that is the cultural heritage studies list and we have a series in that list too. So, I work on heritage studies projects and the archeology list in general. The first thing that I look for is how well a book project will fit in with our existing catalog of books and that has to do with some things like our ability to market books. We know what our audience is for our archeology books and so we want books that are similar to the books that we already have so that we can sell the books appropriately and so that we can reach the right readers.

So, that's the biggest part of it is just that fit within books that we already have published, but I also try to find ways to branch out into new topics. And so I'll try to figure out if it's a book on another part of the world that we haven't published on, maybe it fits in with a theme from a book that we've already published that's about a place in North America or something. So, I try to find those connections and that can help us to branch out a little bit.

I don't really have requirements. You don't have to be a tenured professor to submit a book proposal. It can be anyone, I'm happy to talk to even graduate students if they're thinking about publishing a book in the future. The publishing process can be such a mystery and so I've tried to make myself available to junior scholars and graduate students who are just wondering about what publishing a book is like and I'm open to reading proposals from all career levels, all backgrounds. And I've even read proposals that I don't think would be a good fit for the press, but because I have a knowledge of what other scholarly presses publish on, I can recommend the press that would be a better fit for that project. So, I'm happy to provide advice on that too.

So at UPF, and I think this is the same for a lot of scholarly publishers, we do not accept unrevised dissertations. So, an unrevised dissertation just means your dissertation as you wrote it, you didn't do anything to change it, it still reads like a dissertation, you've got your literature review and the whole formula. Dissertation revisions are just fine to propose for book ideas and I think it can be a good idea to talk to an acquisitions editor if you're thinking about revising your dissertation to get their feedback on parts of the dissertation that you would maybe want to leave out, maybe things that should be added to.

I always give prospective authors who are revising dissertations some book recommendations for them to read for strategies on revising their dissertation, things they should leave out, things they should keep in. I don't discriminate against revised dissertations, I think they can be really great books, but they do take a lot of work to revise and to make actual books. But if an author is willing to put in that work, I'm happy to work with them on that.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Do people come to you with a proposal? Do they come to you with a manuscript? Do you approach them?

Mary Puckett: Yeah. It's a mix of all three. Usually, it's a proposal or an idea and I can help authors put together a proposal. I can tell authors what kind of materials we need to consider their proposal for a contract and to put that together. Sometimes authors send full manuscripts. That's not as common because usually authors want some, and understandably so, they want some kind of commitment from a press before they put all the effort into writing a manuscript. And also the feedback that you can get just from a proposal can be really helpful for writing the full manuscript. So, it's usually a proposal, I often reach out to scholars I think would be good authors for our press, authors who are working on some kind of research that fits in with our list or that sounds really interesting or fascinating and so I've reached out to authors to ask if they want to publish a book before.

And so there are three main parts of the publication process. So, the first part is the acquisitions part. So, that's the proposal part and I'll review the proposal and talk with the author about it. We'll decide if we want to do an advanced contract and that means that it's a publishing contract that's signed before the peer review process. The other route is called a standard contract, and that's where the contract is signed after the review process. At UPF, our advanced contract process is pretty straightforward. So, we tend to do a lot of advanced contracts. We'll talk about those details with the author and then we'll sign the advanced contract and the author and I will decide on a due date for the manuscript.

And then once the manuscript is in, the next main part of the acquisitions process is the peer review process and that's what really distinguishes university presses from trade presses is that peer review process. That's the bulk of my job is shepherding manuscripts through the peer review process. I work with authors on that. I choose the reviewers and communicate the reviews back to the author and talk with them about how to move forward with their revisions or anything else that can improve the manuscript. At UPF, we require two peer reviewers to recommend publication in order to move on to the next step.

So, once the peer reviewers approve the manuscript for publication, we then send the project to our faculty editorial board for final publication approval. And the faculty editorial board reviews the review process, which sounds very confusing, but they'll just make sure that the review process has been rigorous and that the author has responded to the peer reviews appropriately. And so it's usually a pretty straightforward process of the board approval so long as I've done my job appropriately.

The next main big part is preparing the manuscript for our editorial design and production department. So, that's when the final manuscript is ready to go. It goes to our editorial design and production, or EDP department, and that's where the manuscript really becomes a book. It’s typeset and placed, copy edited and all of that.

And then the final step is the marketing phase and that's where the book gets sent to conferences or to bookshops, where it's physically published, it's ready to go to buyers. We have a great marketing department, and we have a pretty good idea of how to sell our archeology books for example, and our other disciplines too, I'm just not acknowledgeable about those. But we really appreciate author engagement with the marketing side of things. It can really improve sales.

If the author is good about promoting their book on social media or if they do book talks. Any opportunity that the author has to incorporate their book into their work just to advertise for it in some way is really appreciated by us. And there can also be those little niche conferences that we may not be aware of that we could advertise the book at. We ask authors for those kinds of events or places that we may not know of that we could use to sell the book and raise the book's profile. So, we really like it when authors are participatory in that process, it's helpful for us and we learn from it.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: How similar or different would you say it is, and how, to publish a book as opposed to a scholarly article?

Mary Puckett: The review process actually can maybe sometimes take about the same amount of time, which is interesting. Everyone’s so busy and there are all kinds of timelines with COVID delays and things like that these days. So I think the review process could be comparable, but I think it’s definitely more work to write a book than an article. It’s a really sustained argument. Some of the same steps are involved as far as you have to get permissions to publish images and books the same way you do for a journal and images need to be a certain size and resolution and I think that journals have those same or similar requirements, but definitely the book project it’s a long game. I don’t know if I have any specific guidance on how to determine if something is an article or a book. I think if you can think of three or four solid chapter ideas, it could probably be a book.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: What would you recommend for people interested in publishing a book? What should they consider?

Mary Puckett: The first step would be determining if you have a book project and then the second step would be thinking about where you would want to publish your book and maybe reaching out to the acquisitions editor at that press. We're always happy to hear from prospective authors and to talk about book proposals that's the fun part of our job and it's almost never a bad thing. Like I said, if it's not a good fit for whatever press you have in mind, that editor may be able to tell you what publisher would be a better fit for your book and so that could be a helpful next step. Think about what you have in mind. It can be just a letter of interest to an acquisitions editor telling them “This is something I've been thinking about, I don't really have a timeline, I don't have a manuscript, but I wanted to get your feedback on it.”

Even questions like that are perfectly fine to send to an acquisitions editor and it can be really fun to talk about the projects at that stage because it's so early, it's really exciting. At UPF, we don't really have timelines in mind and so even if your idea is several years out, it still doesn't hurt to talk to a prospective editor about what you're thinking.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: How would you recommend a prospective author go about choosing an acquisitions editor to approach?

Mary Puckett: I would say that if it's a scholarly book especially, to look at what publishers have published the books that you turn to the most and that you like the most in your field. That's probably going to be the first indication of the press that publishes books like the one that you're going to write. If it's a book on archeology, hopefully, you'll see that UPF has published a lot of those books! Because we have published a lot of archeology books. And so that's one way to figure out where your book fits in with the grand scheme of scholarly publishing. So, that's where I would start. Maybe if you have a book that's a model, that's something that I advise, see who published it and then just go to that publisher's website and you can usually find the list of acquisitions editors for the different subject areas and then find an email address for them. And as easy as that.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Great. Thank you so much for talking to us today.

Mary Puckett: Thank you. This is great.

]]> Conserving a Building and Continuing a Mission at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Episode 114) ]]> Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/878094AC-B4F1-36B6-F32ACCB4314CE305.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-87815327-B738-CF57-C1F906456610D7DD Conserving a Building and Continuing a Mission at the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Episode 114) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with Gordon Umbarger and Sandra Vicchio about the ongoing building renovations at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. 935 no full 114

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Catherine Cooper: My name is Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am here today with ...

Gordon Umbarger: Gordon Umbarger. I'm the Director of Operations for the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Sandra Vicchio: And I'm Sandra Vicchio. I'm the Design Architect and project lead on the renovations of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Gordon Umbarger: The National Museum of Women in the Arts was established in 1987, which just happens to be one year after H.W. Jansen's History of Art, that's a popular art history textbook since 1962, one year after they had mentioned women artists in that textbook for the first time. We have a social media campaign that's grown in recent years that I think encapsulates our mission and reason for existence pretty well. It's called #5WomenArtists, and if you go out and you ask people, "Can you name five women artists?" It turns out many people can't and if they can, it probably takes longer for them to think of five women artists than it does for them to think of five male artists, for example.

The bottom line is that women have never been treated equally in the art world. And even today, they remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued on museum walls, in galleries, at auction houses. And of course, this is an imbalance that goes well beyond the art world, but art plays a vital role in our society in exploring issues of gender. So that's why our mission is so important. We are the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women through the arts. And we exhibit a wide range of works from established artists, as well as emerging artists, in all types of media, painting, photography, sculpture, video.

Sandra Vicchio: The building was designed in the early 20th century by Waddy Butler Wood. He was a well-known Washington D.C. architect. It's a classical revival building. Within that strength, there's some very beautiful and even delicate details like the terracotta cornices and the stamped zinc metal cladding that creates the facade of the sixth floor.

Inside is the beautiful Great Hall, which is beloved by everyone. And then there's its location, which is unparalleled for an institution like this, and would certainly be hard to replicate in today's world.

Gordon Umbarger: One of the things that has interested me the most about the building is the history of it and the fact that it's had so many different uses throughout its life. It was purpose built as a Masonic temple. The Freemasons, of course, being an organization that did not admit women.

So now we have a museum of women in the arts, a 180 there. So many other uses in between and concurrently. The ground floor of the building was one of the premier movie theaters in Washington for many decades. There were offices upstairs for all types of different uses, including the George Washington University's law school. And then the site next door, which is the site of our 1997 addition to the building for a while was a theater of movies of not such prominence, let's say.

Sandra Vicchio: The building is undergoing a full renovation. We are addressing all of the envelope and building enclosure issues. We're looking at the roof, the facade, the windows. We are replacing all of the building systems including mechanical, electrical, plumbing, AV, IT, telecom, security, fire protection. In addition to that, in order to support the museum's mission, we are creating some more gallery space. In order to do that, we had to condense some of the offices for staff and fit them into small functional offices.

Catherine Cooper: What is your background and how did you get involved with the museum and the restoration project?

Gordon Umbarger: So I joined the museum 10 years ago. I have a background in facilities management and also information technology in a number of different things. My job sort of is a big tent role. My desk has a lot of different things on it.

In 2014, as far as how we got the restoration initiative going, NMWA was awarded a grant from the IMLS funded conservation assessment program. The program has two components, there's a collections assessment, which for the museum was headed up by Wendy Jessup & Associates, and then there's also a building assessment, headed up by Watson & Henry Associates.

And so of course, those two go hand in hand in a place like a museum, the collections and the building, especially when you think about the impact that the condition of the building envelope, the function of the mechanical systems, have on the conservation environment for the works that are building houses.

So they delivered their report in early 2015, and it was sort of a broad-brush framework, forgive me for using an art metaphor, the organization's priorities, moving forward, the things that we needed to focus on in terms of staff time and in terms of investment. At that point, we were coming up on 30 years since the building's last major renovations, so many of those recommendations in the report were interrelated and overlapping, literally and figuratively, systems that are stacked on and interrelated to each other. The bottom-line recommendation from that report was that the organization be strategic about it and assemble a team of professionals to move forward with what they call a facilities preservation plan study. And one of the firms recommended to lead that effort was Sandra Vicchio & Associates.

Sandra Vicchio: A project of this complexity does not happen without a whole lot of people. It certainly would never happen without the support of the board of trustees and the donors. I think it's really important to recognize the role that philanthropy plays in institutions like this. I went to NMWA with Tracy Marcotte, the lead from CVM, who's our envelope and structural engineer, and we met with Gordon and he said, "Well, okay, let's get going."

Gordon Umbarger: There might have been a little more to it than that, but ...

Sandra Vicchio: It was a little more complicated than that.

Tracy is a PhD in material science engineering and she thinks at a level that exceeds the way that many people I've worked with in my career think, because her training just takes her to a whole other level. That's been incredibly helpful on this project. As for me, I studied architecture at the University of Virginia where I received my bachelor's and master's degrees. I've always had an interest in public buildings, museums, and libraries. Before I started my own firm, 10 years ago, I worked on projects at Monticello, Mount Vernon, Winterthur, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and a whole series of various library projects, including the Pratt Library in Baltimore. I love the idea of lifelong learning and I love the idea of preservation of both the buildings, which I always look at as the largest object in a museum or a library's collection. It's got to be the largest and probably the most expensive object. I love the idea of taking care of those things and of shoring up the world moving forward.

I assembled this team and NMWA was very open about who I brought in. I brought in a team of really excellent design professionals with whom I had a lot of experience. We kicked off the project on a Friday in January. That was our first meeting all together on the project in the building. We'd all had a building tour and we sat down and talked about what we were going to do. And that weekend, this freak snowstorm comes through and it comes up from the south, which is very unusual in Washington, D.C. It loads a lot of snow on the south facing roof of NMWA and then rips down about a hundred feet, linear feet, of the historic gutter above the sixth floor. Gordon called me and said, "Well, we've got this situation." And I said, "Let me call my team.” I said, "We'll get some people to the site right away." I left voicemail messages for my team and before I actually connected with them, they were either on site or on the train getting down there. They responded very, very quickly. So within three days, then we had two projects. We had the gutter restoration project, which CVM picked up as lead for that effort. And then the facilities preservation plan was under way, for which I was the lead. And as Tracy liked to put it, we had the world's largest mock up during our preservation plan study because all of a sudden we had access to things we never would've seen otherwise. A difficult situation turned into an advantage. I don't know how you explain to a group of people more than to have something like that happen, that the building really does need some attention.

Being NMWA, they rallied and on we went, so we're doing work. Obviously when you want to shore up a building, you start with the roof, that's the first line of defense and then the vertical walls, which includes the gutters. All of that envelope preservation is critical, as Gordon said earlier, to preserving not just the building, but also helping to conserve the art. And that's obviously very important. Those are being approached using normal building traditions, but also with CVM and the way that they think about envelope preservation and conservation, they use thermographic imaging during the study to demonstrate what the issues were and where we had particular problems with the envelope. And then Tracy ran a whole series of very complex calculations, looking at moisture migration through the envelope and how to mitigate humidity migration and balance those things. Because the goal is to protect the building, the art, and to manage energy consumption.

That's how we're approaching it with science and preservation conservation techniques, which I think is the right strategy for this building. And within the building we're really working to preserve and restore the beloved spaces like the Great Hall. It functions as a rental space. It's a gathering space. It's where you would probably say to your friends, "I'll meet you in the Great Hall", if you were meeting there. And it would be a lovely place to wait for your friends. You wouldn't mind being there at all. What's really interesting to me is even though the building was originally designed for the Masons and they didn't let women in most places, the Great Hall was a place where women were allowed. So it's functioning as it was originally intended, as a public space and a very beautiful venue so we're excited about that.

Gordon Umbarger: I mean the bottom line for us obviously is that we need a building that works for the organization and our mission and our visitors. And it'll serve all those things well for decades to come, we don't know what the future holds, but we need to be, especially after the past couple years, we've learned that, but we need to be as ready as we can. We really appreciate the approach that the design team has taken in terms of balancing listening to the organization and what it is that we're trying to achieve and then making that work within our building. The overall size of that building is not changing during this renovation. We have the building we have, and we're very proud of it and proud to have this opportunity to preserve it and keep it in its prominent place in Washington for many years.

One of the things that came to mind when Sandra was talking, we mentioned that historic gutter and cornice earlier, because I was just looking at the submittal that came back for the batten seam roofing that interfaces with that gutter. That's a common product in building these days, but the one that we need is not one that you can buy off the shelf. Because if you look at the original drawings for that cornice, the architect, Waddy Wood, was very careful to line the battens up with the stamped details in that metal cornice. So we want to make sure that those details are preserved when people see the building.

Sandra Vicchio: I was in an awful lot of meetings where we were looking at cost and the systems cost far exceeds the architecture cost. But in this case, that's the appropriate course of action. We're not changing a lot of the architecture in the building. Although we did, in order to meet the museum's mission and need for more space, we're creating a new gallery on the fourth floor of about 3,000 square feet. We were able to do that by condensing staff space. So along with this new gallery on the fourth floor, we've redesigned the library and we've created an education studio. This creates new learning center, which I think is really fabulous. It allows someone to come and see art, learn about art, and then even do some art, all on one floor. Which, if you think about engaging the public, whether they're young, middle aged or older, what an incredible experience that is.

Gordon Umbarger: I just think it's a great project with a really worthy cause. The organization's mission is important and we carry it out in this unique building that's in such a prominent place, it’s on a very prominent corner, two blocks from the White House. It's been an honor to be part of the team charged with ensuring that that legacy and that mission is carried forward. And it's been really fulfilling to see the genuine excitement and engagement from consultants and contractors and other partners who are excited to partner with us for reasons beyond their bottom line. Everybody wants to win the contract, but folks are excited to work on behalf of this project and this organization and that's been really gratifying to see.

Sandra Vicchio: For me, it's hard to pick one thing, so I'm going to pick three if you'll indulge me. First, it's pretty exciting to work on a team, and on behalf of a team, with so many women. And these are women who are A-team women, these are not just any women. There's the owner's rep who works for Gordon, and there are three women who are core on the construction manager’s project team who are deeply in the project every day. That's been really exciting to me. I'm going to say, of course, we have some pretty terrific men on the team as well, but the demographics of this team are different and that's really great to see. I think the second thing is the opportunity to breathe new life into this heroic structure. And then the third thing is, when you think about this institution, that one woman had a vision to create a museum that was, let's all admit, centuries overdue in the world, and then made it happen. That gives me chills.

Gordon Umbarger: We are closed and we closed in August so that we could undertake a single-phase renovation, not only for financial reasons, but just the layout of our building did not at all lend itself to being able to say, "Let's renovate this half while we occupy this and then flip." That's not possible in the footprint that we have. It's about a two-year renovation, and we're looking forward to reopening in the fall of 2023.

The majority of our membership base has never visited the museum. They're from all over the country, all over the world, and they follow us on Twitter and Instagram. And we’re constantly pushing out information about the programs that we're doing and we've got a whole series of them, art chats, studio tours with artists, all kinds of engaging programs that we're working on. And there are also a couple of public art projects down at the building itself, starting with a work by an artist who goes by the name MISS CHELOVE. It’s a scrim on the 13th street side of the building, extending all the way from about the top of the scaffold and then all the way the entire length of that facade.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for telling us about this project and for joining us.

Gordon Umbarger: Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Sandra Vicchio: Thank you, Catherine.

Catherine Cooper: The next public art installation at the NMWA will be by Katharina Cibulka and will be unveiled this fall. She solicited input from the NMWA community to choose a feminist phrase; you can see what she made starting in October.

]]> Stories of Women in Archaeology (Episode 113) ]]> Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/1C36EF81-0E35-E34D-CCBB00C9D626665C.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1C128C6C-D22F-C07D-017A3C170DA61B43 Stories of Women in Archaeology (Episode 113) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with Suzy Eskenazi and Dr. Nicole Herzog about their book "With Grit and Determination: A Century of Change for Women in Great Basin and American Archaeology" 1086 no full 113

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Dr. Catherine Cooper: My name's Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am a research scientist at NCPTT. I am here with...

Suzy Eskenazi: Suzy Eskenazi. I'm a principal investigator and archeologist at SWCA Environmental Consultants in Salt Lake City.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: I'm Dr. Nicole Herzog. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Denver.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Today we're going to be speaking about your recent book, With Grit and Determination: A Century of Change for Women in Great Basin and American Archeology. I would love to know what the impetus for putting this book together was, and how did you approach this project?

Suzy Eskenazi: Really, it started at the 2016 Great Basin Anthropological Conference in Reno. Nicole and I were in the book room. I was waiting in line to get my book signed by Dr. Kay Fowler at the University of Utah press table. And I was speaking with her husband and some other people around me in line, and I just started wondering why, in those meetings they're always giving out awards to men, often the same men over and over. And we were surrounded by accomplished women in that book room, and I thought, why don't we hear more about these women and their stories? And the time was right, and I saw Nicole, and ran over to her, said, “We need to do this!” And she agreed.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Yep. Good retelling. Yes. It was like an aha moment. Yes. Maybe we could create a platform so that that could happen. And so Suzy proposed that we organize a symposium for the coming conference. And so, we really got to work, just brainstorming about who we could invite. And we were dreaming big. All the most amazing people we could think of, and we're like, do you think they'd do it? And then, because Suzy is so well connected and she is a fabulous communicator, she reached out to all these people, and they all of course agreed, which was really shocking to us.

Suzy Eskenazi: And I have to say that I have always been interested in the story behind the story. So, we know so much of their research, and their academic, and CRM experience, but how did they get to be where they are and why? And what are all those roadblocks, and major accomplishments they've had? And so we were just so delighted that a lot of these women that we asked, they were all just very modest and couldn't believe that whatever they would have to share would really be of interest to anyone. That really shocked me, as well.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Yeah. We knew that the paths to professionalism for women were different than for men, but we didn't feel like that was articulated anywhere. And we just wanted to hear people's personal stories. And when we contacted people, they were like, well, do you want me to talk about my research? Or do you want me to talk about my life? Or what do you want me to do? And we did ask them if they would be willing to talk about their personal narratives or their paths, and of course, that incorporates their research. And then it was a packed room, and it was very much of interest.

Suzy Eskenazi: I know that symposium in 2018 was the most well attended symposium of the conference. So we did a good thing.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: And then you had that symposium session turned into a book.

Suzy Eskenazi: Yeah, it was almost immediately afterwards. One of our participants, Reba Rauch, she was the acquisitions editor at The Press. And so of course, she was immediately on board and said, yes. And so we just went from there almost immediately after the symposium ended. We did have a few, at least two that I can think of, that were in the symposium that did not contribute to the book, but we had another woman who contributed to the book who wasn't in the symposium.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: What are some of your most memorable interactions around the book, since it's come out?

Suzy Eskenazi: We had a pretty great virtual book signing. It came out during COVID, which was unfortunate. I thought that went really well. And then, we also were at the last Great Basin Conference in Las Vegas this past fall. And so, we were able to do a virtual book signing, which had a very long-

Dr. Nicole Herzog: No, in-person book signing.

Suzy Eskenazi: Yeah, that's what I meant. In-person. Sorry.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: With real people.

Suzy Eskenazi: It was just so fantastic. People brought their books that they'd already bought, and then we sold out at the event.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: And it’s fun just having random people approach and say, "Oh wow. I read that book, and it really meant a lot to me."

hat has also been a very cool experience, just hearing from people that you don't know, but who are reaching out to you to say, "I was at that symposium and it was just amazing," or, "I read the book and it was just amazing." And so, that part has also been super rewarding, just to have strangers reach out to you and say, "This thing you did was meaningful to me."

Suzy Eskenazi: Like you.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Yeah. I think that was one of the biggest surprises for me is, to just hear how circuitous peoples' paths were.

The places where people started from and the pit stops they made along the way, and the way that they got engaged in one thing and that took them in one direction, and then they circled back around. It's very affirming to know that there is not one straight path, that all these really successful people took all of these really interesting paths to get where they are. And that was another outcome of the book that was really special, because people did elaborate on their talks in the books, so a lot of the chapters were extended versions. And so we did get greater amount of detail in the written works that was also pretty revealing and a little window into the lives of all of these awesome women.

Vulnerability and sharing difficult experiences. Charlotte Beck's chapter in the book was for me, just one of the most powerful things I've read about persevering through harassment, through mental health issues, through all of these things that impact our lives, but that impact our careers and that people from the outside can't see. When you meet Charlotte, God, she is just the most cheerful, kind, sweet, amazing, charming, wonderful person, and you might not know that she had been through such harrowing experiences that were very hard to overcome. And so I think it's so special that she was brave enough to share that story, because I want people to read those kind of stories too, and to know that these things can happen to you and you can make it through, you can have the support that you need, and that again, you're not alone. That was just so moving to read her chapter, and I'm just so grateful to her for being willing to put her experiences into writing and be so vulnerable.

Suzy Eskenazi: Yeah. I would agree, that was a very intense chapter to write, I'm sure. And I really appreciated how vulnerable all of the women were in their chapters too. I think it took a lot for some of these women to just be able to write about themselves and not just what they do for a living. I really feel honored, that they said yes to share all of their vulnerability, and their experiences with us in a very public way. We are all better for it.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: What would you want readers or people who were at that symposium to take away from this book, from those talks, and what do you want them to do with what they've learned?

Suzy Eskenazi: I think one of the main points that I really took home was the importance of mentorship and support. And maybe that's because that's one of my personal interests, but I don't feel like anybody could have gotten to where they are without somebody pushing them to be who they could be, and recognize their talents. Even when that meant that some women had to be married to a man, to be able to go in the field, at least in all of these cases, their husbands were very supportive and provided that path for them. I would just love for this book to touch people in that way, and move them into that supportive mentoring place, so that we can help raise each other up and continue with the future generations.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: I agree. I think the mentorship for both of us was the biggest theme that stood out in all of the writings that are in the book. When Suzy and I were asking people to join us, we tried to ask people from all different sectors of work. We thought it was important to have people who worked doing private consulting, people who worked at agencies, people who did research archeology, people who worked in museums, a whole range of people doing all kinds of different work. So I think one of the really cool things that emerges from the book is to see how many ways you can be successful in this job, and how many opportunities are really out there for you. So I hope that anybody who has this idea, that feels like it's maybe out of reach or in left field or something, sees themselves somewhere in that book.

And there's just a lot of different ways to be successful, and to be happy, and to be supported. I hope that people see in the book that they can do any of those things and that also they could come from someplace that didn't feel like the right fit, especially I'm thinking of Charlotte Beck. Boy, I started out doing this thing and it was just the wrong thing. I was just on the wrong path, and I just found it within myself to change gears and to do what I was actually passionate about. And then to be wildly successful at doing that. It's very affirming to follow your gut and to pursue things that are important to you, and that maybe don't fit the mold, or the trajectory of what everybody else is doing, and that's okay.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: What would you recommend to people who are looking for mentorships, and also what would you recommend to people who are new to mentoring?

Suzy Eskenazi: I think it's really important to just ask. We often don't know that someone is looking to us as a mentor until they ask us. I know that's been true. My mentors have never been the same kind of person. It's always there's a personality trait that I see in them that really, oh, I want to know more about that. I want to know how to be a better leader. I want to be a better support to those around me. I want to be a better person for the people around me, and I'm really interested in engagement. And so how can I find those people that also have those common interests? I think throughout my whole career, I've always just tried to find the underling to just bring along with me. I think it's important that we all do that just to be better people and better anthropologists.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Yeah. I think you've got to find yourself as Suzy, who's well connected and who likes to connect other people together. Reach out to somebody who knows a lot of people in the field and say, hey, I'm interested in this. Is there somebody who might be willing to talk to me about it? A lot of people are shy. I'm not a very good reacher-outer, but if somebody comes to me, that's really exciting. And I'm really excited to talk with people and to think about ideas together, and share whatever knowledge I might have about things, which maybe isn't much. But again, find somebody that is a node, who's in the center of things and look to them to see who might they connect you with. But like Suzy said, the most important thing is reaching out . Suzy and I learned this lesson doing this project, where we were afraid to reach out to these women because we were like, no, they're too busy. They're too big for us. We can't reach out to them. And we were afraid to do that. And then we got these responses back. They were so modest and they were excited, and they were encouraging. And it was like, oh wow, that really wasn't as scary as I thought it would be at all. Nobody was like, oh, absolutely not. I'm not interested in that. That was just not the case. I think it would be very rare to reach out to anybody and have them say that. But we have this fear about reaching out to people and being vulnerable to people. And I don't know if I have any advice for how to get better at that, but maybe just know that it will probably not be terrible. It will probably end up in something really, really special.

Suzy Eskenazi: Yeah. I think what you're speaking to was true for Lorann Pendleton, who wrote the foreword to our book. We didn't know her at all. And then we found out about her and just asked. She was modest like everybody else. But then she wrote this incredible foreword that fit perfectly with the theme of the book. And when we met her in Vegas at the last conference, I was absolutely starstruck. I just looked over and she was standing next to me. And I said, oh my gosh, you wrote the foreword to our book. That's you. And it was just such a delight. Like Nicole says, you just have to expect that people will say yes. What is the worst that could happen? Nobody's ever going to, hopefully, just absolutely say no.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Will you be following up on the book in any way?

Suzy Eskenazi: We both would love to.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Yeah. It's been really fun. Kay Fowler's husband, Don, has been a really big supporter of this project. And so after the book came out, he's like, oh by the way, you guys should do this person, and oh, you should talk about this person. And he's sending us all these snippets, and tidbits, and stories. It's endless. Of course, we talk about it regularly like, okay, what are we going to do next? When are we going to get started on the next thing? And there's so much to do. It would be fun to bring more people into the fold too, because when we did this, we were sort of narrow minded. We were thinking about, let's talk to Great Basin archeologists, because that was the conference that we were at, and we both work in the Great Basin.

When we sent everything to the Press, we were talking about the vision for this project. People were like, why is this about Great Basin archeology? What are you doing here? This is a story about what it is to be an aspiring professional in America. A, it's maybe not even about archeology, but B, probably we don't need to limit ourselves to the Great Basin. And so that's kind of how it broadened in scale, because it was obvious that these are universal stories that aren't necessarily about working in a particular region. Of course, there are historical particularities about the Great Basin that make those stories different. But the theme is really, it runs throughout. The folks at the Press and the people that reviewed the book were all, this is about American archeology. This is not about Great Basin archeology. Yeah, that's true. And so now, do we need to do this bigger project?

Suzy Eskenazi: I really would like to continue on this path. It's so important.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: These are autobiographical. They're not reflections on someone's career. They're somebody telling it from their own perspective, from their own eyes. And there's something different about hearing a story that way, than about a retelling of someone's career. And I think it's kind of special because you really get a sense for who these women are when you read the stories, right? Their personalities really shine through.

It was pretty great meeting our superheroes. It was a little bit of feeling starstruck like, oh my God, I can't believe so-and-so is actually communicating with me or with us. And I can't believe they are joining us in this thing, and that they also think it's valuable. So, I think meeting all those women and just having them validate that this was a cool project, that was the biggest thing, the most exciting thing. And then of course, we developed this really amazing relationship. And after the symposium, we all went out and got drinks together, and we just talked about life, and archeology and it was this amazing experience. We're this group of friends now, and that was pretty incredible.

Suzy Eskenazi: For me, I also was starstruck for sure, but I also appreciated that my very first archeology boss was in the symposium, and she's in the book. And she's somebody who has shaped me as a professional. And there are other women in there that I've known for a long time, that are just in the trenches, they're just doing their work. And so it was just really nice to be able to shine a light on the everyday woman working in the field. And I would second what Nicole said, that we went out to have a glass of wine after the symposium, and it really was one of the highlights of my life probably. It was very, very special.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you both so much for talking with me.

Suzy Eskenazi: Thank you so much.

Dr. Nicole Herzog: Well, thank you for reaching out to us. It's been wonderful talking with you.

]]> Sharing Experiences with the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project (Episode 112) ]]> Tue, 21 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/43E47802-E685-589A-D99053D541AF2340.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-442380C7-9245-8C60-CF5E86E33FDED82E Sharing Experiences with the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project (Episode 112) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with Sophie Ziegler about the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project 1138 no full 112

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C. Cooper: My name is Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am here with…

S. Ziegler: …Sophie Ziegler, an oral historian with Louisiana Trans Oral History Project, pronouns are they, them. So excited to be here, thank you for having me.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much for joining us. So, can you tell us a bit about the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project and how it started?

S. Ziegler: So, we started in May of 2020. The pandemic was already going. So, it was two motivations; one was to fill a perceived gap in the documentation of Louisiana centered trans and gender non-conforming communities and the other motivation was the crippling isolation of the pandemic. Some of us just got really lonely. I started looking around for some sort of project to join and help out with. I assumed something like this would exist. I couldn’t find that it did, so I reached out to just a couple of friends and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about doing this. If I do, like would you want to interview, would you want to be part of this” and I got several immediate yeses right. Had people been skeptical, I wouldn’t have done it.

Simultaneously, I reached out to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center here at LSU because they do a lot of community work. And so that’s my colleague at LSU, Jen Cramer. I told her about what I was thinking about doing and she does what that center does, a lot of sort of helped me get up to speed on what oral histories are, like best practices for that. That center shares their forms right, interviewee and interviewer permission forms. We talked about what informed consent would look like and all of those things and then I just sort of ran off and started.

So, since March of 2020, we’ve had about 40 interviews, I think. That’s always going to be an inexact number because during the process, there’s always people who fall out or ask to be removed. But so, we’ve been going since then. We had an LEH, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, grant for 2020 and which we were able to do a lot of events, pay trans folks in Louisiana to do transcripts for us, pay people to do events.

So, really what we’re interested in doing is bringing in money and redistributing it to our communities. And then I got another, whatever year this is now, we got another LEH grant which we’ll start working on in January of ’22. And that’s going to allow us to do some really great things, including building a participatory map in which we can rethink the geography of Louisiana through the lens of trans joy. So, we’ll be redistributing funds to our community members around the state, asking them to record a short oral history about some place that elicited trans joy and then just take a video of that, upload it to the map and this will just be an ongoing project, which we are very excited about.

And then, we’re going to be holding a Joy-fest in probably June-ish, in which we get everyone together and we talk about trans joy, which is a reaction to just how terrible everything is all the time. We’re just going to make our own joy.

My day job is dealing with paper archives primarily and then running a team that digitizes that and then managing digital repositories. I have a sense of the infrastructure that’s needed for that and what I wanted was wanting to get around the dearth of materials that would be related to the types of people that I wanted to talk to. Also, I wanted a project that could be more or less independent and stay more or less independent.

So, we work with the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center, and they’re sort of our community partner but we’re completely independent from them and everyone else and the institutions such as Louisiana State University. So, oral histories kind of allow us to do that. We’ve been doing everything over zoom, which is not oral history best practice. It definitely wasn’t when we started. I think they’re kind of coming around because you know, what else are you going to do.

One, I just love oral histories because you get so much more unmitigated access to people. It’s such a beautiful format. It is inexhaustible too, right, because you can always go back to the same person, ask the exact same questions on a different day and always get a different perspective.

So, their life shines through them in a lens that’s always changing, it’s just so nice. It’s also just a wonderful way to connect to people and it makes a lot more sense for people who are not in the history game, who don’t really think a lot about records and leaving this type of legacy. It makes a lot more sense to say, hey, we’re just going to sit down and talk because you’re really interesting and you do really important things versus whatever it would look like to try to collect the manuscript materials related to them, right? Because most of us are just leaving behind Google Docs. And there are some really smart people figuring out how to do that, God bless them. But I didn’t want that for me. That’s really, I guess the focus from here.

C. Cooper: So, you see that it complements the archival record or the historical record by these personal stories.

S. Ziegler: Yeah, I mean complements for sure, but there’s not a lot to actually complement. So, there’s been a push recently here in Louisiana, elsewhere in the south, all over the country--it gets more attention in the south, because the people don’t expect it from us. But there’s been sort of a push for LBTQ+ collecting in archives and libraries. But I mean what that really looks like on the ground is mostly cis white gay men, cis white lesbians, mostly of a specific class during a couple of decades, right? Then you get these wonderful lesbian action pamphlets, which are just wonderful collections, but I mean those holes are just so big you can drive an archive through them.

And so, it’s just like kind of hard to think about what we could do that would work better. And I also want to say the goal of our oral history project is to, first and foremost, tell our stories to ourselves. So, we are most interested in creating the types of examples that many of us wish we had when we were younger, right. Some of us die from lack of examples. Like this is really, really important. Secondarily, we’re telling our stories for other people.

So, the process with oral histories or people doing interviews with us, we go through the whole transcription process, we get them to see the transcripts and okay everything, de-identify, etcetera anything that seems to come off wrong or people just get carried away talking shit or something like that.

And then if they’re interested after that, they can sign the paperwork and donate it to the Harry Williams Oral History Center but those are two different things.

So, they can just work with us, have their interview up on our website, maybe do a podcast with us but not everybody wants it in an official archive. That’s really important because we’re not necessarily telling it for posterity. It’s not necessarily history work.

C. Cooper: It’s for the community and preserving the community.

S. Ziegler: Yeah, yeah.

C. Cooper: And strengthening it.

S. Ziegler: I mean maybe not even preserving it, because not everybody wants it for that long. So, like this is just communicating right now. Like things have been hard, right. So like the last legislative session saw four anti-trans bills come through.

Just basically picking fights with the trans youth because they’re still one of the groups you can do that with as a politician and really rally your base without getting attacked for it.

So, it’s just a really tough time, which is why we’re focusing on trans joy. So, the number one reason for doing it is like survival, right. It’s very much like a here and now thing. With, hey wouldn’t it be nice if these stuck around forever. Cause again, like some people are just like, I don’t want to do that part.

C. Cooper: So, is there residence time of the interviews on your website for people who might not want it around forever but just for the now?

S. Ziegler: Do you mean like a sunset?

C. Cooper: Yeah.

S. Ziegler: Oh, ah, no. We have at least two people who said “I will probably contact you soon to take it down.” So, there’s not like anything set. I get the sense if they have life plans such that there’ll be a time when they really don’t want that up.

C. Cooper: Okay.

S. Ziegler: That has all sorts of practical ramifications for how we deal with this. So, it’s on the website, it’s totally accessible right now, but that means we have to have conversations with them about the Wayback Machine capturing that. People reach out like the Transgender Digital Archive; the big online Transgender Digital Archive would like to repurpose the oral histories and like also have them as part of their materials, you can search and find them on their site, which I love, but we can’t just do it as a blank slate. We have to deal with each individual oral history separately because the intentions are different.

C. Cooper: Could you walk us through some of the important terms that folks may not be as aware of, and how they’re used--or vary in use--in the trans and queer communities?

S. Ziegler: Yeah, you know, I’ve done all the interviews so far. I’ve been trying to go out of my way to define as many terms as possible. Most of what people are likely to find right now I think, are pretty understandable. So maybe some people trip over the word cis, which is just meaning somebody who’s not trans. There are various sex acts, which we’ll just leave it for people’s imagination at this point.

But for the most part there’s not a whole lot. There’s a lot of identities that are shifting, and our vocabularies for them are shifting, right. So, like gender queer, obviously the non-binary and the binary woman, a lot of that type of thing.

And so, one of the decisions we have to make is whether or not to have a glossary on the website and we opted to not. One because a glossary for a group of words that change so often--it’s sort of a big undertaking. But also secondly, because we had to make the decision that we’re not doing Trans 101. There are plenty of resources out there and because again, if you think about who our community is, that’s just not energy that that makes no sense to expend on that. But I think the identity is, because we do ask people how they identify currently during the day that we’re targeting.

C. Cooper: Right.

S. Ziegler: We just have a lot of wonderful things. Most of the pronouns are what you’d expect to hear, he/she, they/them but you know pronouns shift also.

I guess if anything it wouldn’t be specific vocabularies. It might be... I wonder if one of the challenges, so some people use any pronouns respectfully, so, you can have a single story about one individual, and they have multiple pronouns throughout, which I think is lovely personally, but I could where that might be a little hard to follow if you’re not used to it, but we do bracket notes and stuff like that, we try to make it easy.

C. Cooper: And each individual may define the terms for themselves differently.

S. Ziegler: Oh, yes.

C. Cooper: Do you get into that a bit when you talk to people?

S. Ziegler: It really depends. So, it’s tricky, right. So, this is an identity-based project. But we’re always concerned if you’ve got a trans person who’s also another thing they’re like, “hey, that trans librarian” so, it’s always a sort of tension. It depends on whether or not they want to talk about it. Some people… like we do “coming out” stories sometimes, we do like “gender journey” stories sometimes, but some people just aren’t that into talking about that. They’re much more interested in talking about their community work that they do for instance. Which totally makes sense, so really it just depends.

C. Cooper: So, can you share a bit about what the interview process is like and how you develop the questions and how the conversations may go.

S. Ziegler: We have a standard form on the website, so that’s step one where we get the names and the pronouns that they want to use for this project. And then we ask them a question on that form: “What does being trans Louisiana mean to you?” And it’s really the answer to that question that leads to a lot of the conversation that we have. Especially on the earlier interviews, I would just read their answers back to them and then just ask questions about it. Like, oh you know you said this and of course by then they don’t remember.

I do light research on folks, especially people who are like very active. You know I would just build sort-of not specific questions but like broad ideas that we could talk about. So, like for instance if they’re very active in an organization like reproductive justice for instance, or prison abolition, we might be to talk about that and just ask them about that and ask them about how they’re relationship to power influences their choice of work and how it is that they work.

Most of the interviews we’ve done so far is sort of full-life interviews, so we do actually start off with where they were born. What it was like growing up there if they want to talk about that. The requirement to participate is that you lived in Louisiana at some point. So, it’s geographically constrained, temporarily rather open and I did that on purpose. I’ve interviewed people in Virginia and in other states. And I did that on purpose because we’re very interested in like what their perspective of differences are too right? So what it looks like in Virginia versus what you did in Louisiana. Because we’re just trying to paint a large picture of how their life is, what turns their life has taken, given their existence in Louisiana.

But you know, based on their answers, you know the questions or topics are always changing. I leave it open. Generally, I end with a question about “If you were to donate this and then it becomes like part of the “official history” of Louisiana and that is like in the archives, somebody runs across it in like 30 or 40 years, what would you like that person to know about what is like living your life here, now.” And so, we generally end on a question like that in which people get like a final opportunity for people to say anything that hadn’t come up.

C. Cooper: So, what has been the most rewarding part of this project for you?

S. Ziegler: So, I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of really wonderful people that I don’t think I would have met before or at least not as quickly. So many phenomenal people, so that’s really rewarding. This is my first oral history project. I feel like having spent time doing oral histories, I now spend a lot of time listening to other oral history projects, podcasts for that, books based on those. I feel like I’ve become a much better listener, I’ve be come a lot more empathetic. It’s just a lot easier to get outside of yourself, especially when you’re re-listening for these, for transcript purposes and you know, you have the headphones on and it’s just you and that person. It’s rather intimate. So all of that’s very rewarding.

And then, I’m particularly proud of the fact that we are able to bring in funds through the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities who has funded us twice so far, through a Patreon account, through just donors; and we take all this money, we’re not an entity, we’re not an LLC or non-profit, but we just take all this money, and we just give it back out to all the communities here. So, either to have them do panels, like we can pay everybody for that. With our podcast, we just finished the first season, it was very short but I’m not good at podcasts. It was grueling. Every episode featured a trans artists from here in Louisiana, so we were able to pay them. There’s this upcoming project we’re going to be paying the participants for the maps.

So yeah, it’s really good. So that’s really rewarding because it’s just an immediate, actual, tangible good.

C. Cooper: So, you mentioned that this project was kind of born out of the pandemic…

S. Ziegler: …Yes.

C. Cooper: Where do you see it going forward?

S. Ziegler: I don’t know how long it’s going to go and that’s because of the way that it’s been formulated so far is it’s me in my living room with a Zoom account. We’ve done a lot of amazing things and with again with wonderful people. But I’m white, I’m fortyish and you know with luck, middle class-ish right, so most of the people that I have contact with are more or less the same. So, most of the people I’ve interviewed are white, a lot of trans femes.

So, I’ve been making a lot of effort to work with other projects that focus specifically on Black and Brown communities. So, this most recent project I’ve got funding for from LEH is a joint project with Last Call NOLA, which is a long going oral history project built originally on the fading dike bars scene in New Orleans and so they were really focusing on that and they are very multi racial, like intentionally multi racial, intentionally storytelling focused.

So, we’re working very closely with my colleague Nathalie Nia Foulk from that project. So, I think what I would really prefer, oh, and I’ve talked to a lot of other people who want to do interviews when we can do them in person. But I would like to de-center myself in the sense that like we just sort of dissolve the center of LaTOHP, which is currently again, me in my living room. Build capacity so that people can go around like this, like what you’re doing now and interview the elders that are important to them and then we can centralize in whatever makes sense, the interviews for access.

So, this was the model that the New York Trans project did for a while. I think they might be re-thinking it now but the types of interviews you get would be very different; the questions asked are very different for both good and challenging as that might be. Well, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be doing these sort of full life interviews.

We’re doing another series currently based on trans resistance to the anti-trans bills from last season so, we’re talking with a bunch of folks that we know who are really active in building resistance to that and building community around coming out for the protests and calling lawmakers and organizing around that.

That’s one direction we’re going and again, we’re working with a lot of different people so it’s not just the LaTOHP project. We’ll see what happens. I’m not that interested in making sure LaTOHP survives. I’m much more interested in taking advantage of the connections that that enabled to be able to do something potentially more impactful in the future.

In the way that a lot of my interviewees--and this is always so beautiful--so many people I’ve spoken with, at the end of our interview, will say something along the lines of, “interviews like this often make it seem really bleak. And we know that there’s a cultural narrative around transness that’s tragic. But the amount of joy and resilience among the community is just really empowering.”

And so, for everybody who is donating these for long term preservation, these interviews for LaTOHP, that’s really something that I want to shine through, right. So again, we’re doing this for those of us alive right now in Louisiana and those of us who are about, you know, currently coming and out and having a really hard time here in the deep south. Secondarily, we’re doing it for the future. To have a source of non-tragic narrative I think is a really beautiful thing and I’ll leave it with that.

C. Cooper: So if anyone is interested in reaching out to you…

S. Ziegler: … Yes, absolutely you can find us at LouisianaTransOralHistory.org is our website. We’re on Facebook and Twitter…and Instagram, yes, yes, we are. And we’ll have lot to advertise during 2022 and I hope people participate and reach out with questions.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.

S. Ziegler: Thank you for this, this is great.

]]> Stories from the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum (Episode 111) ]]> Thu, 16 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/4B5044B3-A153-7BA6-B5DF26F1EC8C41F9.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-4B56B913-0A71-FFC2-B9A3E335097A176F Stories from the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum (Episode 111) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with leaders of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum about the stories shared and made there. 1162 no full 111

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Catherine Cooper: I'm Catherine Cooper. I am here with...

Gilory Chow: Gilroy Chow. I'm currently The President of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, retired Engineer.

Frieda Quon: I'm Frieda Quon. I'm The Vice President of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum. And I'm retired Librarian.

Carolyn Chan: I'm Carolyn Chan. I was born in raised in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm an elder among the group now and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have been a Classroom teacher.

Randy Kwan: I'm Randy Kwan and I teach at Hines community college in Pearl, Mississippi, and I teach Film and TV Production.

Emily Jones: I'm Emily Jones, I'm the Archivist and Curator for The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum.

Gilory Chow: There are many stories to be told, and there are many ways to tell it, to do it with an oral history, with a video, with pictures, written. Just so many different ways to archive and capture the information and to share it.

Carolyn Chan: And I think that's what we need more and more of today, is for people to come to a museum such as The Chinese Heritage Museum in Mississippi. See that history and understand that we all have had to go through struggles. We've had to overcome a lot of discrimination, and that we have to understand how each of us have a history that certainly deserves respect, but we also need to respect everybody else's history and work together to make this a better country.

Randy Kwan: What’s really actually helped that blossom has been COVID, because people have been at home, looking for things to do, and they've actually discovered more, I would say there's a greater awareness of the various cultures and the struggles that all the cultures have had to go through. And I really think that's actually kind of helped. I've seen that with my students a little bit, much more sensitivity towards various cultures now.

Emily Jones: One that really has stuck with me since it happened, was when we were up there. I think it was November, when Madeline and your son and his family came.

Frieda Quon: Shannon from Tokyo.

Emily Jones: And they were on the third floor. And you were standing in front of the picture of your dad as a young one. And you were telling Shannon and his two children, the story of how your dad had come as a paper son and how one day your name was this, and then it was a different thing. And what that meant for your dad to admit that and record it officially and all that. And just to watch Shannon realize how close he was to what the 1882 exclusion laws had done.

Frieda Quon: Right.

Emily Jones: As a national thing, it had an effect on him. And just watching you tell your son that.

Frieda Quon: Okay. All right, because I have grown up sons and... one is 50 something. And so this son is like 40 something. He wanted to bring his children, Madeline, who is 20, and Jackson who's 15, I guess. It was the first time. He wanted to bring them to Mississippi. We don't tell our children... So I grew up with... Because my dad was a paper son. So I'm a paper daughter. So half my life, I was Frieda Pang. And then it was not until...

Emily Jones: You were in school, right?

Frieda Quon: Oh yeah. And so then we can change our name and

Gilory Chow: He took their real name,

Frieda Quon: Real name back. And so...

Gilory Chow: Rather the paper name-

Frieda Quon: Some people did it, and then others were scared. I mean, to this day they think they're going to get deported.

Gilory Chow: Because it happens.

Emily Jones: Under today's laws, looking at what paper son created, you would say that there are illegal aliens, but that's the way the system worked in order to come to America. Because the law had created a system that was the natural reaction

Gilory Chow: Because of the end of the transcontinental railroad, you had all these Chinese on the west coast and the west coast said, we need to stop these because they're taking our jobs away. And so the 1882 exclusion act said that, 'oh, they can come, we'll allow 105 families." The only time an ethnic race was...

Frieda Quon: Limited.

Emily Jones: Excluded.

Gilory Chow: Excluded from immigrating to the United States. You had unlimited Irish, unlimited Germans, unlimited Europeans, unlimited Asians, as long as they weren't Chinese,

Emily Jones: Right.

Gilory Chow: Chinese were excluded the only time. And it wasn't until 1942, into the war.

Emily Jones: 43 finally.

Gilory Chow: That the Magnuson act corrected that wrong, to not exclude. But not only men in 1882, but a couple of years later, the women were excluded. And so the only group that was excluded. So therefore the only way you could come in was if you were a paper son or a merchant. And so my birth certificate says, my dad was a merchant and I said, "what is a merchant in 1940?" But it was a class that could immigrate legally. And so even though he was a teenager, he was a merchant. Also in 1906 in the earthquake. If you were here by birth—“so what year were you born?” “1906.” “Where's your birth certificate?” "Oh the earthquake got it."

Emily Jones: Yep.

Gilory Chow: So I don't care how old you were. You were born in 1906.

Emily Jones: Yeah.

Gilory Chow: Would be a way of getting in. And so we could look at it now as they were being clever, but that's how bad things were in China with war, famine, economic hardship. There was no place for them at home to...

Emily Jones: To survive yeah.

Gilory Chow: To actually survive.

Emily Jones: And so paper sons, and paper daughters was a thing that happened, but it wasn't just a thing that once happened, it created Frieda.

Frieda Quon: I mean it affected many families.

Emily Jones: And if your dad hadn't done what he did at the time that he did it, you could still be a paper child, if he didn't go the agent up in Memphis and do the things that you had to do to prove that you were worthy of being a citizen, even though you had fought in war. And could you please, sir, have your ancestral name back. He did that. So you married as Frieda Su and not Freida Pang to and...

Gilory Chow: And then she's able to share it with her children.

Emily Jones: Yeah.

Carolyn Chan: The Gong Lums, their daughters, Martha and Berda, they were in the schools in Rochdale, Mississippi at the white school, and they were told after they'd been going to school there that they would have to leave because they were not white.

Randy Kwan: This was in the '30s correct?

Carolyn Chan: No 1924, 1924 is when they filed it. And it went through the Mississippi courts, local courts or the county court. Then the people there, they said, well, no, they're neither white nor black. So they cannot go to school here. They already were enrolled, but they dismissed them for that day. But then Gong Lum decided to hire lawyer and file a case. And the case was decided that they were not white, so they could not go to that school. And there really was no place for them to go. They did not want to go to the black school, and of course some people say, well, they didn't really make a step toward integration. But the way I look at it is they wanted to have the best education for their children. This case went all the way to the Supreme court.

Randy Kwan: Yeah. And of course this was before Brown versus Board of Education-

Carolyn Chan: It's actually recognized as a civil rights case. This is really interesting because when I was teaching in Old Town Elementary school in Albuquerque, one of my coworkers was Rudy Sanchez and he's Hispanic. And he was taking courses on Education for his master's degree. And he actually asked me, he says, “You're from Mississippi originally, do you know anything about the Gong Lum case?” And I said, well, that's my uncle and my aunt, and he said, “Well, you don't realize how important that case is. It's a landmark case.” And I said, oh, okay. That also helped motivate me to become involved politically and advocate.

Carolyn Chan: In our neighborhood, we did have a really multiracial and multi-ethnic neighborhood. We had Jewish people, Lebanese people, African Americans that were our customers, Native Americans and Mexican customers in our particular neighborhood because our store was close to the levy. And we had during the time that I was a young person in the store, I grew up there from the time I was born.

Carolyn Chan: I was actually born in the living quarters of the store; I’m the first of the six children that are living in our family. And we got along with everybody, and we did have to go to the one room segregated at school at the time that I was going, until 1947, after World War II was over, and Chinese Americans had served in World War II. We were viewed as being patriotic, and we were then allowed to go to school with white children. Unfortunately, the time that I was growing up… well, actually when I graduated from college, then we were not able to teach in the white schools in Mississippi. So that was one of the reasons I left. Not only that, but I fell in love with my husband. We moved to New Mexico so...

Gilory Chow: I was born on a farm at Cleveland crossing and we had a store and I've heard stories of the gristmill where people would bring their corn and you'd always grind, but you'd never clean up real well until after they left, because you'd get to keep the leftovers. And that was part of it, people were happy to get their corn grounded into meal in a country store.

Gilory Chow: That's a picture. So Freida's husband is professor at Delta State Accounting, his parents had a grocery store. My parents had a grocery store, I've got a degree, my wife's got a degree. Our children have multiple degrees. And so that story's repeated time and time and time again of the hard work that they put in. And again, the values, the work ethic has carried over, and they were role models for us. They didn't realize it. We were role models for our children. We didn't realize it. But now we're being told that you were role models. We just lived life. And we did what our parents did just in a different way.

Emily Jones: Your grandparents and your parents left everything in China.

Gilory Chow: Yes.

Emily Jones: And gave all of that up. And sometimes even your ancestral identity because of the 1882 exclusion law. That's what was given up, and willingly, to come over here, to do what was most available, which was become merchants and do that. And so what I see from the outside looking in, is that's the spirit they pass on is not that I expect you to be the most brilliant person in the room, but you do what you have to do, in order to be able to make the next step up possible for the next generation, whatever it is.

Gilory Chow: Yes That's a wonderful analogy because things were hard in China. We didn't ask the question of why, and they might have been able to say why, because why did Dad come over into New Orleans as a young teenager? Because things were so hard at home. I can't imagine sending my son to a far and distant land. He probably didn't even have a suitcase.

Frieda Quon: They came as teenagers. My dad came as a teenager.

Gilory Chow: And to go by themselves and then to spend a year in New Orleans. When we were down at the Amistad Center at Tulane, Sally and I found records of my dad, Joe TM, as a student. And I tell the story, he must have been a good student because he was P: present every day, for a year. And that's the extent of his education: that year, he spent at the Presbyterian church school in New Orleans.

Emily Jones: Baldwin and his brother, Edwin, had never been outside of California. They were born there. And they thought because of Charles, their dad, coming to America, when he was a teenager, that they must be the first American born Chinese in their line. But their dad, he had a picture of the headstone of his dad and his granddad. And it was in English. And so Baldwin just asked him one day, he was like, "so if it's in English, where is it?" And Charles said, “well, it's in Mississippi.” And that's all they had to go on. Edwin called the city hall and asked, “Does anybody know anything about a Chinese grocery store that was in the Delta, somewhere around Cleveland? We don't know the name of the store, but my dad's dad and his granddad died there and they're buried there, and we want to know more about that.”

Emily Jones: We don't actually archive things under people who die and leave stores. So I thought, good luck, but come on, and sent emails out to people. I remember the board, that's the greatest part about the board is they're this living, breathing institutional memory of relatives who were connected and how and why and all this kind of thing. So when I got a question like that, I sent it out to everybody I could think of. And you know, we got a couple of leads, some thoughts and stuff, but they decided to come to Cleveland, just hoping that somebody might know something. Somehow we knew a lot more than we thought we did.

Frieda Quon: So we have this Baldwin, the grandson. And so he brings his father and they don't know what they're going to find. The father didn't have any memory, he was one, so he really didn't have any memory at all of his real father, just knew that he had come to Mississippi. And so the whole family came to visit the Museum. They realized the family store was in Pace, which is just a little bitty town down the road. And so they come in and they're seeing the exhibits and everything. And so Charles who's, the father said something about his father's name is KC Lou. And he kept saying, my father's name is KC Lou. And Emily over here, in her mind, "she said, KC Lou." And she said just a minute, and she goes into her little store room and she pulls out this Bible and it was KC Lou's Bible that he had gotten for graduation. How did you remember that?

Emily Jones: I don't know. I mean, literally I think everything had to be standing right there for it to click finally. But yeah, it was one of those days where I was just really glad to have come to work. But when the Bible came out, the collection that it had come from was a totally different family, and that's how we realized. “Okay. Well, if that, if KC lose Bible is in the Dunn family collection, you need to talk to the Dunn family. And that's when the floodgate broke open-

Gilory Chow: The interesting thing about the Bible, Charles Lou is a Christian. When he realized that his father had a Bible, he thought in his mind that his father is a Christian. And so as a Christian, he knew that he had a heavenly father and he knew that his father knew the heavenly father, because he had a Bible. And he knew that he would meet his father in heaven someday because of that Bible and that tie. But then the Dunn family had acquired the Bible because it was in the store when the grandfather passed away. And so the Bible was in the possession of Dunn family. And then the Dunn family made the connection. The Dunn family had acquired their store in Pace from Baldwin and Edwin's grandfather. So there's the connection. Kevin Bacon talks about six degrees of removals from everybody. In Mississippi it's about two or three, that you will know somebody that knows somebody.

Emily Jones: Charles learned of his dad from all the people who knew him. It's a little outside of yourself feeling, to watch a man learn about his own father from everybody else who knew him best. You just think in your family pod, you are going to know your family better. But because of the situation, because of 1882, and because rules forbade people from coming and going, and the freedom, Charles never knew his father. But all these other people have opened up every memory bank they can think of and have told him and let him know his father now. And like Gilroy said, that's why he cries when he holds the Bible. He knows...

Frieda Quon: Because thought he was just abandoned orphan.

Gilory Chow: But he found out why. One of the things Baldwin found was a letter. It's in the Dunn family, and it was from...

Emily Jones: KC wrote it to Mr. Dunn.

Frieda Quon: Okay.

Gilory Chow: And he must have dictated because it was typed; talks about how much he missed his family. And so Charles was able to hear, see with his own eyes, in his father's hand that how much he loved and missed his family.

Catherine Cooper: Thank You so much for talking to us.

Carolyn Chan: Nice to talk with you too, Catherine.

Randy Kwan: Same here.

Gilory Chow: Thanks for coming.

]]> Creating the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum (Episode 110) ]]> Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/7524E356-C843-666A-1A7697756B611E04.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-7525B3A0-D7D9-AE27-EA69B07DFE76F662 Creating the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum (Episode 110) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper speaks with board members of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum in Cleveland, Mississippi about the creation, purpose and growth of the museum. 874 no full 110

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TRANSCRIPT:

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This is the Preservation Technology Podcast, bringing innovation to preservation. The Preservation Technology Podcast is a production of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a unit of the National Park Service.

Catherine Cooper: I'm Catherine Cooper. I am here with…

Gilroy Chao: Gilroy Chow. I'm currently the president of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, retired engineer.

Frieda Quon: I'm Frieda Quon. I'm the vice president of The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum, and I'm a retired librarian.

Carolyn Chan: I'm Carolyn Chan. I was born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi. I'm an elder among the group now, and I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I have been a classroom teacher.

Randy Kwan: I'm Randy Kwan and I teach at Hinds Community College in Pearl, Mississippi, and I teach film and TV production.

Emily Jones: I'm Emily Jones. I'm the archivist and the curator for the Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum.

Gilroy Chao: As a museum, Delta State University, and the City of Cleveland, we're able to make available things that reflect the heritage that the Mississippi Delta Chinese have shared for, we think over 150 years, their presence has been here in the Mississippi Delta. Sometimes, with the larger population, and currently saying that there are probably about 500 Mississippi Delta Chinese now, that are remaining or have come in since. But, we're really trying to highlight the history and the culture of the Mississippi Delta Chinese.

Randy Kwan: There's not much known outside of Mississippi on our heritage in the area. So, we basically wanted to preserve our lifestyle and make people more aware of it.

Carolyn Chan: The Mississippi Delta Chinese Heritage Museum is a place to gather the history, and the artifacts that tell the story of the Chinese migration to the state of Mississippi, how they were accepted, maybe in a certain way, a limited way, as they fulfilled the need of providing a place for African Americans to come and shop for their groceries, during the reconstruction period. A place that they felt comfortable with. And, of course, we were restricted as to where we could operate and even immigrate, to the United States. And, only as merchants could we come, the early settlers. And, that was a way that they were able to come to Mississippi.

Gilroy Chao: There was a time when there were Chinese grocery stores across the entire Mississippi Delta. When we say the Mississippi Delta, we're talking about from Memphis to Vicksburg, from the Mississippi river over to the hills of Mississippi. We have actual documented history of grocery stores in each of the Delta towns. And, we talk about Clarksdale having over 25 stores, Greenville having over 50 stores, Cleveland 30 plus stores, and in small towns like Ruleville and Marks, Yazoo City, Chinese grocery stores existing. Some of them side by side, sometimes across the street from one another. And so, we are trying to capture and preserve that heritage of the families, of what they did and how they persevered and worked, overcame obstacles, personal, financial, even within the community, sometimes. That they not only existed, but they thrived.

Emily Jones: Well, I think if we're talking about origin story, just a little bit deeper into that, my perception of it was, first of all, as a grad student. I had gone to Frieda's husband, John Paul Quon, and he had told me then, back what, like in 1999, that he had this idea to create a Chinese heritage museum or a Mississippi Delta Chinese Museum, but it was supposed to be in Greenville. And then, when I came back to work here at Delta State, Frieda and I got to be really good friends. Thanks, Frieda.

Frieda Quon: That's how it started.

Emily Jones: And then, when John Paul Quon passed, it was time.

Frieda Quon: We were so busy, I guess, just living our lives. You know, our parents were here, but we regretfully didn't ask them all the questions that we wish we had. And so, it finally came to a time, and my husband was still alive then, and he realized it. And, he got a grant with Dr. Thornell, who was—

Emily Jones: Provost

Frieda Quon: John got this humanities grant and went about the Delta and interviewed. I mean, this was the nucleus of the interviews that we have that kind of started the museum. And, it was true that initially, everybody thought, oh, we need to put this museum in Greenville, because that's like the metropolis back then. So, that was the thought for a long time.

Frieda Quon: So, anyway, they gathered those interviews. John passed away in 2006, and then I think it was around 2009 or 10, that those of us who remained in the Delta realized, if we're going to do a museum, we need to get together and do this. We met actually up here in the archives. Emily and-

Gilroy Chao: And, everybody shared the vision at the same time. We're actually second generation, because we consider our parents first generation, or grandparents first generation. But, realizing that unless somebody went out and captured this information now, that it would be another layer of information lost. And so, it came together at the right time and had the right skill sets of law, art, architecture. We had the right people in place and we're happy to see them. You got to see that a little bit this morning, as they interact and play that, you know, that's what it takes. It takes a large number of people with different skills and different personalities, to come together and enjoy doing the things that we're doing.

Emily Jones: Yep.

Frieda Quon: And then, as far as setting up the museum, I can remember Emily was calling for things. She would have brochures. Okay. If you have this, this, this, you know, and people, like I said, are thinking of, we need to bring museum quality things. So, we learned from Emily that it can be whatever that's in your daily living. So, we ended up bringing our kitchen table or those apple crates, that my dad, these were boxes that fruit came in and those became my chairs and-

Gilroy Chao: Or Jerome's sculptures.

Frieda Quon: Oh, the art.

Gilroy Chao: The art. That is so unique. It's laminated apple crate ends.

Emily Jones: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gilroy Chao: And, then he turned them into art figures. How did you learn that? Well, he actually shaped the sausage.

Frieda Quon: Right. He started out shaping pork sausage, and made that into a pig.

Emily Jones: Okay. And see, I thought everybody always had that at their grocery stores. Because, I grew up in Greenville.

Gilroy Chao: And, saw that.

Emily Jones: And, saw that at everybody's deli counter. I thought everybody did that.

Gilroy Chao: You wrap meat.

Emily Jones: Yeah, you make the meat into a face. Now, it sounds weird. But,

Gilroy Chao: But, it worked. The apple crate in the museum, is the apple crate you see, Frieda as a young girl, sitting on, because that was the furniture of the day. And, she didn't think anything of it. I mean, that's where she sat. And now, if you go to Frieda's home, you'll see some fine furniture.

Frieda Quon: We actually bought those chairs. I mean, we grew up poor, but we didn't know it. You know, I mean we had shelter. We had love. We went to church. Went to school, and we worked alongside our parents. Obviously, maybe didn't have a fine car or anything. But, we had all our basic needs and, I don't know, I mean, we never felt deprived.

Carolyn Chan: We need to talk about the history of people and how they get along with each other. And, that's the reason why I got involved at the museum in Mississippi, and with the Chinese American Citizens Alliance. It's a national organization. So, I've been involved with people who were involved with the Chinese American Museum, in Los Angeles, and also, going to the Smithsonian and some of the museums, because of the advocacy trips that we were involved in, in DC. I was exposed to a lot of Chinese culture and felt that our history is very unique in Mississippi, among the Chinese Americans. So, that I came before we actually got our charter for the Mississippi CACA, Chinese American Citizens Alliance, chartered in Mississippi.

Carolyn Chan: We brought an exhibit of what we were doing in Albuquerque. And, it was just sort of a little cardboard exhibit about the history of the Chinese in New Mexico, and in Albuquerque. And so, we come to the meetings to try to help the Mississippi organization get started. And, we actually encouraged them to start talking about having a museum in Mississippi. I think we really wanted it in Greenville, but it turned out it was not the best place to have it. And, I agree now that the best place is in Cleveland, because it is affiliated with the University.

Randy Kwan: For me, I was actually involved with the CACA in Los Angeles. Of course, originally from Mississippi, moved out there in ‘93 or ‘92, and got involved with the CACA out there. And, in 2003, I moved back here. And, through involvement with the CACA out there, Aunt Carolyn and my mom, we basically had created a CACA organization here, or charter here. And then, that eventually led to the involvement with the museum.

Catherine Cooper: What are your hopes for the museum going forward?

Emily Jones: First of all, can I just frame this with, we do not have an official five, ten or fifteen year strategic plan.

Gilroy Chao: Yet.

Emily Jones: We've been talking about making one happen since the board put together. And, I will say, a plan is always good, but being open and flexible to whatever comes through the door, has really worked for us.

Randy Kwan: Hopefully, that the museum will flourish. Through various events that have been on TV and documentaries that have been covering the Mississippi Chinese, I think there's a greater awareness of it. And, it seems to be a greater interest in our lifestyle and our history, which is always great to see. I just hope it keeps growing.

Carolyn Chan: I agree with you. And then, the things that I've seen that's been happening is that, people are now taking their own children and their grandchildren back so they can see, how did my grandma and my grandpa go through all of this? What did they do? What did they contribute? And, they have a respect for what their grandparents and their forebears went through. And, I think that also, people who are not Asian American come, and they cannot believe how we survived this. What did you do to, we had to go through this and we have a respect for you for what you've gone through.

Gilroy Chao: We love the idea that we partnered with Delta State, and with the City. So, that sustainability is always a question mark. We have struggled raising funds. We're pretty good right now. We are always looking to improve and add to the archives and the exhibits. But, sustainable is a goal. Improvement is a goal. There's nothing wrong with what we have, but you can always add to the story. And, the current generation, probably need to talk about that. Some of the descendants and our children and grandchildren.

Emily Jones: I would say, as a board, we are reactionary and try to do our best to field the requests for access to the information. If we were proactive, we would probably give people stuff that they don't want to know, yet. Yeah.

Gilroy Chao: Yeah, yeah. That's a good word, that we are reactive, but enough requests come in that it keeps us very busy.

Emily Jones: I'm very proud of the board. I don't really know how to run a board, but they're very good.

Frieda Quon: And, they're everywhere. They're in Hawaii. They're in New Mexico. Both coasts.

Emily Jones: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Gilroy Chao: Texas, Gary in Virginia.

Emily Jones: And, the local people who can put their feet on the ground here, do.

Gilroy Chao: Susan, Harry,-

Emily Jones: Not often do you see a board that will put the sweat equity in. What I do know of boards is that boards raise money and they advocate on behalf of whatever they represent. This board actually does the work, the heavy lifting, going out and talking to each other and promoting the museum. An effort, a homecoming, a reunion. We don't have a publicity campaign, or a communications program or anything like that. It's word of mouth. It gets things out.

Gilroy Chao: It works. It's working.

Emily Jones: Yeah. I'm very proud of what we have achieved. And, as long as we all keep working together, I think we've got a good feature.

Catherine Cooper: Yeah.

Gilroy Chao: Yeah. The long term plan is, don't let anybody move.

Frieda Quon: If you do, you have to go find us a replacement, huh?

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking to us.

Carolyn Chan: Nice to talk with you too, Catherine.

Randy Kwan: Same here.

Gilroy Chao: Thanks for coming.

This was a presentation of the Preservation Technology Podcast, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. For more podcasts like this one, please visit our website.

]]> Expanding the Louisiana Digital Library Collections with the Y’ALL Award (Episode 109) ]]> Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/8DF8CAA7-C099-14B2-44A03CF577621C7C.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-8E2AF4D1-AC39-3A53-FA9C0DF5FEB1BAEC Expanding the Louisiana Digital Library Collections with the Y’ALL Award (Episode 109) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Sophie Ziegler and Leah Duncan at the Louisiana State University Library about their work on the Y'ALL initiative to increase the diversity of the Louisiana Digital Library holdings. 782 no full 109

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This is the Preservation Technology Podcast, bringing innovation to preservation. The Preservation Technology Podcast is a production of the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a unit of the National Park Service.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: My name’s Dr. Catherine Cooper, I am here with…

Sophie Ziegler: Sophie Ziegler, Head of Visual Programs and Services at LSU libraries.

Leah Duncan: And I’m Leah Duncan, I’m the Digital Collections Librarian at LSU Libraries.

Sophie Ziegler: So, what we want to talk about today is the Y’ALL Award is what we call it and this is an opportunity for LSU Libraries to help smaller cultural heritage institutions around the state have their materials digitized and uploaded to the Louisiana Digital Library.

For a bit of background, the Louisiana Digital library is our state’s front door to our digital cultural heritage. We are the technical home here at LSU, but it’s a collaborative effort between LSU libraries and right now, about 30 other institutions throughout the state.

So, we have archives, and museums and libraries, government repositories, religious collections, etcetera. We work on joint projects, and we have a really good time, and what we’re trying to do with the Y’ALL Award is to make sure it’s as geographically and content diverse as possible within the LDL.

The Y’ALL Award is an acronym for the You Are Louisiana’s Legacy.

Leah Duncan: That is correct…

Sophie Ziegler: …that is correct, we are proud of that. Thank you for asking.

Leah Duncan: There was a lot of worse acronyms that came up as ideas for this Y’ALL Award name. I think I remember the CRAW--the Crawfish Award, which was going to be Creating something…archival materials, I don’t remember but Y’ALL is better.

Sophie Ziegler: So, we got the Y’ALL Award. It’s an opportunity for cultural heritage institutions around the state of Louisiana to apply to have one of two options: the first being the Mobile Digitization Lab in which folks here from LSU Libraries, we will pack up our digitization equipment, including flatbed scanners and overhead cameras and lighting apparatus and drive over to a host institution and digitize a selection of materials that is identified by the host institution.

The second option is what we call the Open Digitization Lab, where we invite members of other institutions to come and use our digitization space here at LSU libraries.

And the idea with both of these is that LSU has the staff and the equipment to do digitization that we know most other places don’t that we want to deal with, so we are looking for opportunities to share it.

Leah Duncan: Theoretically what I like especially about the Y’ALL Award is that it’s usually larger and more well-funded institutions that have the expertise and technology to be able to create these digital collections, but there are a lot of valuable historic materials held by these smaller cultural heritage institutions, and of course they should keep holding them. Right. So, being able to have a way to present these materials and provide them a way to preserve them digitally is something I’m really proud of.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: When did the Y’ALL project start and what is the duration or how do you see it progressing from here?

Sophie Ziegler: It started right before the pandemic…

Leah Duncan: …oh yeah.

Sophie Ziegler: …yes, as a lot of these things do, it took a while to get the paperwork in order, it took a while to get all the stakeholders on board. We were relying on our neighbors and colleagues from across the country to help us. We spent a lot of time talking with people from the Mississippi Digital Library, who do very similar things with some key differences. And they were very kind enough to show us how they set their project up and all the paperwork that they have etcetera. We talked to people at Georgia Homeplace who does a variation of this, so we were able to rely on them a lot.

And then we did our first pilot of the Mobile Digitization Lab in November of 2019. We got their stuff up online where you can see it now. It was from the Jeanerette Museum in beautiful Jeanerette, Louisiana. It’s up in the Louisiana Digital Library now and then of course, Covid hit so we haven’t done anything since then.

The application remains open. We do have our next project lined up with the River Road African American Museum in Donaldsonville, Louisiana. We’re trying to be very slow to make sure everybody is comfortable with the level of personal interaction that this type of thing takes.

To the future, I feel like all that’s left now is to really smooth out the edges. So, the pilot project allowed us to understand what it takes to get material to a host institution, what it looks like to have our staff in hotels etcetera, local enough that they can get back to the site institution every day at a reasonable time. And we get a lot of those logistics done, it’s going to be tweaked as needed with every new opportunity. But moving forward, we just hope to make it routine.

So, moving forward what we want to do is think about how to de-center LSU from being the center. Right now, this is an LSU project. It is all LSU people going out. It’s mostly LSU people evaluating applications, but the LDL just has again, almost 30 members, so what we really would like to do is think about dividing up the state geographically so that LSU doesn’t necessarily have to drive. For instance, in Natchitoches, we could rely on a member institution closer.

And that’s really what we’re hoping to do. We don’t know what that will look like, whether or not that will look like us investing, us being the LDL community, investing in digitization shops scattered around, whether or not this would like one central digitization lab set up that we can drive around. But that’s our hope is to really bring in more people, to make it more collaborative.

Leah Duncan: And sort of thinking about the future of this project and the afterlife of these collections, we think a lot in the LDL about collections as data. And we are recently part of a grant project that focused on collections as data and thinking about how to make your collections available as data and to create workloads and use cases around that.

So, a big part of my job is basically trying to get people to do cool things with our collections, whether that’s digital humanities projects or teaching or various types of, again, like data analysis around our collections.

One thing I think a lot about is no one can do anything with a collection, especially computationally, that’s not there yet. So, the content of what’s available in your digital library really does affect the scholarship and the teaching of the future as we move forward. And we saw that a lot during the pandemic. We had to do a lot of adjustments when our institutions closed down, to facilitate courses and instructors who were relying on our archival materials to help them pivot towards using digital archival materials. So, the more sort of diverse content that’s available, the more diverse and representative teaching and research that can be done in the future, and I get excited about that.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Are there particular areas you would like to see the LDL expand toward?

Sophie Ziegler: Yeah, so there are a couple different ways to think about this. One of the ways that we tend to phrase it is, if we think about the Louisiana Digital Library as a representation of Louisiana, Louisiana would look a lot whiter than it is, it would look a lot older than it is.

Leah Duncan: More urban than it is.

Sophie Ziegler: We know from working in institutions what people are likely to scan and put into a digital library. So, you’ve got a lot of photographs of people shaking each other’s hands on the steps of a capitol, like we do. We have a lot of politicians, we have a lot of well-to-do families, but what we don’t have is a lot of everyone else who lives here and has always lived here.

So, we’re thinking about African American centric collections in which they’re actually centered, right, and not represented as enslaved individuals. We’re thinking about all the other groups that are here and have been here for generations and just don’t tend to make it into the local repository.

So again, if you think about something like the Louisiana Digital Library, it’s always going to be a selection of a selection. We’re always working with what’s already been collected by somebody and then on top of that, what repositories consider important enough to put the resources in to scan.

So, what we’re hoping to do is, if we can take on the burden of the digitization and leave the selection to the host institution. Then what we’re hoping to do is put people in the position where they don’t have to be making this cost benefit analysis. Rather they can just say, “This is what we’d really love to have up, this is what’s really important to our community.” And then those of us coming in from LSU can be the ones who actually take on the burden of doing the work itself.

This is to make the LDL a better representation of Louisiana and this is to make the collections within the LDL fuller so that you can do more things with it as Leah was saying. But this is also just an existential issue in the sense that we’re losing ground and we’re more likely to be hit by a hurricane every single year.

We’re in a race to hold onto our cultural heritage and almost all of our institutions, for one reason or another, whether it be funding or hurricanes and flooding. I think it remains to be seen in the deep future as to whether or not digitization is actually the way, a long-term solution in any way to this, but I think in the short term, it gives us a certain focus and a certain urgency to this type of work.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Have there been other applications that have come in, are you looking for more people to apply?

Sophie Ziegler: Yeah, we’re definitely looking for more people to apply. We weren’t pushing it during most of the last year for Covid reasons. We started pushing it just a couple of months ago with conference presentations and other outreach forms, specifically to the archives and museum communities here in Louisiana.

So, we’re definitely taking applications. We’re trying to keep the application as minimal as possible. We do ask that applicants think about the material that’s either completely owned by them or that they have rights to post the materials online.

We prioritize collections that represent geographies not currently represented in the LDL or communities not currently represented and we are willing to help think out how much can be digitized over the course of a week. Which again, is one of the harder things.

So, one of the big things we want to say is that we’re always happy to talk to applicants at any point during it. Our contact information is available on the application. If anybody starts and has questions, we do hope that they’ll reach out to us. If anybody is thinking about applying, we’re always happy to talk about projects and try to do the best that we can to make it a successful application.

It’s set up as an award right now for a number of reasons. That’s not because we don’t want to give it out. We have it set up as an award in the hopes that there will be a lot of internal reflection on anybody that applies. So, we want the partner institution to tell us what’s important about their collection that should be digitized. So, we ask them to think about their community that they serve and to think about what they would be really, really upset about, what would be the most detrimental to their community should there be a fire or a flood at their shop.

So, it was setup as an award so we can have that type of structure where they can answer those types of questions for us in advance. And also because we think, and we’ve been told by Mississippi Digital Library and other people we talked to, the award is sort of a nice way for the partner institution to sort of brag. We’re thinking about maybe having plaques and again just to make sure that everybody is really feeling good about the project.

I think a good place to leave this, at least from my point of view, would be to reiterate that the Louisiana Digital Library is a joint effort. A lot of the work going on in it is community building work. It wouldn’t be any good for those of us at LSU, which is just one member of the Louisiana Digital Library, to decide that this is important work. Instead, what we’ve been doing is spending a lot of time building capacity among all the members of the LDL and hearing about what everybody has in their collections, what everybody would like to see the LDL become and all to move in the same direction. Because nothing we’re saying here is novel. I mean Mississippi has had a digitization project like this for exactly the same reason for years and so many other states also.

It’s not that it’s novel, I think what’s so exciting is that it’s actually happening and it’s happening in a very intentional way where we’re naming what we’re trying to overcome. We want a digital library that is more inclusive because we have such a beautifully diverse state and I think we’re doing everyone a disservice if we’re not able to represent that.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking about this project and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Sophie Ziegler: Thank you so much for having us. This was a lot of fun.

Leah Duncan: Yeah, that was fun.

This was a presentation of the Preservation Technology Podcast, produced by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. For more podcasts like this one, please visit our website.

]]> Setting up Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park with Chris Collins (Episode 108) ]]> Tue, 25 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E958C4CB-FA62-8040-940A38DDBC996ACA.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E98D7C5D-ED8D-3321-052B1B3220565FF4 Setting up Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park with Chris Collins (Episode 108) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Superintendent Chris Collins about the establishment of Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park 749 no full 108

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My name's Dr. Catherine Cooper. I am with Superintendent Chris Collins from Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park for today's podcast. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

Chris Collins: Oh, Catherine. Thank you so much for having me.

Catherine Cooper: Tell us about Ste. Genevieve and how it became a National Park. It's relatively new. Isn't it?

Chris Collins: Very new. Yes. I will tell you a little bit about the town and a little bit about the National Park Service in town. Ste. Genevieve Missouri is a small farming town in the middle Mississippi River Valley. It's about 60 miles southeast of St. Louis, with a very long history. In fact, it's the oldest European settlement in present day Missouri founded by French Canadian settlers sometime around 1750. Ste. Genevieve's claim to fame is that it contains the largest extent collection of a rare form of French Colonial vertical log architecture. In fact, it's the largest collection in the United States and maybe even in North America.

So the story of Ste. Genevieve and the National Park Service goes back several decades. And so I had to put a lot of thought into all of those interactions. And it really started back in the 1930s with Charles Peterson. He was a historic architect for the Park Service and as a part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal initiatives, he and his team started the Historic American Building Survey program, or the HABS program, which documented America's architectural heritage.

And so Peterson and his team spent a lot of time in Ste. Genevieve documenting the houses that we are aware of to this day. And that was the Park Service’s first venture in Ste. Genevieve. Then in the 1950s, another Park Service employee by the name of Ernest Connelly, worked with The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America to help with the first restoration of any of the historic homes in Ste. Genevieve and that was the Bolduc House. Sometime in the 1970s, the US Army Corps of Engineers conducted an archeological survey of the Old Town site and that's approximately three miles Southeast of the current town site. The town was moved sometime after 1785 after a series of horrific floods all but destroyed the Old Town site. The research by the US Army Corps of Engineers and their findings sparked the interest of the National Park Service.

And in 1978, the National Park Service set out on a reconnaissance survey to determine if there was national significance, suitability, feasibility, and a management requirement to set up a unit of the National Park Service in Ste. Genevieve. And I believe in 1980, that report was completed and delivered to Congress and the findings were to move forward at some point with a special resource study to extrapolate on their findings, to really get to the heart of whether or not it made sense for a National Park Service unit here in Ste. Genevieve. After 1980, the Park Service didn't have a huge hand in Ste. Genevieve until the 2000s.

In 1985, the HABS survey received additional funding. They came back and they updated some of the work that they started in the 1930s. And then we see in 1993, there was a massive flood in Ste. Genevieve. It threatened several of the historic houses here, and that really brought national attention to the city and the need to preserve the town. It resurrected a new wave of preservation that really took hold in the town throughout the 1990s and 2000s. And through those efforts, we see this renewed interest to create Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park.

So in 2005, after many local stakeholders went to Congress and testified for this need, Congress passed the Ste. Genevieve County National Historic Site Studies Act and that directed the National Park Service to conduct a special resource study. Finally, in 2016, so about 10 years after that, the special resource study was complete, and it was delivered to Congress. Those findings stated that in fact, the area was significant and suitable for inclusion in the National Park Service. And then in 2018, the park was authorized by the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018. The caveat there is that it included a provision that agreements and sufficient property would be required before the park would actually be established.

Catherine Cooper: What does the specific designation of a National Historical Park mean? And does that have implications for the site?

Chris Collins: That's a really good question. It's one that I grapple with myself and I've asked several people about this, because I've worked at a few NHPs in my career, and I've also worked for some National Historic Sites in my career. What I've finally figured out is that they're very similar, but the difference really comes down to instead of a smaller footprint, maybe just one distinct site, a National Historical Park has a larger physical footprint like a campus. And it usually also means that there's some increased complexity, either in the treatment of the resource or with the history that's being interpreted. And that's really what I've found is the difference between a National Historic Site and a National Historical Park.

Catherine Cooper: So at what stage did you become involved with Ste. Genevieve National Historical Park?

Chris Collins: I was selected for the position of park Superintendent and as the first employee of the park in the fall of 2019. And I started on the job in January 2020—before the park was established, we were just authorized at that point. When I started on the job, I didn't even have space for an office in Ste. Genevieve. We had one historic property, the Bauvais-Amoureux House, which does not have modern amenities, heat, air conditioning. It does have electricity, no internet. So I started with my office at the Old Courthouse at Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis. We did have another acquisition in progress, and in late February 2020, the park closed on the Jean-Baptiste Valle House. And it did have some modern amenities. It did have some administrative space that allowed me to finally set up shop in the community.

And so at first, a large part of my responsibilities were just working with local stakeholders, developing those relationships. Also, trying to figure out with my supervisor, our regional office, and the Washington office: okay, so what did the Secretary mean by we needed agreements and adequate properties in order to establish the park? I was really hired to get us across that finish line and so that took a good 10 months by October 30th, 2020, we were established and we became the 422nd unit of the National Park Service.

Catherine Cooper: What are the challenges of setting up a new National Park?

Chris Collins: Yeah, first and foremost, I just needed some office space just to have meetings, to do paperwork. I needed internet. I needed a desk. I had never worked on a brand new unit where I was the first employee. I don't think I realized everything it took. I'd always stepped into some empty shoes where there was already a cadence in place, relationships that were established that were pretty easy to figure out and move forward. But I started from scratch. So just aside from all the logistics, it was really about those relationships, meeting the community stakeholders, setting expectations. They had waited decades for the Park Service to get here. I think they felt like the minute I was hired, I would just hit the ground running and I knew where to go and I knew what was expected of me in the Park Service.

That was a huge challenge. It was a learning curve, it was daunting. And in fact, there were other nonprofits and government organizations in town that had already taken on that role of tackling preservation and interpretation of the resources and history. And so we were the new kids on the block. And so there was a lot of pressure to shine. There was also that sense of urgency like I said, they thought, “You know what you're doing, we've been waiting for you for decades. You've been planning for decades, right?” No. We're just starting now.

So there was a lot of pressure on me to really show the community that we were worthy to assist and care for their special place. There are a lot of passionate opinions here in this town. And so I really had to figure out where to focus my priorities, where the priorities for the new park should be. So setting the pace was huge, but it's also extremely rewarding. As well as it being exceptionally taxing at times for all the challenges and hard work, the successes and the progress, I think are the most rewarding and fun parts. I've had the pleasure to be involved in a lot of firsts at this park and I didn't realize how fun it would be to be the first to find this or that.

And so there are a few things that really stand out. It was a lot of fun to work with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training on the analysis of the makeup of the historic fabric of some of the houses, we didn't know what we'd find. So that was really cool to see how that works. It was amazing working on our first historic structures report. The Bauvais-Amoureux House historic structures report is complete. There's actually a standout moment for that project, and that was when the contractor discovered a missing truss beam from the attic that at some point in that house's 229-year history had been repurposed and turned into a floor joist. So the excitement when we all ran down to the Cabo and we were shining our flashlights on that architectural mark, it was just, I don't know, it was a moment with just that energy and excitement that everyone felt. I think you were here that day.

Catherine Cooper: I was there that day.

Chris Collins: And I think you were just as excited as we were. It was so cool. And I think there's one standout moment of everything that I've observed or been a part of since I've been here. One of our park rangers gave a program to one of the descendants, an Amoureux descendant. And I think we were all a little teary-eyed and moved when at the end of the program, he said, “That's why I've been waiting for the National Park Service. That's what I've been waiting to hear.” And wow, what a moment to be there when you have a descendant say that to the park ranger, who's so nervous giving a program about his family.

Catherine Cooper: Right.

Chris Collins: It was amazing.

Catherine Cooper: What are your hopes for Ste. Genevieve going forward?

Chris Collins: There's a running inside joke amongst the staff at the park that we talk about all the time and it’s “the potential”. I think maybe it's probably a huge motivator for the staff of all new parks. I mean, the potential, the things that you can do and the things that you can be a part of. And we've had a number of conversations about that kind of elaborate like, well, what does that mean? What is the potential? So some things that stand out to me that we really hope to get to is increased community engagement, continuing to develop those relationships, strengthening those relationships, getting those stakeholders, those descendants involved in what we do in Ste. Genevieve. So the acquisition, the preservation, and the restoration of the cultural landscape, it's changed so much in the past 230 years.

So working on that is exciting, providing inclusive and relevant interpretation. Really telling those untold and underrepresented stories, that's important to the staff at this park. And so it excites me when we can start to do that. We're really excited to build a robust and a far reaching education program. We want to spread the word, reach youth about the park’s history. We also look forward to developing a park museum program about exhibits, archeology, curation of artifacts. Something that's important to me is providing increased accessibility for visitors with physical and cognitive needs. That's a huge challenge for historic properties.

So thinking of ways and maybe thinking outside the box for ways that we can make that happen; it's all about figuring out that delicate balance between resource protection and visitor enjoyment. And so spending a lot of time thinking and concentrating on that. And then maybe lastly, I get really excited about recruiting and building a staff of dedicated and passionate employees. Having a staff that's as excited about this place as I am is really important and it keeps me motivated and engaged.

Catherine Cooper: So you are no longer the only staff member?

Chris Collins: Thank goodness. No. We're now a staff of four and hopefully, we'll have a few more budget increases and we can keep growing over the next few years.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking with us today. The park is open for visitors?

Chris Collins: The park is open seven days a week, nine to five central.

]]> "Why Keep That?" Examining WWI through Memorabilia (Episode 107) ]]> Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/40295C09-C5DA-0BA9-B0B94C87685875E4.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-402BC80B-0212-41DD-C442EF64F8BB6DA1 "Why Keep That?" Examining WWI through Memorabilia (Episode 107) National Park Service Dr. Catherine Cooper, Research Scientist at NCPTT, speaking with Stacie Petersen, Director of Exhibitions and Registrar at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, about the “Why Keep That?” exhibit. 650 no full 107

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Podcast 107: "Why Keep That?" Examining WWI through Memorabilia

Dr. Catherine Cooper: My name's Dr. Catherine Cooper, Research Scientist at NCPTT. Today, I'm speaking with Stacie Petersen, Director of Exhibitions and Registrar at the National WWI Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, about the “Why Keep That?” exhibit. Stacie, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.

Stacie Petersen: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me today.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Could you tell us about the WWI Museum and Memorial and your role there?

Stacie Petersen: Yeah, so we are located in Kansas City, Missouri in the downtown area, so right across from Union Station next to Crown Center, the international headquarters for Hallmark. And our groundbreaking actually was a hundred years ago this month. We broke ground in 1921 and opened to the public in our original form in 1926. So we are the only collecting institution in the world looking at the global story of World War I. We are kind of beat out a little bit by the Imperial War Museums over in London, but of course they got into the war a couple years ahead of us. And they just had across the English Channel, while we had an ocean and half a continent.

Stacie Petersen: I am Director of Exhibitions and Registrar, so that's really kind of two sides of my job. As Director of Exhibitions, I oversee the logistics and the schedule for the museum's exhibitions. So that includes concepts, the work of bringing in contractors, construction, installation, basically bringing it to the public. The Registrar side is working with the collection itself: digitizing it, making it accessible to the world on our online collections database, as well as paperwork, things like loans, insurance, shipping, customs, those sort of things.

Stacie Petersen: “Why Keep That?” is an exhibit that looks at what our museum collects and why we're keeping those sort of things. Because as you're going through the exhibit, you'll see different items, like menus and receipts. Really, when you think of military, of World War I, you're thinking of our large items, such as our guns and uniforms and machine guns and those larger objects. While within archives, it's a very diverse situation in terms of what is kept, because of course the story of World War I is more than just the military aspect.

Stacie Petersen: You also have the lives of those soldiers and service volunteers and service women that served and they went on tours. So we have tickets from train rides out when they were on leave and menus from different concerts they've gone to or programs and events like that. So with “Why Keep That?”, it was looking at, again, why are we keeping these objects? And what is the process of making the determination of bringing them into the Museum and Memorial's collection? We went through our collection and went, "Okay, what is unique? What is something that someone will look at and be like, 'So I am no longer a hoarder because I keep that sort of thing as well. And if the museum can keep it, I can now keep it as well'." So again, going back to those very day-to-day situations of maybe scraps of paper that they've sketched a prosthetic medical device on in order to support a limb, or tickets, memos. We have other unique things, like this huge chart that's called the Barometer Chart of Feelings that was produced by a woman in England, looking at her emotional wellbeing during the war. And it's literally a graph barometer chart of her highs and lows throughout the entire experience of World War I.

Stacie Petersen: This exhibition really is strongly pulled from our ephemera collection. So typically what we catalog as ephemera is all those little things that people collect as mementos of remembrance. So within this exhibition, we're looking at those mementos. So it might be a birthing ticket that shows, "This is the hammock I slept in on the ship ride over." Or also in that same frame is a birthing ticket of a Gold Star Mother who went on pilgrimage overseas. And you see two very distinct cards, because the hammock, very basic. It's like “Hammock B, tier three”, this is where you go. It's a piece of cardboard. While the birthing ticket for the Gold Star Mother is shaped, it has a hard ring for the hole so you could put it on a string. It's very decorative on front and back. So it was created to be a memento to keep.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: This sounds quite a bit like what you would see in scrapbooks. Are these loose objects or were they in collections?

Stacie Petersen: So in this particular case, these were all loose objects. They were things that we did not have to remove from photo albums or scrapbooks. Now, when objects come into our collection, while we say we have 3D objects and archives, the archives is not what we would consider your stereotypical archive. Really our archival collection is housed and stored more similar to a museum collection. So every piece of paper gets an accession number or object ID number. It's cataloged down to that level because of how our collection is used. So these are objects that you would see in a scrapbook, but luckily for us, they were not inside one.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: So you've mentioned that this has been a collecting museum for a hundred years now, essentially. Has the collection protocol changed since the inception?

Stacie Petersen: So we have been collecting for a hundred years, and our shift really for the most part has not changed because our focus has always been World War I. So luckily for us, we've been very defined in that period of 1914 through 1919, 1921 and a smattering of select years after that, depending upon what was happening, such as the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages, which happened later in the twenties into early thirties. And of course that's lucky for us, because we don't have this willy-nilly collection. But now, our focus has shifted a bit in that we have to be now a lot more selective. We have a lot of uniforms. So if someone wants to donate their grandfather's uniform and he was a private in the Army, more than likely, that's not something that we need to add to the collection because we already have other examples of that.

Stacie Petersen: But at the same time, this means we can now focus our energy on collecting more specific areas in terms of 3D objects. So we're looking at women's service, especially women Marines, and collecting initiatives of people of color, African Americans, Native Americans, anyone that served within those entities. But also looking at the Indigenous populations of Europe, Australia. So expanding our focus from just the general service man to more of those global participants that are not widely represented in our collection at this time.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: And does the collection also expand outward from not only the people actively participating in the war, but the people who were affected by it at home during those years?

Stacie Petersen: We include some of those stories of the homefront. And of course when we say homefront, a lot of people think, "Oh, United States," because that's where we are. But of course homefront expands to also Germany, France, Belgium, because those were the homefronts of the foreign entities that weren't involved in the war. So we do collect as much as we can of their stories as well. And in some cases, they might be told through the eyes of someone we have in our collection. For example, off the top of my head, I can think of a gentleman, his name is Arthur Standing. He was a conscientious objector, so he didn't fight in the war, but he was sent overseas to serve as a volunteer and he worked a lot in those French villages. So we have a scrapbook and mementos of his that tell their story through his lens though.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Is there anything in particular that surprised you in people interacting with this new exhibit?

Stacie Petersen: The one object I can think of in particular is a poster that's featuring African American Stevedores. And it is one of our examples of showcasing African American servicemen in a positive light. The imagery in it is reflective of service, of their work. And a lot of people see that and think, "Oh, that's not stereotyped to what you would see of imagery from the teens of people of color." So a lot of people are surprised by that, but they're also surprised by how we gathered that into our collection. It was not actually what we had originally intended to take. We took the rest of the collection that had been donated to us and this poster was found folded up in the back of a scrapbook. And as we were going through the collection and processing it, we found it folded up, unfolded it and went, "Whoa."

Stacie Petersen: And it's also a poster that I've, at least so far online, have only found one other example of at the New York Public Library. And we have a copy that was signed by the artist, including a letter that was talking about how he created it and why he created it. There's a few examples on our website underneath the exhibition page, but this is all available via our online collections database at our website, which is theworldwar.org. If you don't have an interest in World War I now, I challenge you to do a study of World War I and try to find something that's not of interest. There's so much that can be traced back to the history of World War I. So the Civil Rights Movements, the Suffragette Movement, daylight savings times, we just all went through that, can be traced back there. Even if you wear a trench coat in your daily life now here in the fall, that comes out of World War I, as well as even the technology that's running your cell phone. So there's a story in line that can interest nearly everyone in World War I.

Dr. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I hope that folks will come visit you, either in person or virtually.

Stacie Petersen: Yeah, we are open now and through Memorial Day, every Tuesday through Sunday. And between Memorial Day and Labor Day, we're open seven days a week.

]]> Examining Hélio Oiticica’s Pigments (Episode 106) ]]> Wed, 29 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/2944D191-0ACC-EFF9-E85336D5F54B6AD2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-2946D9A0-9CB4-2074-99B6488A6A00DBF3 Examining Hélio Oiticica’s Pigments (Episode 106) National Park Service Cory Rogge, the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Menil Collection. In this podcast, they talk about Cory’s work examining the pigments and works of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica 959 no full 106

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Cory Rogge, the Andrew W. Mellon Research Scientist at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Menil Collection. In this podcast, they talk about Cory’s work examining the pigments and works of Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica Catherine Cooper: I'm here at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston with Cory Rogge, the Andrew Mellon research scientist at the MFA Houston and the Menil Collection. Cory Rogge: Hello. Catherine Cooper: And today I wanted to ask you about the Hélio Oiticica collection that you have here that you've been working with. Cory Rogge: So we have an amazing Latin American arts collection at the MFAH. And in the early 2000s our Latin American arts curator, Mari Carmen Ramírez, reached out to the Oiticica family because she was interested in doing a show on Hélio Oiticica, who had died in 1980. He was born in 1937. Oiticica was a Brazilian artist and he kind of came of artistic age at the very end of the concrete art movement in Brazil. And here, concrete doesn't mean like concrete sidewalks. Concrete means constructivist, more like Mondrian. So very geometrical, very rigid paintings. And Oiticica was really interested in art, but he quickly became bored with the two-dimensional aspect of things and launched his art into three dimensions, all the while being very interested in color. And Oiticica's father was a scientist, an engineer, and an entomologist and a mathematician, and Oiticica actually worked in the museum where his father worked. And so he kind of, despite being an artist, had a scholarly or a scientific approach to what he was doing. And he kept amazing journals and he kept his paints. And so as part of this exhibition, our Mari Carmen and our then head of conservation went down to Brazil, brought the artworks back for treatment, but also brought all of the extant studio materials that were still with Oiticica's family. And at that point there wasn't a scientist here in Houston. So the paint sat—on a cart—for years. Until I showed up and got asked to look at them as part of a Getty project on concrete art in Los Angeles. And we were interested in them because number one, they're a record of what he used, which is interesting of itself. Also, unfortunately a lot of his extant artwork burned in a fire in Rio. And so these paints are the only records we have of what was on his art. And they give us insight into what the colors of his art should be. And then Oiticica also kept journals: he kept diagrams for his artwork, he kept recipes of what the color mixtures were that he was using on a given piece of art. They weren't always very accurate in that he measured out his amounts in spoons. So we had a soup spoon and a teaspoon and a coffee spoon. And in his notebook he'll say, "This color of yellow is made by mixing one soup spoon of this with one coffee spoon of this and a teaspoon or two of that." So we don't know the volumes that were involved really, but we can guesstimate. So now what we're interested in doing is taking the paints, figuring out what the pigments are, and then figuring out what the binding media is and then seeing how that relates to what his recipes were because he wasn't mixing his paints by taking pigment and mixing it with oil. He was mixing his colors by mixing different amounts of other paints and we don't always know what was in the other paints and he'll say, "I mixed a soup spoon of this brand of paint’s Vermilion red with this teaspoon of an orange paint with this." We won't know what the Vermilion really is, so we're trying to pick that out as well. So long story short, those are the paint collections and that's how they came to live in Houston.

Catherine Cooper: Have you been able to see the convergence of his documentation of a work with one of the few that still exist with the artists' paints that you have?

Cory Rogge: Sadly, we haven't really because all of the paints we have that we can tie to a specific artwork are related to artworks that either burned or we don't have access to. We have in our collection, one Oiticica object. In English, it's called a spatial relief or Relevo Espacial, for Oiticica. And it's a bright orangey yellow object. It looks almost like it's a piece of origami folded together, although it's made out of plywood and about three and a half feet long. It was meant to float in space and you're meant to walk around it and appreciate the color as an object. And this object has, in some areas, eight layers of paint on it and one of those paints appears to be the same as one of the paints in our studio collection. And that paint, interestingly enough, is labeled for another artwork. It's supposed to actually be associated with Núcleo, or Nucleus. And so now we can say that probably these two objects were sister objects. They were maybe being made together in his studio at the same time. And that gives us insight into the fact that he wasn't making only one thing at a time and he was thinking about these different constructs in space at the same time. Catherine Cooper: Is there a correlation with the pigments that you have and the journal articles and his changing art style and expression? Cory Rogge: Wow, complicated question. So he went through a bunch of different series as he broke out of strictly two dimensional art, and the first series to really do that he called Inventions and these were square paintings that hung off from the wall. They were offset so they leapt out into space just a little bit. And we have four paints related to the Invention series and these are all bright, brilliant reds in tone. The next series we get into are the Spatial Reliefs and the Nuclei and here he backs away from red, he starts going into the yellow colors and then from there he jumps off entirely into three dimensional objects that you can handle or that you can wear or that you can walk into or around and manipulate. And so he really, at least color wise, he makes a break from the inventions which are largely bright red into these yellow-oranges that he tends to favor later on. In terms of pigments, I guess we find differences from what he wrote and what he used and that he would say things in his journals like "This pigment isn't very stable, this other yellow pigment would be better", but in fact we find the one that he thinks is less stable in a lot of his artwork so he doesn't always practice what he preaches. And then in terms of binding media, most of what we have are oil paints. He manipulates them a little bit. He mixes in some commercial paints that are alkyds and faster drying than oils, but he's not being like other Brazilian artists at the time, like Lygia Clark, who were using really modern paints like nitrocellulose automobile lacquers. Even though he's being very nontraditional in how he uses them and the objects that he's making, he's still using really traditional materials. Catherine Cooper: Where do you hope to take this research or is it mostly completed for this past exhibit or is it hopefully going to inform future conservation or future work with the family? Cory Rogge: I'm slowly in the process of writing this all up, but there are 139 different studio material things that came. Most of them are paints, but we have some powdered pigments and some varnishes and some media that he used. And right now I'm in the process of trying to correlate all of what a given paint has in it with what his journal articles might say. And then what we've learned is that his objects are sometimes more complex than he indicated in his journals. So for an object he might say, "Oh, I made three paints for it, or four paints for it." But in our collection we have 21 so we know that he layered his paints. Are these iterations, did he manipulate the color, but change the color ever so slightly—evolve the color as he went along. Were these paints really all on a given object? We don't know, but because so many of his artworks burned and we have the journals, the family has been reproducing them. And so this information we have will inform them in those reproductions because they'll be able to better understand that his paints and his objects were not a single flat tone of color. The surface color was influenced by the layers below and so they're much more vibrant an object than the reproductions are. Catherine Cooper: Does the depth and complexity of the pigments relate to conservation problems as these objects age? Cory Rogge: So we have issues with, with our object, the fact that he has tried to make plywood act like paper. Plywood doesn't bend like paper, so you can't get those creases. So he had to force the wood into bends and turns that it doesn't want to make, and so some of the seams are opening up and that's causing paint loss. He had actually intended to make more of these kinds of objects and gave them up because they were so very hard to construct. In terms of the stability of his materials, he actually used really stable materials for the most part. So we're not having too many issues with his objects fading for instance, as far as we can tell. Because so many of them lived in environments in Brazil that had relatively poor climate control, there have been issues caused by expansion and contraction with the wood, which can cause paint loss. And then also just dirt in the environment. Museums filter their air to keep dust and grime and pollutions out and other institutions and places don't have that benefit. Catherine Cooper: What about Oiticica’s art—for people who are unfamiliar with it—what should people know? Cory Rogge: He was one of the most inventive artists out there, and he really kind of revolutionized what was thought of as art. For centuries art was on paper, art was a painting, it was hung on a wall. And he thought that color was an object and he wanted to make these color objects, he called them, that were interactive, that allow people to see color and experience it in a way that nobody else had. And so we have American artists like John Cage or Robert Rauschenberg who are doing art that's breaking the boundaries of moving beyond painting into interactive exhibits, into interactive occurrences, happenings, and Oiticica was doing that at the same time. And so he's really, he's changed what art is. He made a series of objects called parangolés, or capes, and they were meant to be worn and danced around the streets and in Samba dances. And so he's doing performance art, right, and making objects for that. Catherine Cooper: For any of those performance art pieces still existing, are they being treated in performance or are they stationary now? Cory Rogge: They are stationary. But for the exhibit here, the foundation and family permitted reproduction ones to be made that the public were allowed to wear and to dance with the way that Oiticica would have wanted. Catherine Cooper: The intersection of the integrity of these objects and conservation of them is always an interesting question when they're in use. Cory Rogge: Yes. And he made a series, another series of objects called bólides which translates into firecracker and here he wanted people to interact with color in the form of pigment. And so there are boxes that can be opened that have pigments in them or there are jars that have pigments in them. You can put your hands in them and stir the pigment about and sift it like grains of sand. And in a museum environment we can't let people do that because it would go everywhere and some of the pigments aren't necessarily good for your health to be doing that. So we do walk a line—we can explain how they're meant to be used and there are photographs of him using it. But we chose in that case not to ask the family if they can be reproduced for the public to use. It's really been an interesting project because it's made me learn a lot about Brazilian paints that I didn't know and the paint industry in Brazil. Oiticica was kind of transnational in that he also lived in the U.S at two different points, and he lived in London and he wrote letters to people. He and Lygia Clark had an extensive correspondence, so you could go back through and get a real sense of him as a person and his real philosophical take on what he was doing and talking about the psychology of stuff. And then you have his wonderful journals and then you get to learn a little bit of Portuguese for reading them. The more you read about it, the more interesting he really becomes as a person and unfortunately the conversation is one sided, right? He's talking to me from the past. I can't- Catherine Cooper: Ask him. Cory Rogge: Exactly, but I think he would have been a really interesting person to have been a friend. Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking with us today. Cory Rogge: It's been a pleasure. Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today's show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Conservation and Community Use: the Collection Access Program at the Museum of Anthropology (Episode 105) ]]> Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/5958F8A0-E5D5-1AD6-62810982286D1A17.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-5959BDF5-B0FD-BF8A-75F30EEF659A37B6 Conservation and Community Use: the Collection Access Program at the Museum of Anthropology (Episode 105) National Park Service Heidi Swierenga, Senior Conservator at the Museum of Anthropology--frequently called MOA--in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this podcast they talk about MOA's Collections Access Program. 813 no full 105

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Kevin Ammons Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Heidi Swierenga, Senior Conservator at the Museum of Anthropology--frequently called MOA--in Vancouver, British Columbia. In this podcast they talk about MOA's Collections Access Program. Catherine Cooper: The first question I want to ask you is what is the Collections Access Program at MOA and why is so important for MOA’s collections in particular? Heidi Swierenga: The Museum of Anthropology is, what we would call in Canada, a medium size institution, and we have about forty thousand objects in the collections now from cultures from around the world. The Collections Access Program is the work that we do within the institution to connect the cultures from which those objects came from to the objects themselves. It can take a couple different forms. Probably the most significant part of that program is the people that come into the museum. We host quite regularly elders gatherings, or community gatherings, sometimes school gatherings; different types of groups from different communities will come in to spend time with the belongings that they’ve selected. So, a typical visit might be twenty elders coming down to see forty objects. And let’s just say it’s a basketry collection. So we might pull all those basketry pieces, put them in one of our research rooms, and then they have the day to work with them, and speak about them, and handle them. The other type of collections access that we do is when we bring belongings out to communities for use. And most of my experience is around use in a Potlatch. Often that means that something might be danced, or presented, or processed as part of the business that goes on in the Potlatch. Catherine Cooper: How did this program develop, and have you noticed it change as a part of the Truth and Reconciliation process that Canada has recently gone through? Heidi Swierenga: It’s actually a program that has, I think, evolved naturally and very slowly. When we talk about when did this all start, we go all the way back to the early 1980s when then Senior Conservator, Miriam Clavir, had her first request to lend out one of the older pieces for use in a Potlatch. And at that time in the early 80s this was a very, very different and new thing. For her as she talks about it, it challenged her and her professional training, because conservators are trained to make sure that an object lasts for future generations. And using something, even though it may be done gently and safely, there is always a risk that damage might occur. And prolonged use will inevitably change the look, or the aesthetic presentation of something that’s used. So, for her, it started a decades long conversation about that balance between preservation and use, that now we as conservators are very, very familiar with. But that first loan turned into the next loan, that turned into the next loan, and the next loan. And now we do quite a bit of it. And the second part of your question, how has this changed since the Truth and Reconciliation and the TRC, for people that might not be familiar with it, is the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was established to look at the residential school system, and the abuse and the damage and the fallout from that over several generations. One of the big things that came out of the Calls for Action was, how have we, as an institution, met the directives of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights on Indigenous People. It was a challenge, and UNDRIP has been around for a long time; it forced a lot of us to say, “Have we thought about it? What have we implanted in terms of policies and procedures, that have addressed the primary directive?”—Which is that Indigenous people have the rights to say what’s going to happen about their cultural belongings, and the right to control the information about those cultural belongings.

And I think what we did is realize that we may have been doing what we thought was a pretty good job at working with our Indigenous communities, but we were being very passive about it. Yes, we were approving loans. Yes, we were facilitating these requests, but we were still doing it in a way that was convenient for us.

I think since the Calls for Action came out, we have taken on a more proactive stance, and we as an institution have recognized that we have the responsibility to make sure our program provides the resources and funds so that people can have the ability to travel to come see us. It’s a limited pot but at least we went after it and we made sure we’ve got resources there so that we can offset the costs associated with coming to the institution, or we can fully cover the costs that are associated with the insurance that is required when you travel a belonging out to a community. And it’s a priority for us. It is absolutely the number one priority for many of the people who work in the institution. Catherine Cooper: How does the Collections Access Program, and particularly the loan of objects, balance the conservation ethics of preservation and use? Heidi Swierenga: I think it does very well is the short answer. [laughs] Catherine Cooper: Yeah. Heidi Swierenga: And maybe I can come at it from how we deal with the requests. So, when a request is made, let’s just say it’s a request to borrow a headdress from a family member that has the rights and privileges to either wear that headdress or have somebody dance it on their behalf at their Potlatch. It is not such a complicated process, but it’s a process that involves several different people. So, conservators would be involved, a curator would be involved, the individual that’s made the request, and possibly the dancer who might be dancing that piece. And together, we’ll work out whether or not the piece is strong enough to be danced. Basically, what are the risks involved? Heidi Swierenga: And together as a group we’ll say, yeah it is strong enough, or we can’t quite attach the rigging that’s required in order for it to be attachable to the person who’s dancing and therefore safe, or we can, or maybe together we have to do some modifications to the piece in order for it to be strong enough to dance, or look in a way that is respectful for it to be danced. So, for one example, myself, working with the late Kwakwaka'wakw artist and hereditary chief Beau Dick, modified a headdress only after he was satisfied that it was safe enough to be danced. When we first looked at it together, it was carved out of beautiful, thin hemlock wood and it, was cracked in several places. He thought it was going to move around too much during dancing and was worried that it would deteriorate further, and he said, “Whoa, maybe not, maybe we should look at something else.” And I was able to say, “You know what, I think I might have a really simple fix for that.” And my conservator brain was saying, it has to be simple, it has to be observable, and it has to be reversible. And I was able to do it quite easily just using tinted Japanese tissue paper and wheat starch paste. Once I did that, it was super, super strong and solid. And Beau said, “Yeah, that’s great. Now what I need to do is, re-carve the missing elements,” because he couldn’t present it in a way that he felt wasn’t respectable both to the object as well as the owner. So, he recreated the missing elements, painted them and then passed them back to me to stitch the whole thing back together again. So, it was a perfect balance, in my mind, because we were both able to get at the point where we knew it would be safe. Yet we had to make changes to it in order for it to be safe. So, it’s not just preserved in its original form, it’s now different, and it’s showing the process that it went through. It’s showing the Potlach it went through, it’s showing that it was danced again, and it was able to still do the job that it was originally created to do, which was to show a certain privilege that the family wanted to show and be witnessed at that Potlach. Catherine Cooper: How has your work as a conservator changed as these programs and initiatives have developed? Heidi Swierenga: I would say that my personal process has changed quite a bit, and one story I can tell that illustrates this is… I was going to through some documentation for some belongings that are owned by a family who was going to be hosting a Potlatch. And when I went back to the file, I saw this memo that I had written when I was just freshly hired at the museum, so going on twenty years ago. And this memo was in response to the first request for the loan of a particular headdress for the first Potlach that this family had had in several decades. And the memo that I wrote I feel now was appalling. It wasn’t really, but it was me as the young conservator who knew the best thing to say, and who knew exactly what had to happen, that well, yes, I think that it could be loaned but it couldn’t be used, it could only be presented because of a number of different issues. And it was in fragile condition and maybe that would have been the end result, but my quick answer was, “No, I don’t believe it’s possible.” Now, that’s never how it would happen. Now, I would say, “I’m not sure. Why don’t you come in, let’s take a look at it together, see what you think?” And I would offer some thoughts, and they would offer some thoughts back, and together we would come up with a plan. But I read that memo and I thought, “My God, well I’m going to have to burn this. Nobody can know what I said.” And actually, I showed it to a colleague, and they said, “No, this is great, this shows how much we’ve changed, this shows how much our practice has evolved.” And for me really, it shows how much I have learned from the different artists, dancers, and community members who I’ve worked with, who have taught me how to go about doing this properly. And I am grateful for all of those lessons, and grateful that I have something to go back to, to show my own students and say, “Look, this is one approach, and this is how you might rethink that and approach it in a different way.” Catherine Cooper: So, what are some of the challenges of creating a program like this? Heidi Swierenga: Well I think the most important challenge to overcome is the understanding that it’s important and the prioritization of this type of work over other things. Within every institution, that is such a challenge in itself because there are so many different priorities. Also, another challenge would be the connections to the communities for institutions that maybe didn’t have such strong connections. I think the other big challenge for us, and it’s one that we’re still dealing with, is how do you get the information out? And that goes pretty deep. It’s not just letting families know that they can come and access the collections here, but families might not even know that their belongings are here. Many things have been taken from communities in different ways, a lot that was done within a period of oppression imposed here by the Canadian federal government and throughout the world. And family members may know that their belongings were taken or sold, but they may not know where they went. So, part of this is trying to facilitate that research process as people try to discover where their material culture now resides. The Reciprocal Research Network that was co-developed, MOA being one of the partners, is one platform that we support and that helps with that. We also feel it’s important to make sure that our own home collection is digitized and accessible online through our collections Access System. But that’s just one thing. How do you get the information out about the grants that you do hold? And what we’re learning also is, how do you write about it so people make sure they know that this information is for them? Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today's show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Discussing the Display of Mummies with Curator Gina Borromeo (Episode 102) ]]> Fri, 27 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/596A5AD9-DE99-E218-2B4BFE1B1BC2A4B2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-5989AE60-D08A-90BA-1CB14A8AC4745D07 Discussing the Display of Mummies with Curator Gina Borromeo (Episode 102) National Park Service Dr. Gina Borromeo, Curator of Ancient Art at the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum. In this podcast, they talk about Gina’s work on redesigning the RISD Museum’s Egyptian Art exhibit and the museum’s decision to rehouse the mummy, Nesmin, in his sarcophagus. 885 no full 102

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Dr. Gina Borromeo, Curator of Ancient Art at the Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum. In this podcast, they talk about Gina’s work on redesigning the RISD Museum’s Egyptian Art exhibit and the museum’s decision to rehouse the mummy, Nesmin, in his sarcophagus.

Gina Borromeo: The redesign and reinstallation of our Egyptian mummy—and that is of a Ptolemaic money of a priest named Nesmin—Nesmin and his coffin has been at the RISD Museum since they were acquired in 1938. Since that time, they have always been on view separately; the mummy on one side and the coffin on the other. I would say that in the past couple of years, we have had certain programs and projects in the museum that began to question whether it was okay for us to continue to display a human body in the museum. These projects were based on a discussion called Double-Take where we invite two different experts to discuss one object from two points of view. During that discussion, which happened between a professor of criminal justice and an anthropologist, it was brought up that the idea of displaying a mummy in the museum was problematic and specifically, the displaying of a human being in an art museum.

That was also followed closely by a project made by a RISD MFA student who had a program here that spoke all about the display of black bodies in particular. Here, he was really asking the question whether we would show a mummy if it were not of an Egyptian, weather we would feel equally free about displaying a white body. In addition to that, there was a Brown BA thesis that discussed various displays of mummies in the United States.

I think these three programs together made us rethink our approach to this display. Some of the questions they raised were: “Is a human body of work of art?” Then another one was, “Does the human body belong in an art museum? And if so, should it even be on view?” Then they brought up the fact that we would probably not display other human remains in an art museum, particularly Native American human remains because of NAGPRA considerations in this country. They pointedly asked, “Well, what makes it okay to show an Egyptian body?”

I think we had to come face to face with the questions, or actually the realities, that we have always seen Egyptian mummies on view in museums so much so that they have become normalized and we began to question that idea. Is it in fact okay to continue to do so just because it’s become normal? I think we started thinking that, well, no. Just because Nesmin no longer had descendants who could speak on his behalf, didn’t mean that we had permission to continue to show his body in this very public context.

Also, it became clear to us that we could still continue to talk about Egyptian religious traditions and even Egyptian religious beliefs about death and about the afterlife, but didn’t have to show the mummy anymore. In fact, the coffin itself could stand in as the object from which we could educate our viewers about all these issues.

Catherine Cooper: It sounds like there were a number of different aspects that you had to mediate in redesigning the exhibit. How did you handle those different voices?

Gina Borromeo: Well, first of all, this was a very difficult decision and one that I did not want to make alone. So, I engaged other members of the museum staff in this discussion, certainly the director, the deputy director, our conservators, our registrars or installation staff and even other curators, as well as outside experts, outside Egyptologists and anthropologists, were part of this discussion process. In the end, the major points of consideration were continued care for the mummy and the coffin. We wanted to make sure that whatever we decided to do would not damage the mummy any further or the coffin. We have to remember here that these have always been on view separately. Essentially, that wooden coffin has not held the weight of Nesmin’s mummy since the 1930s and we were really afraid that the wood had become brittle. There were cracks throughout the coffin. We were really scared. I don’t think that’s an overstatement of the situation. We were scared to put the weight in and we were afraid we would further damage the coffin. It was interesting because our conservator, brilliant conservator, Ingrid Newman, decided that perhaps we should place little tissue bandages across the cracks of the wooden coffin so that when we put the weight of the mummy back in, we could see whether those cracks would tear the tissue paper and if so, that meant that we were causing damage to the wood and that the wood may not be able to take the mummy’s weight anymore. Fortunately, that did not happen, but I have to tell you that when we were putting the mummy into the coffin, a lot of us were holding our breaths and there was a visible sigh of relief when we discovered that in fact, the coffin was stable enough and could still hold the weight of the mummy and that essentially, it was still good for its original purpose.

I would say that a second consideration in our decision was also consideration for museum visitors because while I would say a great majority of our visitors are school children come to the museum to see the mummy, it is a highlight actually if they’re sixth grade experience here in Rhode Island, they come to the museum to study ancient culture; so ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome. They have come to expect to see Nesmin in the museum. We had to let people know that we would no longer be showing him, but I have to tell you about something else that I think not a lot of people know and that there have been instances where our visiting public, and I’m speaking specifically about these sixth graders, there’ve been instances where their encounter with Nesmin is their first experience, their first vision really, of death. For some children, this has been a traumatic experience. I have heard of teachers who have had to take children out of the room because they were so shocked and disturbed by seeing a dead body in the museum. These are things that I think the general public doesn’t know about, but I felt very strongly about the fact that we had to think about our museum visitors. The RISD Museum, I don’t know if you’d know it, but it is a small museum, so we don’t have a space that we could segregate with a notice outside that says, “You are about to enter a room with human remains.” I think visitors can just be roaming around the museum and immediately, before they know it, be face to face with the mummy and the coffin of Nesmin. So this is a way of also, not shocking people into that experience if they were not prepared for it. Also, we worried about the coherence of the display. Because we would be taking the mummy off view, we had to deal with a whole other side of the case, and we’re talking about a custom made climate controlled case here that was quite expensive and that we could not make modifications to really. We couldn’t move the support, we couldn’t move the stainless steel framing supports that held the shelf for the mummy and the coffin. So we had to think about what we should put on the other side and we were able to find painted mummy portraits from the Roman period to put on the other side. But I would say that if I had my choice, I would really prefer to lower the coffin a little bit right now because you really can’t see the top of the decoration on the coffin, but we had to deal with the limitations that we had and not being able to make modifications to the case.

Catherine Cooper: In rehousing Nesmin and changing the display, it was also an opportunity for further education of why this display had changed and why RISD has Nesmin, and you were able to work that into the display, correct? Gina Borromeo: Once we made the decision to put Nesmin back in his coffin, we focused on how to make our decision process transparent to our visitors because I think it’s a really good illustration of how museums decide to do things. We decided to make videos that when you visit the museum you can access, and we decided to make these videos so that they addressed specific questions that we thought people would want to know about. The first question and the first video deals with, “What do you see on the coffin?” Essentially, what can we learn from the text and images that are on Nesmin’s coffin? Then the second video addresses how Nesmin got from Egypt to Providence in 1938, so his history of ownership and where we think he might have been excavated and how he passed from one private collector to another before he eventually made his way to RISD. Then the third, and I think perhaps the question that is most interesting to a lot of people is, is a body of work of art? This basically answers the question of why we chose to put Nesmin back in his coffin. We had invited an anthropologist and an Egyptologist to talk about how ancient Egyptians viewed bodies and mummies and how that has changed from antiquity through today. Basically, touches also upon the history of the display of mummies in museums. That was very interesting. I would say for the most part, I’m really happy with the way that display turned out and really quite happy with the videos. But should things change in the future, I know that what we did could easily be reversible and we can improve on these videos, so I leave that open. I hope that we could make this display even better for our visitors. Catherine Cooper: Have you gotten any feedback that you’d like to share on how people have received the change to the exhibit? Gina Borromeo: When people realized they could no longer see him, at first there was, I wouldn’t say an outcry, but people were asking questions, “But why? But why?” And gradually, now, over time, people have said, “Well, Oh goodness. Those are actually valid questions. I’m glad that the video is here to help me understand why you did what you did.” So I guess that’s positive feedback. In this display, we really felt a responsibility to the mummy of Nesmin and the coffin, so we took such care with it. We were concerned about making sure that we did not cause harm to the mummy of Nesmin and the coffin that we in fact, practiced the move several times before we actually did it. Our manager of installation, Steven Wing, made a model of the mummy that was about his size and weight and we wrapped it in linen as we would eventually wrap Nesmin. Then with members of the installation crew and with the conservators, we practiced lifting him out, lifting him from his shelf. We did this so we could identify where possible issues might arise and so that we could find solutions together about we have to support him more specifically here, and we have to lift this part up just a little more when we put him into the coffin. At the time we actually made the move, it was done in one smooth movement. These decisions, obviously it was not taken lightly, but we tried to prepare as much as possible for the move of Nesmin back into his coffin. I like to think that he is finally now in his intended resting place and that he is finally getting the rest that he’s so, so deserved and that we had temporarily interrupted. Now, he is back in the coffin and resting quietly we hope.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for sharing that process with us.

Gina Borromeo: Thank you, Catherine, for allowing me to do so.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Dr. Jennifer Kramer, “Shake Up: Preserving What We Value” (Episode 104) ]]> Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/DEE82A46-D4AE-32FF-E461A8053DD4925B.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-DEF43C2C-C8B9-3F16-C78B901883315919 Dr. Jennifer Kramer, “Shake Up: Preserving What We Value” (Episode 104) National Park Service Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Dr. Jennifer Kramer, who holds a joint position at the Museum of Anthropology--frequently called MOA--and the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In this podcast they talk about Dr. Kramer's recent exhibit, “Shake Up: Preserving What We Value,” which explores earthquakes from a variety of perspectives including First Nations narratives and teachings, and the seismic upgrades that the museum will undergo. 832 no full 104

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K. Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service's National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Dr. Jennifer Kramer, who holds a joint position at the Museum of Anthropology--frequently called MOA--and the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. In this podcast they talk about Dr. Kramer's recent exhibit, “Shake Up: Preserving What We Value,” which explores earthquakes from a variety of perspectives including First Nations narratives and teachings, and the seismic upgrades that the museum will undergo.

C. Cooper: What is the Shake Up Exhibit and what was the impetus for creating it?

J. Kramer: The Museum of Anthropology is about to undergo seismic upgrades of a significant portion of our building called the Great Hall to protect against seismic movement of the earth. As a result, the curators were tasked with telling our public what was coming, and what to expect, and what they could learn about the process when they were physically cut off from being in the Great Hall.

The Great Hall is this soaring space of glass filled with totem poles from the First Nations of the Northwest Coast and other monumental sculptures. So, we wanted to prepare people about what they were missing seeing, but also make them understand why it was so important that we preserve what we value.

C. Cooper: When designing this exhibit around these seismic upgrades, how did you and your team decide which narratives to include and how to balance them?

J. Kramer: I co-curated this exhibit with Curator of Education, Dr. Jill Baird, so it was definitely a team effort. With her interns in the Department of Education and also with help from other curators in my department, because we have four curators that work with First Nations Northwest Coast peoples here in British Columbia.

It was a learning curve for Jill and I to learn about what causes earthquakes and how they can be mediated. We had to do our own research on protecting historic iconic buildings, of which the Museum of Anthropology is one. It was designed by Arthur Erikson, a Scottish-Canadian architect, who is quite famous for his modernist buildings. But in this case, he was very much also inspired by First Nations longhouse and big house construction and also was inspired by having a building that fit within the land. This is always an important message from the Museum of Anthropology, that we sit on the ancestral, unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking Musqueam people.

So, while the architecture is modern, it might seem like it’s a different trajectory than seven thousand plus years of inhabited history for the Musqueam people. There’s actually a tactile relationship with the architecture. So we wanted to preserve the iconic architecture, we wanted to preserve, of course, these incredibly important First Nations totem poles, which tell long standing histories between people, their territories, their ancestors, and how they came to live and steward the land upon which they draw their resources.

But we also realized that it was a bigger story than so-called western science about how do you preserve a material building using—and this is what we’re doing, we’re using something called base isolation, which I have learned a bit about. But what we also realized was beyond the science, the engineering, the architecture, we realized there was so much knowledge within the Indigenous communities who live on the Northwest Coast about how you survive an earthquake and a tsunami. And we realized that there are multiple ways of knowing and being prepared for what now we think of as these ultimate disasters, but we realized there was knowledge to be learned from talking to Indigenous communities.

So, Jill and I basically looked at the totem poles we had represented in the Great Hall and said, let’s try to do an overview from the north of British Columbia—so we chose a Haida Gwaii Haida artist, Kwiaahwah Jones. From relatively the south, so we chose Tim Paul, a Hesquiaht Nuu-chah-nulth elder from Vancouver Island.

And we chose someone sort of in the central coast from the Kwakwaka’wakw community, from the Nelson family, Frank Baker and K’odi Nelson. So we basically asked them, as this kind of north to south representation, of their cultural teachings about earthquakes and tsunamis. And that was where the exhibit exploded. In a wonderful way.

There is actually only one physical belonging, or otherwise known as a treasure maybe, in this exhibit. It’s a Ninini Kwakwaka’wakw Dzawada’enuxw earthquake mask. Ninini means earthquake. And it has been in our collection since the 1950s, sold directly from the widow of someone that had owned the rights to dance Ninini as part of his box of treasures in Kingcome Inlet, Gwa’yi, a Dzawada’enuxw Kwakwaka’wakw man.

What was exciting about this exhibit is first, we became involved in figuring out—so just from this one physical object—we did research to figure out whether there were living community members who were attached to this mask that had been in our collection for seventy years. And we were able to find a family that owned that connection and still had that right to dance Ninini. And we were invited to a potlatch in Alert Bay, British Columbia in October 2018, to watch a different version of this mask be danced and we recorded it. We were given permission to record it and show it as a five-minute film. But then due to establishing that relationship with that family, they got closer to the mask in our collection and the following year, a different member of that family, who held that inheritance, asked that the mask that was in MOA’s collection, go up to Alert Bay to be danced in his memorial potlatch in October 2019. And so, we now have footage of that and what it is, is showing that this cultural heritage, this material heritage is not from the past, that it has ongoing meaningful significance. It’s a small exhibit but it’s scattered in multiple locations and it covers a tremendous amount of information about what causes earthquakes, tectonic plates, the Ring of Fire, vernacular architecture that worked with protecting buildings from earthquakes like the longhouses on the Northwest Coast. We also share chronologies of earthquakes around the world, beginning with the last major subduction zone Cascadia earthquake that hit the Northwest Coast in 1700. So, another sort of larger, underlying reason is we know from science and from records around the world that subduction zones, so underwater tectonic plates that suddenly slip causing mammoth sort of scale eight or nine earthquakes, happen about every 250 – 500 years. So, we are definitely due for one here in Cascadia. And so, this was getting that message out.

C. Cooper: How will these seismic upgrades help protect both the building and the contents of the Great Hall?

J. Kramer: Now, caveat, I am not an architect, but I have spoken to our building people to understand. Base isolation is a platform which has this ability to move sideways during an earthquake in order to allow the energy of the earthquake to go out sideways instead of forcing the totem poles and the other monumental sculptures in the building to fall down due to vibration. So it releases the strength of the vibrations.

What we learned was that, we’re going to have to actually take down the building completely in order to put in this base isolation and then rebuild it. It was somewhat of a shock to us all, but it will be a safer construction if we start from scratch, and it will be built to exactly Arthur Erickson’s vision. But I want to add that the seismic upgrades made us realize not just that we were preserving the iconic building or even preserving tangible material culture, but also that we were working on preserving intangible knowledge, intangible heritage that was part of the mission of the museum.

And so, respecting all of that knowledge about how to be prepared for disasters from First Nations on the Northwest Coast, was also part of what we were preserving, what we all valued. And so, we were making those different knowledges from the west and from Indigenous people with thousands and thousands of years of history on the land, come together, to work together and that was exciting.

C. Cooper: Because of the pandemic, quite a bit of this material has gone up on MOA’s website. How did you decide what portions to put up on line, and will they remain up beyond the physical exhibit?

J. Kramer: When we all went into lockdown in mid-March, everyone at the museum moved very, very quickly to plan how we could share the work we do at the Museum of Anthropology with the larger public. One advantage of virtual access is it can be from anywhere in the world if you have the bandwidth. So, in some ways, we’re thinking this is a complete sea-change in how a museum does the work it does. I doubt we’re going to take down what we’ve already put up. It isn’t about forcing people to come and pay door admission in order to hear these stories about earthquakes, see these dances about earthquakes and longstanding family relationships to specific lands, territories, and resources, songs. I imagine they will stay online.

We did a three-hundred and sixty virtual degree tour of the Museum of Anthropology Great Hall that people can go online and experience for themselves. Because I imagine once we get the hoarding wall up, which is supposed to happen in the fall, it probably will be closed to the public for 18 months at least. The Shake Up exhibit will obviously remain.

C. Cooper: This “Shake Up: Preserving What We Value” exhibit is one of two exhibits that are planned to discuss natural disasters. Can you speak of it to how this exhibit will interact with or converse with the other exhibit?

J. Kramer: I can’t say that we actually planned it this way. It was a lucky happenstance, and especially if you add the pandemic into dealing with global disasters. But the two exhibits do work very nicely together. Our Curator of Asia, Fuyubi Nakamura, has been planning an exhibit called, “A Future from Memory: Art and Life After the Great East Japan Earthquake.” She’s been working with artists that have done contemporary responses to what the 2011 great east Japan earthquake meant and has ongoing meaning. Also, the remnants of what was found from the tsunami, photographs that were lost to people’s families. I know she went, and they had thousands and thousands drying, trying to connect them back to their families. So, it’s been a grand preservation effort of reconnecting individuals to their personal history, but also a country figuring out how to deal with this disaster. And I would read a statement that she made that I think is really important as to how it connects to Shake Up. She said, “A Future from Memory will show that this disaster is not simply about a region, Tohoku, or a country, Japan, rather this event has global relevance. Fishing boats from Tohoku arrived on the shores of the Pacific Northwest, reminding us that we are connected by the same ocean and are mutually responsible for our environment.” She put that wonderfully, but it also is what we were thinking about when we did Shake Up. That we’re all in this together, the Ring of Fire circle, the world and so we are all mutually responsible for our human relationship to the earth. It’s about making us all think about the land beneath our feet and how we move forward into the future, knowing that we know there’s going to be another disaster.

C. Cooper: Thank you so much for sharing this exhibit with all of us.

J. Kramer: Thank you. It’s been wonderful sharing it with you.

K. Ammons Thank you for listening to today's show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast, show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Celebrating the 19th Amendment with Stories from the Lucy Burns Museum (Episode 103) ]]> Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/084B2281-B4A7-BAE0-036A78BC86C3D736.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-084BC33D-CCA1-0AF6-F42101734943F575 Celebrating the 19th Amendment with Stories from the Lucy Burns Museum (Episode 103) National Park Service Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Laura McKie, the creator and current director of the Lucy Burns Museum at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia. In this episode they talk about the women who picketed the White House in pursuit of women’s right to vote, and how these suffragists fit into the larger history of women’s suffrage in the United States 815 no full 103

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Laura McKie, the creator and current director of the Lucy Burns Museum at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia. In this episode they talk about the women who picketed the White House in pursuit of women’s right to vote, and how these suffragists fit into the larger history of women’s suffrage in the United States

Catherine Cooper: What is the Lucy Burns Museum and why is it in Lorton?

Laura McKie: It is there for a very special reason. The prison that was built in Lorton was for the District of Columbia; in 1910, they built a men’s workhouse and in 1912 they built a women’s workhouse.

A few years later, 1917, women from the National Woman’s Party began picketing the White House in support of women’s right to vote. They were on duty in front of the White House with banners but silently standing from January until the beginning of the summer of 1917.

Up till that time, in that winter and spring, Woodrow Wilson, who was then President, was not concerned apparently about these suffragists. But right around the middle of the summer, he became more and more upset with having them there. He asked the commissioners to ask the police chief to get rid of the women. He did not want them in front of the White House. So, arrests began. At first the women were sentenced to a couple of days in the DC jail, but since they kept coming back—this didn’t stop and the women appeared every day, every day—these sentences got heavier. They were frequently offered the opportunity to pay a fine, but no one did. They chose to take the jail sentence.

So, beginning in late summer of 1917, suffragists who were arrested began to be sent down to the women’s workhouse in Occoquan. They were sent there up to November of 1917. The last group of women came in mid-November of 1917 and they were treated horribly. While they were there, they were roughed up, they were forced to be in cells, which at other times they hadn’t been. Lucy Burns, who was one of the arrestees, was chained to the cell bars with her hands over her head all night long and that was typical of what was done.

They asked for permission to be political prisoners, but they were denied that. So, they decided to go on a hunger strike. The warden did not want them to die and become martyrs to the cause, so he ordered that they be force fed. Force feeding is not a very pleasant activity: it involves putting a tube down a person’s nose, down past their throat into their stomach, and then using a funnel, raw eggs and milk were poured down into the woman’s stomach. From what was written by those who were involved, it’s a very painful process. And they did that three times a day and, in the meantime, while they were doing this, they would walk by with plates of fried chicken, apple pie, coffee and stand outside the cells, hoping the women would give up. They couldn’t see each other at this point, and they were told that all the other women had given up, but they hadn’t. So, they were using every kind of psychological and physiological things to make the women quit. But they didn’t.

Eventually, it was found out that the women were at the workhouse because they had basically been smuggled down. So, there were 32 women there and after about a week, a lawyer came down and wanted to see them. He was denied the opportunity to see them, but he got a writ and came back and was able to see the women and saw what terrible shape they were in. He then went to the courthouse in Alexandria to a federal judge and arranged for the women to be brought there on a writ of Habeas Corpus. It was a challenge to get the women there because they were in such fragile condition, and we have photographs of some of them coming out of the jail and they looked terrible.

That particular incident was so powerful, they were written up in virtually every newspaper across the country in great detail. Names were listed and how they were treated and so on.

This combined with all the other activity that was going on in support of women’s suffrage, basically forced Woodrow Wilson to go to the Congress and ask them to pass an amendment. After five tries, they actually did in 1918. Then the amendment was sent around to the states for ratification and it was ratified in August of 1920. And that’s why we are now celebrating the 100th anniversary of the enactment of the 19th amendment.

We honor the women at the workhouse for what went on in 1917 because it was so influential. And many people have said it was a turning point in the views that people had of the suffrage program.

Catherine Cooper: How is the story of the Occoquan Workhouse unique in the suffrage story in the United States and how does it fit in to the other aspects?

Laura McKie: Well, a lot of things were going on in women’s activities around the turn of the century. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had been so in front of the movement, were passed away by the turn of the century and a new group of women came in. And they began to be active all over the United States and they proceeded in a variety of ways. The National American Woman’s Suffrage Association felt that it was most important for them to work at the state level and to go state by state. The group that Alice Paul and Lucy Burns formed was an outgrowth of that. You’ll hear me use those names, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, frequently because they were the ones who spearheaded the activity in front of the White House. No one had ever picketed the White House and especially no woman had ever done anything like that before. It was considered outrageous.

Lucy and Alice were the co-founders, but we named the Museum after Lucy Burns because she was the only one of the two to actually be imprisoned at Lorton.

Catherine Cooper: What objects or elements did you have to work with when putting the museum together and can you tell us a bit about how they’re displayed?

Laura McKie: We relied primarily on photographs. The Library of Congress has wonderful photographs from the period of the activities of the women in front of the workhouse, of groups being attacked by visitors who were surrounding them, having their signs pulled down and stomped on, being shoved around, it became a messy thing. In the exhibit, many of these pictures are blown up to larger than life size.

In addition to that, we have three beautiful larger-than-life size statues of Lucy Burns, Alice Paul and Dora Lewis. Dora Lewis was chosen because she represented one of the older women who were involved with the project. The oldest woman who was imprisoned was 72 years old and the youngest was 19.

The only real objects that we have on display that directly relate to the suffragists are the jail log books, and we’re fortunate enough to have the three logbooks that cover the dates from 1916 to 1918. These are great, heavy books, probably five inches thick and they weigh about 20 pounds each. But inside of those books in carefully written script—the script is beautiful—are the names of everyone who was arrested in the district, day by day, hour by hour, what they were charged with, where they came from, and what the disposition of their charge was; if they were sentenced, what they were sentenced to, and if they were released.

This is the place where all of the names of the women who were arrested are listed and includes the 72 women who were sent to Lorton to the workhouse. It also includes the other women who were sent to DC jail. The one that we have on display is open to the page that has the most suffragists names on it. Lucy Burns’ name is there. It lists and details all the things that happened to her while she was there. Many of them listed the name of the place where they resided as Cameron House. And Cameron House was like an office-boarding house right in Lafayette Square for women who had come to town to stand in front of the White House and picket. Women came from all over the country, but it was also Alice Pauls’ office.

Catherine Cooper: For visitors to the museum, what are the main things that you want them to take away.

Laura McKie: So, I really want them to know the bigger story, starting with the group who met in Western New York in 1848 and the intense involvement of so many thousands and thousands of women, leading up to the 1920 amendment. It was amazing. It was the largest organization that the United States has ever had. The vast majority of women who were working toward the suffrage amendment were white women. They did come from all classes, however. But black women were not included. It was a conscious decision made on the part of the leadership. They wanted to get the South behind the project of getting the vote and they felt if they brought black women into that process, that the South would turn against them. So, they consciously decided not to include them. However, African American women across the country were very, very active and working towards the vote. However, their view was a much broader view than the white women. The white women were narrowly focused on one thing, getting the vote. The African American women had a much broader social agenda, because although African American men had been given the vote in the 15th amendment, they, in many parts of the country were not allowed to vote under the very strict Jim Crow laws that were then in effect. So, the African American women who were working towards suffrage, wanted to enlarge the vision to include men, but also to include the social aspects of the black community which were then so terribly benighted. So, African American women were there but not nearly so obviously.

One African American woman and her daughter did, in fact, picket the White House. She was not arrested, so she’s not on our list of people. Her name is Mary Church Terrell and she’s a very, very fascinating woman who lived in Washington DC, and in her autobiography, she writes about her experiences.

The second thing to take away in my opinion is to recognize that women were willing to die for the vote, because people have died from going on hunger strikes. They went into this situation and went to jail willingly because they felt their sacrifice was sufficiently important for everyone and they were willing to do it. So, we need to honor that bravery, that commitment by voting and voting locally, voting statewide and voting nationally.

In 1920, not everyone in the United States could vote. Even though women had been given the right to vote, Native Americans couldn’t vote, Asian Americans couldn’t vote, citizens of District of Columbia and of the territories of the United States could not vote. It wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that everyone in the United States who was a citizen over the age of 18, could vote. So that’s the last message that I tend to throw out to people as they leave the exhibit is, vote.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much.

Laura McKie: Been a pleasure. And I hope that folks will visit us digitally if not in person. We do have a website. It is workhousearts.org/LucyBurnsMuseum.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast, show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Running a Small Museum during the Pandemic (Episode 101)

]]> Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D5950EA1-EB1F-4461-A9F0D3915036E9AC.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D5AAFF4D-F8DE-3CF7-F50C220BAE97B80A Running a Small Museum during the Pandemic (Episode 101) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Allison Titman, Executive Director of the American Helicopter Museum and Education Center in West Chester, Pennsylvania. In this podcast they talk about how the pandemic has affected small museums. 743 no full 101

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Catherine Cooper: Thank you for joining me today.

Allison Titman: Thanks for having me, it’s great to be here.

Catherine Cooper: I’d like to start with asking you to introduce yourself and the museum.

Allison Titman: Sure. I’ve been at the museum a little under a year. It’s a really cool place and has about 35 helicopters on display outside and inside. When we’re open and not in the conditions of a pandemic, several of those helicopters are actually interactive because we want people to understand—as much as they can without taking flight—what it’s like to really sit at the controls and to pilot a craft like that. We also offer helicopter rides, have special events for holidays, do all the fun museum type activities that everybody else does.

Prior to being at this museum, I was actually at the American Alliance of Museums as an Accreditation Program Officer, where I worked with museums of all types and sizes as they prepared for, and then achieved, accreditation.

And in case all of that isn’t enough work, I’ve also been involved with the Small Museum Association for about ten years. I am currently the President Emeritus of the Board.

Catherine Cooper: How is small museum defined in the United States?

Allison Titman: I would get that question all the time when I was the one fielding emails for SMA and my answer generally is, if you feel like your museum is small, then it is small. People throw around different definitions based on budget and staff size; it used to be under 250,000 dollars annual budget, now I hear more under half a million, something like less than five staff members or less than ten, but it’s really hard to define. So, what I say is a small museum is one that feels like it doesn’t usually have the resources it needs to meet its goals but figures out innovative ways to meet them anyway.

Catherine Cooper: You have mentioned that we are currently in pandemic times, how has that affected your museum?

Allison Titman: Well like every other museum, we’ve had to close. We closed on March 13th [2020] and are still closed, though we’ve just been notified that museums in our region will be able to open over the next few weeks. During that closure, myself and the one other full-time person transitioned to working from home. Unfortunately, I did have to furlough my six part-time staff members because without earned revenue, we just weren’t able to sustain our usual staffing levels.

During the closure, we’ve been working to maintain operations in terms of finances and the essential tasks we have to do to keep the place running. I’m also trying to take advantage of this time to do some behind the scenes work on how we use technology and other systems to make sure that we’re streamlining our work as much as possible, so that when we go back, our lives are hopefully a little easier. I’m also, like every other museum, applying for all the various funding opportunities to help us get through this crisis. And I’ve had to work on a phased reopening plan, looking at what kinds of cleaning and disinfecting procedures and safety protocols we’re going to have to institute to open safely and then putting those on paper, so that our staff and our volunteers and our visitors all feel safe reentering the facility.

Catherine Cooper: Could you tell us any details about that plan, sort of how it fits in with the phased reopening of your region or museum practices that everyone has been discussing?

Allison Titman: Sure, so it’s a combination of information from my region, information from federal sources like the CDC, and then thinking about how our museum works and how to integrate those things into our operations. And I think all Directors and all operations staff members and other people with similar responsibilities have been cobbling together the same things. It’s challenging to take a set of CDC protocols on cleaning and disinfecting and then think about how that applies at my 30,000 square foot building, 15,000 square feet of which is a big gallery full of helicopters, but which also has a museum store, staff offices, two commercial tenants, a theater space, an archives, a library and I’m sure other people are grappling with the same things.

Our most popular spaces are our kids’ helipad area and then our interactive helicopters. Both of those spaces are meant to be really heavily hands on. They’re supposed to engage all ages, but especially those learners who might not be reading yet but who can really experience things using their other senses. We use helicopters as a gateway to STEM education, and we feel like those hands-on experiences help to make that connection between helicopters and aviation to larger concepts for people of all ages.

So, we have had to think through what spaces have to close because they’re just too high touch we can’t keep them open, versus what we can keep open if we make sure to clean more heavily, and to make sure that people understand really what the experience is going to be like in the new normal that we’re all having to deal with.

Catherine Cooper: From speaking with colleagues who work at other small museums, how similar or different have their pandemic experiences been from yours at the American Helicopter Museum and Education Center?

Allison Titman: My friends and colleagues have really had a variety of experiences. For me, I’ve been at the helicopter museum less than a year, so I was still in a phase of doing some organizational transformation in terms of our goals and our programming and what we were really trying to put in place to build on for the future. So, I have colleagues whose institutions are more settled who have solid programs in place, who have been able to make really impressive pivots into virtual programming. Friends are doing things like virtual story times, and turning an education program that was previously in person into a zoom-based experience. And then being able to reach out to institutions like local libraries that are looking for virtual programming and partner with them.

I used to be on the Board of the Greenbelt Museum in Greenbelt, Maryland and as they think about reopening, they’re seeing a phased approach, where the first thing they bring back is their walking tours of Greenbelt. That’s an outdoor experience that people can engage in more safely, whereas the museum itself is a house from the late 1930s that’s less than 1000 square feet. So, you can’t put too many people in there at one time at this point.

So, people are really thinking through what kind of existing programming they have and how to pivot to make it fit our current conditions. And then we’re all dealing with some uncertainty around the future. Whether that’s financial uncertainty, whether it’s not knowing if visitors are going to come rushing back to our institutions when we reopen or whether it’s going to be a trickle at first. And then how people will respond as we have to make adjustments over time. If we can’t have our signature events or if we have to really reduce our capacity, will our audiences understand why and really work with us to follow the safety protocols we feel like we have to put in place.

Catherine Cooper: How can members of the public help small museums at this time?

Allison Titman: So, during the pandemic I got a new phone system at the museum because we had a traditional system where the phones rang to our desks, which didn’t work when we weren’t at our desks. So now the museum’s phone rings through to my cell phone, and I’m the frontline staff picking up all the calls.

So, the first thing the public could do that would be really helpful is just to be understanding. I know that there are people who really want to get out of the house, and who really need a place to take their bored kids now that their summer breaks have started, but some museums just aren’t permitted to be open yet, and some are still putting their safety practices and protocols in place and aren’t ready.

So, members of the public should just keep an eye on museums’ Facebook pages, websites, anywhere they’re posting information to see when they’re reopening, if they’ve had to adjust their hours, if they’re asking people to buy tickets online in advance. It’s really helpful if people take a second to plan their visit and to look up the information before making a phone call or before just showing up. And then if the public really care about an institution, it’s great if there is a way for them to financially support that museum. If they can’t do that, can they share the museum’s Facebook post, or forward the emails, or tell their friends how long they’ve been a member of the museum and what a great experience that’s been? So, whether people have dollars or can just extend the museums reach, that’s all really helpful right now.

I think right now, we’re all trying to figure out what the future looks like. And we’re having to think about the short term because that’s where our heads are, that’s where we’re all working. Either our museums have just reopened their doors or they’re working towards that, decisions are having to be really immediate.

What I think is coming, and we’re starting to have to grapple with, are the longer-term implications of this pandemic and what the lessons we take away from it are.

When I worked in accreditation in 2018, we were still seeing museums who had not rebounded to their pre-2008 recession levels. So, cataclysmic events like this affect museums for years and years and years. But on the bright side, these kinds of events give us a good opportunity to plan for the future. What can we put in place now or over the next year or two years, that will help us weather the next crisis? How do we build more sustainable institutions and how do we become more resilient? And I don’t say that lightly, I know it’s not easy. I know that small museums in particular, but all museums in general, tend to feel under resourced and to feel like it’s really today that they can handle and the future that has to wait. But I think that if we can learn from this crisis, that we have to plan and we have to put a strong foundation in place, we can at least take something positive out of what has been a fairly negative experience.

And if nothing else, at least it shows that we are all in this together. It really is museums across the globe that have had a hard time and it’s been wonderful to see people talking to each other.

We might be stuck at home, but we have access to people across the country and across the world and our museum professional organizations have really stepped up to offer helpful resources. So, the American Alliance of Museums, AASLH, ASTC, all of the museum umbrella organizations and then the disciplines specific organizations, have really tried to help their members and the field at large.

So hopefully, no one feels like their museum is struggling through this alone.

]]> UHawaii Hilo students caring for ‘ohana at Kalaupapa (Episode 100) ]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/A838E6BC-E0FA-915C-381CDFA3AC4AC8C6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-4188E326-B6DB-C314-3DF9C0467561621C UHawaii Hilo students caring for ‘ohana at Kalaupapa (Episode 100) National Park Service Jason Church talks to students from the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo. In this podcast, they talk about the students’ cemetery preservation work at Kalaupapa National Historic Park. 817 no full 100

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Recent HOPE Crew at Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

K. Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. Today we join Jason Church as he talks to students from the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo. In this podcast, they talk about the students’ cemetery preservation work at Kalaupapa National Historic Park.

J. Church: You’ve been here now for a week and a half doing cemetery work here at Kalaupapa, so introduce yourselves and let’s talk about what you’ve been doing.

Darienne: My name is Darienne Marie Kaiaʻokūlaniakea Kealoha, I go by Darienne.

Nanea: Aloha, my name is Naneaikealaula Victoria Thomas and I go by Nanea.

Cody: Aloha, ʻo Cody koʻu inoa my full name is Cody Koʻokāne Pacheco, but you can call me Cody.

Kinohi: Aloha ʻoe, my name is Kinohi Pūkaua o Kamehameha Neves and you can call me Kinohi.

Sheldon: Aloha, my name is Sheldon Takeshi Keoni-Kawikaonalani Rosa and you can call me Sheldon.

J. Church: What interested you in doing this project? Why here and why the cemeteries?

Cody applying D/2 to a grave before scrubbing with a natural bristle brush.

Cody: Well first, before I think we talk about the importance of being here, we should talk a little bit about the history of this space and so where we are located right now is a peninsula on the island of Molokai and it’s called Kalaupapa. This peninsula at precontact time had Native Hawaiians living and residing here but in 1866, that’s when the first leprosy patients were brought to this settlement. There were nine of them, there were six men and three women. And at that point in history, Hawaii was experiencing a very drastic change in the way that our native populations dealt with leprosy and how our ancestors were dealing with that disease, which at the time, had not cure.

And so, this settlement which is about two by two miles long and wide, totally trapped off from the rest of our islands because of the two thousand foot pali or cliffs on one side and then being surrounded completely by the ocean on the other side. And so, you can think of it as a natural prison and so when our government was dealt with the leprosy epidemic that was occurring, the Board of Health decided to take these people from our communities who were dealing with leprosy and put them in this landlocked prison of some sort.

And so, that started in 1866 and since then…it ended in 1969 and in between 1866 and 1969, roughly eight thousand patients were brought to this peninsula and so the reason that we’re here is because that eight thousand plus patients that were buried here and died here have graves and markers. Not all of them but those that do have that, we’re here to just mālama take care of them.

Kinohi: Mahalo Cody, for all of his manaʻo it’s important to go to the history because when you hear the history, you’d assume that everyone would want to be here, but for a lot of schools and this was brought up during our week here, that sometimes this subject is not covered in our classes. I know in my education, it wasn’t really a subject in school. As he mentioned, there’s eight thousand patients and during our work days here, we’ve seen a lot of familiar names. Some family members that we didn’t know had family here and maybe they don’t even know our friends connection here.

For me, my parents have always told me that there was a family member that was a resident here. That drew me into being a part of the class, being involved and to reconnect that family tie.

Nanea: Like Cody and Kinohi said this place has a lot of very important history here in Kalaupapa for a lot of us students, it’s personal history. We are called here, not only a privilege but in great honor to be able to come to this space and mālama each and every single grave on this peninsula. A lot of us are called here because we do have family here, whether we are able to identify their tombstone or not, every single grave on the peninsula is ʻohana to each and everyone of us and it’s very special too when we do find our ʻohana because whether you see the name or you hear someone say the name out loud and you’re like that’s my ʻohana it’s bigger than an oha moment, it’s that connection that just…it roots you even more to this space and really makes you appreciate just being able to be herea

Hilo students scrub a concrete grave marker removing biological growth.

Darienne: To go off of what Nania was saying and then to go all the way back to Jason’s question about why we applied, it was something that Kumu Kai mentioned in one of her history classes. It was just that she was going to have this class and if you want to do it complete the application with an essay and when I did the essay, it was the first time that I really thought about whether or not I have a connection here, or how much my family doesn’t know about Kalaupapa. And when I started to ask my family members, they didn’t even know what island Kalaupapa was on or like what it really was. All they knew was, oh yeah, some Hawaiians got sent there and they were isolated from everyone else.

When Kumu Kai put it out there that we were going to come to Kalaupapa, it felt like a tugging sensation and it felt like something I had to apply for, and I had to make sure that I was going to come here, and I was going to be able to be on this trip. And like everyone has said, we all have connections, but we don’t always know about it.

Yes, so the more I learned about Kalaupapa, the more questions I asked my family and I found out that I did have family here and had I not got that tugging sensation to come to Kalaupapa, I wouldn’t have asked about our family history here or even if we had history here.

When we went to ʻĪliopiʻi it just so happens that my family was there that day. I didn’t think much of it when somebody told me, “Oh, I found a Kahihikolo over here, maybe check it out.” As soon as I got to the grave, I burst into tears. And I think everybody saw me just like crying on the side to myself. That was something that kind of brought it all together for me was that feeling of connection to my family and to my culture that I don’t really get to experience that often.

Rinsing the grave marker after cleaning with D/2.

Sheldon: That we can clean the gravestones and how we can mālama and take care of the kūpuna so that we can remember it, we can pass on their stories, because you know we all have a kuleana here. We all didn’t get to experience this teaching of what Kalaupapa is and what the trauma that these patients went through. So, we all have a responsibility here to teach this to our children and to the next generation to make sure that they know this history, because if you don’t pass it on, then it’s gone.

Cody: Today, Kumu Kai asked me a question in the field that we were working in, she said, “Cody, are you learning things from this workshop? What have you learned if anything?” And amongst the many things that I listed to her in response to that question was, that the ability and skills that I’ve gained in learning how to mālama and take care of these gravestones and the connections that are built when you take care of them, is something that I’m going to take home to my families graves.

And I know…when I was a kid, my family would always on Sundays go to a cemetery where a lot of my ʻohana is buried and it’s been awhile since we’ve gone but I know that a lot of the graves of my ʻohana is falling apart or the soil is running away and just being in this workshop, constantly I’m thinking about how now I have the tools and the skills and the desire more to go back home and take care of that ʻohana that I know deserve more. And so, I really appreciate that from this workshop.

Nanea: Like Cody said, how to properly tend to cemeteries, specifically gravestones and thinking about the gravestones that I can access and tend to back at home. When I was young, my mom used to take us to Kona of the island, which is where most of my family is buried and we were never allowed, me and my siblings were never allowed to eat McDonald’s and so when we’d visit the cemeteries, we’d buy one bag full of all cheeseburgers and we’d go eat our little McDonald’s at the cemetery. And I didn’t like pickles so I’d give pickles to the grave sites and then the fries that don’t make it into the little fries’ box, they would get dumped into the bottom of the bag, we’d dump it on the graves so they could enjoy it with us. And so now going home, I can do more than just give them my pickles, I can you know, properly scrub them, pull the weeds and tend to them, so I’m really excited and grateful to have learned all this knowledge on proper tombstone care and take that home to my ʻohana there.

When I think about it, there are over eight thousand patients buried here and only about one thousand, a little over one thousand of which are visibly marked graves. And so, when we research them and then see their graves, we get to, each person gets to mālama their person a little bit extra and then when they tell their story, it’s a way for us to do our…a small part in making sure that each person is remembered.

Student uses a bamboo skewer to remove biological build up from the inscription.

Kinohi: As Sheldon was talking about how he talked to Uncle Mike and that he describes this place as a forgotten place, I would say for whoever is listening that, that connection to us should be that where ever our grandparents, our uncles and aunties or whoever is buried, that that place doesn’t become a forgotten place as well. That we learn from Kalaupapa that where our family is buried doesn’t become Kalaupapa as well. That we stay connected just as we reconnected here in this place.

Darienne: On the first day when Jason, Molly and Rusty was talking to us about what we’re going to be doing for our time here, I don’t remember who said it but somebody said to ask for consent before scrubbing the graves and when they said that, I thought it was funny because we all knew we were going to do that anyway. That we were going to ask for permission to be in that space with our kūpuna before we work in the first place. And then something else to mention is that Aunty Mikiʻala it took some time to explain to us the different signs of our kūpuna saying, “Okay yeah, you guys can come in, it’s okay” and some of the ones that she talked about was hearing the manu or like the bird chirping, is it a happy chirping or is it like a warning chirping. If it’s a happy one, then obviously, yeah you can go ahead and if it’s a warning, then maybe we should go somewhere else or maybe we should work on something else or it can be like the change in temperature and the wind or a feeling that you get, knowing that it’s okay to go in or it’s not okay to go in.

Sheldon: I would like to say thank you whole crew and Jason, Rusty and Molly for coming down as well as NPS for allowing us in here. Thank you for hosting us and giving us this awesome opportunity to give back to our community and give back to Hawaiʻi to the patients that lived here. Giving us the opportunity to reconnect with these people and to connect back to Kalaupapa. We now all have a kuleana that we need to ʻauamo or carry, a responsibility we get to carry and we’re thankful that you opened that avenue and that gate for us to be able to explore this and to learn how to take care of our kūpuna. It’s been an awesome experience and it’s going to be a memory that I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life.

Kind of ending it on “He Mu” it’s a protocol we do before we leave so that all the negative energies, of spirits perhaps, you know they’ve never seen people in a longtime sometimes. So, when they see us young people coming down, they get excited and they want to talk. So, we do this just to tell them like, goodbye. Please stay where you are and don’t follow us back and just to keep them where they should be, because you don’t want to be taking this energy with you because it can affect your life.

That’s what a lot of people have been saying to me before I came here, like don’t bring anything back. So, they gave me a bunch of salt, like make sure you leave Kalaupapa at Kalaupapa. But yeah, I’m just making sure we let them know like, okay we are leaving and a hui hou, never aloha but always a hui hou, until we meet again.

UH Hilo students: Chanting “He Mu”.

K. Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.NCPTT.NPS.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody

]]> Finding and Preserving LGBTQ Southern History with the Invisible Histories Project (Episode 99) ]]> Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/415E6563-0FFB-248B-AB762E4B7108D6FA.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-4172CFCF-F9E8-C6EC-400BDA04C58A7875 Finding and Preserving LGBTQ Southern History with the Invisible Histories Project (Episode 99) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Josh Burford and Maigen Sullivan, the co-founders of the Invisible Histories Project. In this podcast they talk about the Invisible Histories Project and their work finding and preserving queer history in the South 844 no full 99

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Josh Burford and Maigen Sullivan, the co-founders of the Invisible Histories Project. In this podcast they talk about the Invisible Histories Project and their work finding and preserving queer history in the South.

Catherine Cooper: What is the Invisible Histories Project and how did you come to start it?

Poster presentation on the Charlotte Queer Oral History Project

Maigen Sullivan: We are a 501C3 non-profit. We’re not a traditional archive or a traditional education, but our main focus is LGBTQ history and archiving. We act as an intermediary between organizations like museums and libraries and universities and LGBTQ people in the south. So, we’re trying to connect folks and locate histories in order to get them preserved and researched. So that’s basically what we do. It’s a little unusual, there’s not a lot of folks doing that because we don’t actually have that kind of physical archives space and we’re not a university, but we act between them in order to preserve that history in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia as of March this year. And we also manage a network of archivists, historians, just people interested in queer and trans southern history. It’s called Queer History South, which is a conference where we get together, and we just talk about best practices. How do we find this history? How do we preserve it and how do we make it accessible?

Josh Burford and Maigen Sullivan, co-founders of the Invisible Histories Project

Josh Burford: I think how we got started is very typically a queer story in that there was this gap. We were looking for information about our own history. We were being asked information about our own history and we didn’t have access to it. It wasn’t in traditional repositories, it wasn’t in libraries, it wasn’t being studied at universities and so, we took it upon ourselves to do what a lot of southern queer people have done, which is grass roots organize to locate and preserve our own history.

The nice thing is Maigen and I have both been in higher ed in the past. We understand how it works. I moved to Charlotte in 2012 to build an archive for the city of Charlotte—an LGBT archive—and so, while I was there, Maigen and I talked about the possibility of taking this city-wide project and turning it into a state-wide project in Alabama. Since we’re both from Alabama and both from the deep south, it made sense that that’s where we would start.

And now we’re a regional project within in two years. There’s just so much material that needs to be collected. We’ve collected sixty-three individual LGBT collections in Alabama in the last eighteen months. We’re on track to double that number in the next two years and we’re on track to have collections that wide and in that much scope in Mississippi and Georgia. We’ll be at five hundred, six hundred collections in three states in four years.

Catherine Cooper: What materials does the project seek to collect and are you actively looking for these collections?

Josh Burford: Yes, we are actively collecting and so if you can imagine a spreadsheet in your head for a second, you know there is a whole section that’s just stuff we’ve already collected with all the data. There’s a section of collections that have started but we haven’t picked up materials. So, that list is probably around seventy or eighty individuals and groups. So that we’ve contacted them and then we’re working with them. And then we have our research collections. I mean, the one from Georgia has gotten so big, so quickly and we’ve only really been officially in Georgia since March.

So, we are working with donors every single day. I mean I was on the phone with donors this morning, I have donor meetings the rest of the week and even though we’re distancing, you know we’re looking for ways to continue the process.

Josh Burford and donor with the first disco ball from a gay bar in Tuscaloosa

Every single donation that we pick up—and I think this is part of the benefit of doing a grass roots-based project—is that I see every donation that we pick up as access to fifteen or twenty additional donors and donations. Because we are asking people when we pick up their materials, who influenced you? Who were your people? Who was your community? And so, the work quickly fans out especially because of the connectivity between Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. There’s so much shared history there.

As far as what we’re collecting, I mean it would probably be easier to list what we’re not collecting at this point. But you know, the traditional manuscript collections, so letters, photos, documents related to organizations, meeting minutes, posters, flyers, the usual stuff that you’d see in an archive. But because, to make Maigen’s point, we’re not a traditional archival repository, a lot of 3D collections; so, dresses, drag performance gowns, Mardi Gras textiles, banners from gay pride festivals, we’ve got the very first disco ball from a gay bar in Tuscaloosa, which is in our office currently.

Maigen Sullivan: The good thing about us, is because we’re really focusing on community accessibility, that’s our number one goal for materials. So, we have a number of repositories that we work with and these are both local, state repositories as well as some national partners that we negotiate what that will look like and then we can work with the donors to get their materials to the right place.

Ideally, something would stay local, so if it came from Birmingham, Alabama, it would go to Birmingham Public Library. However, everyone has restrictions on what they can take and size and specialty, so if there are pieces, we do like to keep things together, but let’s say that there’s a really critical piece like a disco ball, that can’t just be stored anywhere, we will find the repository that is invested in storing that kind of material in order to make sure that it’s the right fit for the archive as well as the donor.

Catherine Cooper: So that actually very much speaks to the next question which is, what is your process for housing and preserving and it’s these partnerships…

Josh Burford: Yeah, and I think the layer that we have that a lot of traditional archival repositories don’t have, is that we have integrated social media into our work. We also have amazing archival repository partners, so if we get a piece in and it’s in really bad shape or it’s like Maigen’s point, like a disco ball, like where’s that going to go? We have a network of people we can reach out to immediately and find out. So, we’re not saying no to collections right away, but we get the chance to bring collections in to IHP, to do what we call a pre-sort. So, we’re able to organize the materials as they come. So, it doesn’t matter what shape they’re in. We work with the donor and then we get it figured out.

Alabamians marching on Washington as part of a large rally calling for lesbian and gay rights; October 11, 1987

Then we get to take photos of material, we put that on our social media. We get to look at what the collections are about and then start building lists of individual people we want to work on the collections because we’ve got this huge network.

I think, if things had been different in our world at the moment, this summer we would have had four different graduate and undergraduate students in Alabama, all working on a different collections.

So, we’re pushing the material out, we want people to see it and handle it and to look at it and to photograph it and to write about it and to experience it. So, for us, the preservation piece is very crucial so that people can see it from now and a hundred years from now.

But Maigen is right, accessibility is at the top of our list because as we’re very fond of saying, the difference between archiving and hoarding is a very important distinction to make. It’s not enough to have it in a box. It’s not enough that it’s safe. It needs to be available to the public.

Maigen Sullivan: We also provide support for the repositories and the universities that we work with. So, you know you’ve got all this stuff coming in, sixty collections really fast, that is very overwhelming. So, what we like to try to do is give this information up front; this is what’s in this collection. We’ve worked with the donor, they understand what is and what isn’t archivable. We’ve gone through and cleaned things up and then we work with universities in the three states that were to bring in graduate archival students that will help fully process. You know, write up the finding aids, organize everything, help store it and then give everything to us, so we can connect with researchers, either on student level or a faculty level who want to come in and research the material and get that out into the public as well.

So, we’re helping a lot of these folks get the things that we donate to them ready for research and accessibility pretty quickly because these students are, they’re killing it. They come in and they’re like, boom, boom, boom, forty boxes, what’s that?

Josh Burford: It’s also nice to be able to plan for the future of individual materials that we’re getting. We get requests all the time for things like LGBT identity and southern religions, or lesbian history. As we’re bringing collections in, we already have a working list of people that we can reach out to, even before we’ve picked up the actual boxes and say, “Hey, I want you to know that this is coming.”

Because of that we’ve been able to build coursework at so many of our institutional university partners so that undergraduates are working with primary documents. They’re digitizing for us. They’re describing collections, they’re creating subject headings for search.

Catherine Cooper: So, for people who are looking for getting access to these collections, what do you recommend?

Josh Burford: Well I think the easiest place to start is our website, which just went through a facelift and so it’s really beautiful and people should look at it, InvisibleHistory.org. It’s a good place to start because we’re listing out our institutional partners and our collections by state. If they follow us on social media at all, they’ll be able to see the collections literally as they arrive on our doorstep.

And then, we push people to our repositories so that they can make the initial contact. Anybody that were working with, if you pick up the phone and say, “I’m looking for this collection, IHP brought it to you,” they can get it to you.

Lesbian Avengers from Mississippi State University, October 1995.

Maigen Sullivan: We are on Instagram and Facebook the most, we’re at Invisible Histories Project on both of those. We are technically on Twitter, but we are not great at Twitter, but you can find things there.

Another thing too, if people are looking for something, if they’re interested, if they’re doing a project or if they have materials that they want to donate, we get a ton of hits on social media, they’re like, “Hey, I have this 1940’s piece, is this good?” They can email us at contact@invisiblehistory.org, and we can work with folks to figure out what would be best, particularly with everything being so weird right now, trying to get them access to the materials is going to be a little tricky because like Josh said, most of the stuff isn’t digitized right now at least.

Catherine Cooper: What are the ways you’ve been able to use these collections in your education programs?

Maigen Sullivan: We do a lot of talks, we do a lot of presentations, we have worked with queer youth centers and we have a traveling mini exhibit that represents mostly Alabama right now, but also Mississippi and Georgia.

The biggest thing was in the beginning, well even now, this material was not widely available. It wasn’t collected and if it was, it was oftentimes hidden under weird headings or unacknowledged or not processed. So, we have spent, at the beginning time, just getting the materials, just finding them and bringing them in. We are now to a place where we can do more education.

Photo of Frank Bowers, a drag performer from Birmingham, AL in the 1920s.

Josh Burford: And we’re not starting from scratch, because obviously there have been queer historians before, but because we’re new and because people know who we are now, at least on some level, we’re able to try different things that maybe people haven’t done before. So, we launched a digital project called, Drag Family Trees and so we’re having drag queens literally, physically map out their drag families for us, like their drag mothers and siblings are. And then at a certain point coalescing all that material together so that you cannot just see the evolution of an individual drag queen but all the connectivity between all of the deep south states. I mean there’s so much connectivity between Atlanta, Birmingham, Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans, just in that I-20 corridor. And anytime we can get primary documents in the hands of undergraduates, I’m delighted.

Maigen Sullivan: So, we’re working with organizations and individuals who are involved in some sort of queer organizing or movement, to archive what they’re doing right now. So, we come in yearly with different organizations, different individuals, we say, “Okay, what do you got from this year,” so that we can create plans that we can go ahead and integrate, with things from the 1920’s, with things from the turn of the century, with stuff from the 2000’s, so that young folks can understand that you’re a part of history and that all of these actions that you take, add up and matter at some point. And I think that’s been really great to see as we’ve worked with folks.

Catherine Cooper: For people who want to get involved both now and when we’re allowed to meet in person again, what would you recommend?

Maigen Sullivan: The first thing is to follow us on the social medias, check out the website, email us at the contact Invisible History. If you’ve got questions, we do have a few ways for people to get involved. All of the archives that we work with are shutdown.

So, we can’t keep producing social media posts like we used to, so if folks have queer southern photos that they would like to share with us, we would love to get them, to feature them online. We’ve started a YouTube series, where we sit down and talk with different folks doing queer history work across the country or who are involved in queer organizing. So that’s available if folks want to just see what people are doing and ways that they can get involved outside of IHP. Just shoot us and email if you’re interested and we’ll figure things out.

Josh Burford: Something else that we want people to know about is that we’ve launched a new program called, Archiving at Home, which now has a tab on our website. You can click on it. Basically, it is a step by step explanation of the process; how you go from a closet full of materials to an archivable collection step by step. It explains both, what kind of materials we’re looking for, how you should be putting things together, etcetera. It also explains digital documents, so like what you can do for digitization. If you have digital clouds, how we preserve those.

People can download the PDF, they can start working on it and if folks live near us in Birmingham, Jefferson or Shelby county, you will actually physically take them boxes and so, they can have boxes on their front door safely and start putting stuff away, which we really appreciate.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i Hilo (Episode 98) ]]> Thu, 21 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/3444769B-FE7F-D4C3-64DD7C2AB9E3D0EE.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-3526F8C2-A393-B3DF-A9DAFC41BD6877B8 Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i Hilo (Episode 98) National Park Service Jason Church talks with students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. In this podcast, they talk about the Hawaiian studies program at University of Hawaii. Speakers: CJ Sweezey,Emma Tanigawa, Jason Church. 784 no full 98

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Student Group: Chanting “Ua Ao Hawaiʻi”

Kevin. Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. Today we join Jason Church as he talks with students from the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. In this podcast, they talk about the Hawaiian studies program at University of Hawaii.

Student Group: Singing Hawaiian Song.

Jason Church: Introduce yourselves and tell me a little bit about the program.

Makoa: Aloha, mai kākou my name is Kekamamakoaaka’ilihou Kaleilani Caceres but I go by Makoa.

Emma: Aloha, ʻO wau ʻo Emma Kawaikahi Tanigawa, I just go by Emma.

CJ: Aloha, my name is Kenneth Clinton John Sweezey and I go by my middle initials, CJ.

Makoa: But to best explain Hawaiian studies, UH Hilo is really a place where the Hawaiian language is kind of revitalized, so a lot of our professors nowadays were the original folks who first made the first Hawaiian language text book. So, a lot of our focus is on revitalizing the Hawaiian language because it was almost a dead language at one point prior to the first Hawaiian renaissance in the 1970 -80s. But we learn a bunch of different things involving language and culture. So, we have this thing called Kumu Honua Mauli Ola, which is the foundation of what a Hawaiian identity consists of. So, that includes language, spirituality, body language and all sorts of things. Throughout all of our courses at UH Hilo, base all of the coursework on those foundational beliefs.

Jason Church: So, what kind of things do you study in the program?

Emma: Besides language, we also study things such as traditional uses of native Hawaiian plants, we study traditional mele, traditional hula, we also have a papa iʻa class which is a class about ocean animals, fishing, stuff like that.

Makoa: There’s two pathways; so, there’s continuing the culture, which a lot of those courses focus on the revitalization of language and prepping you to become a teacher. So, UH Hilo actually has the only teacher accreditation master’s course that’s completely done within Hawaiian language and that program is really meant to prepare some of our students to become teachers in the Hawaiian Immersion programs that the state provides. For those parents who put their children and want them to be educated primarily in the Hawaiian language. And the other pathway, monitoring the culture, that’s kind of where they try to connect the Hawaiian studies program to all the other disciplines. So, some of the classes that count towards that degree our marine science programs, a lot of anthropology programs, history classes and that kind of stuff.

Jason Church: So, what drew you three to the Hawaiian studies?

Emma: Okay so, when I joined the Hawaiian studies program, my main goal for myself, was actually to learn as much traditional knowledge as I could in order to help educate others that do not have this same opportunity regardless of age, regardless of gender, regardless of race, because I feel like even in public schools all across Hawaiʻi, they don’t really have a good strong foundation when it comes to Hawaiian studies being implemented within public schools. Developed, not only in schools but also in like all of Hawaiʻi and help it become our traditional knowledge, become more normalized.

CJ: I think that when I moved back home to Hilo, I went and lived with my grandfather, who I have never had a relationship with and he’s from Kalapana. Just learning from him, learning about that side of the family made me realize that I wanted to learn more about this place that I call my home or my second home.

Being back in school, especially in higher education in college has allowed me to really open many doors to learn about it.

Makoa: So the reason that I ended up joining the Hawaiian studies program, my parents met at UH Hilo and they were both in the Hawaiian studies program back in the late 90s.

When I was born, I was put into a Hawaiian Immersion preschool Aha Punana Leo o Kona and then as soon as I graduated from there, I went to kindergarten, from kindergarten through sixth grade, I was taught primarily in Hawaiian, in one of our Hawaiian Immersion schools, at Ke Kula Kaiapuni ʻo Waiau.

So, throughout my entire life, the Hawaiian language was all I knew and Hawaiian studies, wasn’t something that I needed to study to know, that was just my life was Hawaiian studies. Everything that I was taught from my parents, and everything at home is basically what I’m learning in class now. So, it makes it really easy for me.

The reason why I decided once I graduated high school, to jump back into it was because I felt my Hawaiian ideology that we have this thing called ʻO wau ma kuleana, which means to take care of your responsibilities. But to say that kuleana equals responsibility isn’t completely true. It’s more a part of who you are, it’s more a part of your identity, that you’re not your truest self unless you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing for the betterment of your community.

And so, learning about my past, learning about my language, learning about my culture, it takes me one step closer to who my ancestors meant for me to be and that was a vital person within our world community.

I think that what we learn at UH Hilo, which is really unique compared to other universities, is that in order to make our world a better place, we need to take ourselves back into the mindset that those of indigenous culture had, that that’s the future that we want. And that’s something that we’re learning here in Kalaupapa is that community and all of the foundational beliefs that are instilled within those communities, it is our duty, it is right to become those vital people in that community. And that’s what you learn at Ka Haka ʻUla or the Hawaiian studies program at UH Hilo.

Jason Church: So, every morning here at Kalaupapa, you guys have done what’s called…what you call piko?

Makoa: First think of the word piko, it means center. So, like our human body we have three different piko’s and each piko connects us to a different part of who we are. So, at the top of our head there’s a piko and that connects us to our ancestors. Our bellybutton, that connects us to our mothers and our genitalia, that connects us to our future generations. So, piko, if all of your piko’s are in alignment, then that means that you’re in balance.

So, every morning we hold piko, because we’re trying to re-center ourselves, we’re trying to focus all of our energies so that we can ensure that whatever kuleana whatever responsibilities we have, that we are in a place where we can take care of those responsibilities.

Emma: With that being said, that’s why we choose certain mele to perform every day and along with that, we also have, well it’s tradition that the kāne [men] get their mana’o and that following that a wahine will come and give her mana’o based off of what the kāne had previously said and build off of that for the day.

CJ: Even when we say the E hō mai which is like asking for knowledge, right, I really like that because that’s what we’re trying to gain right now, we’re trying to gain knowledge from you Jason, you know from your preservation work, we’re trying to gain knowledge from the kūpuna here, like Mikiʻala and stuff and from our professor Kumu Kai and from one another. You know, we’re learning the weʻre feeding off of one another, so I really appreciate it and I wish more of my classes incorporated that type of protocol or that type of ritual…

Emma: I think growing up on Oahu, no one in my family spoke the language. No one in my family danced hula. No one in my family sang or knew any Hawaiian mele. I feel like after entering the Hawaiian studies program, I’ve learned so much about what it means to be Hawaiian, what it means to be Kānaka Maoli. I’m just very grateful for that.

Now, I’m teaching my family all these mele, I’m teaching my family hula, I’m teaching my family about all these traditions that they didn’t have the privilege to learn growing up. So, not only am I reconnecting to my ancestors but I’m helping all my family reconnect to my ancestors.

Makoa: So, I would say, kind of building off of what they’re saying, being a student at UH Hilo, not just in the Hawaiian studies program, but being a student at UH Hilo, just in general.

We’re in a very unique circumstance because there’s a lot going on in our communities, in our local communities makes our learning a little more important, makes our learning a little more interesting.

So, for example, Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani which is the name of the Hawaiian studies program at UH Hilo, came as a result of basically a bunch of our elders rebelling against the state and making their own illegal schools where they taught their children in Hawaiian. The Hawaiian studies program came as a result of those struggles.

Being a student at UH Hilo, which is located on the big island, during a huge controversy such as the thirty-meter telescope being built on Maunakea, it kind of teaches you that knowledge that you learn in the classroom is most important outside of it. So, I feel like especially at Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani and especially being a political science major, learning all of these different strategies about how to advocate for indigenous rights, indigenous beliefs, indigenizing an educational system, that’s what makes being at UH Hilo awesome. Because we’re seeing the struggles that we’re learning about in classrooms happen live outside of our communities.

We can walk outside of our classroom, look up the road and see the mountain that, to us is sacred; a very large telescope is being proposed to be built up there and so I think that’s kind of the coolest thing that I’ve learned. I’m taking everything from one of my classes, bit by bit, and learning how to use that information to advocate on behalf of my people, our people, and I think that’s, yeah, that’s what makes me a UH Hilo student.

Student Group: Singing “Hawaiʻi Ponoʻī”

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Applying Polymer Science in Conservation (Episode 97) ]]> Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/C920E521-07AE-3A37-9BFB0BD01C503807.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-C961DB3F-E3A6-4614-C666167957D91274 Applying Polymer Science in Conservation (Episode 97) National Park Service Today we join North Dakota State University's Alison Rohly as she speaks with Drs. Stuart Croll and Dante Battocchi. In this podcast, they talk about Dr. Croll's work with conserving modern art and Dr. Battocchi’s work with conserving metal sculptures. 1134 no full 97

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join North Dakota State University’s Alison Rohly as she speaks with Drs. Stuart Croll and Dante Battocchi. In this podcast, they talk about Dr. Croll’s work with conserving modern art and Dr. Battocchi’s work with conserving metal sculptures.

Alison Rohly: Dr. Croll, given your physics background, how did you first become interested in art conservation and how does your background in physics and polymers align with modern art conservation?

Dr. Stuart Croll

Stuart Croll: Well, firstly I have to say that I studied physics because that’s the way my brain works. It seems to be what I’m probably best at in terms of the science and technology fields. There’s probably no linear connection between physics and art conservation at all. And in terms of how my background applies, I liked and studied physics because I was always interested in how the world around me worked—that’s the natural world as well as the technological world. Although I had to study it, I was never interested in nuclear particle physics or quantum theory or anything like that. I was much more interested in what I could see and how it worked and I suppose in that regard there was a natural sort of focus on material science and then polymer science became a natural part of that and coating sciences proved to be a natural part of that and a lot of artwork work is coatings and very similar materials.

Everything, my sort of scientific and interest inclinations, fit very well actually in many ways because a lot of the problems that appear are not only chemical related but they’re sort of physics and engineering related too. I actually started my interest in art conservation and when I was about your age. I was at the National Research Council in Canada as my second job actually, ever. And I was studying the internal stresses generated in coatings where they try and kill us. That’s the evaporation of solvent and the cross-linking, densification, and all the rest of it and all these stresses tend to cause cracks and you see that they became brittle. And I published a handful of articles and then the Getty Museum got in contact with me and we exchanged letters in those days. And I ended up going down there. So I was in Canada, in Ontario, and I went down to the Getty.

It was only in the Villa in those days on Santa Monica Boulevard. No, on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. And so I went in after hours, and I talked to their one technical person at the time, and he was interested in the work I’d done and why and how paintings cracked and how other works of art are cracking and what might have caused that and all the rest of it. And then he showed me around. I had my own personal tour of the museum and the backrooms where they looked at things and so on. So, and it made a huge impression on me at the time and so I was sucked in there and then.

Then, a few months later, a museum in England got hold of the same articles and we exchanged letters. I didn’t actually go there, but… So I was fascinated to realize that there was this world where my research was relevant, that I’d never really thought of before. It’s always nice to be appreciated, isn’t it? I mean, it just sort of lay in the back of my mind for decades and then we were approached here actually, and that’s how the interest here started. So Dr. Bierwagen and I were sitting there doing our booth duty at a paint show about 2002 and then two scientists approached us at the desk. One was from the Tate Gallery in London, England, and one was from the Getty museum in Los Angeles. And it ended up they wanted us to do some work.

Alison Rohly: So related to that, could you specifically talk about a project or two you’ve worked on as it relates to art conservation?

Stuart Croll: Well, I could talk about that one actually because it was all about modern art. Turns out modern art is now not so modern anymore. Many of the pieces we think of as modern art are actually 50, 60 or more years old and in need of fixing in some way. And most of my interests actually have been, most of my work has been, on what you would call modern art because of that. So, the project for us here was in two parts. One was to make latex that would correspond to the latex paint that the artists were using basically in the 1950s. So we found an old formulation and Dr. Webster’s students made a latex. My part of it was to try to solve some mysteries that they were discovering, because these two places—the Tate in London and the Getty in Los Angeles—had started ramping up their analytical capabilities and so a lot of good spectroscopy and chromatography and they were looking at the materials in modern art, trying to understand what they’d got and how to fix them.

And they were finding all sorts of compounds in the modern paint that they’d never seen in old paintings. So my part of it was to go back—and this is where NDSU played its role because at NDSU in the library we’ve got all these old books that date from the start of the coatings industry as an industry. All the old books, they could take formulations, a lot of old journals and digests from the Ag. school here—they’ve all got old formulations and what sort of materials would have been in paint from the nineteen hundreds and then through the 1920s and 1940s and onwards. So my part was to try to look at the formulations of particularly the latex paint that would have been used by artists in the 1950s and 1960s, and deduce which were the most likely ingredients in those formulations.

So I spent months pouring through all the archives of NDSU and what they wanted as the final outcome was the top six most likely latexes, the top six most likely greater TiO2 pigments, the top six most likely surfactants, the top six and so on and so forth. Just to give them a clue as to A. what they would expect to find and get from their analysis and give them a clue as to perhaps where they could go and find more details so they could deal with their art problems with more confidence, I suppose, they were going to do the right thing.

Alison Rohly: What do you think are some major challenges in this field from a scientist’s perspective?

Stuart Croll: Well, in many ways they suffer the same challenges that we do. So modern art really I suppose started perhaps between the World Wars and uncertainty boomed hugely after the Second World War. At the same time, the number of different polymers and coatings and plastics and other materials was booming as well.

So the artists had all these materials to try to get whatever effect they wanted to get and combine them in ways they what actually is would offend you and I with other aspects. Since, as I said, these works of art now in need of repair, restoration, conservation and understanding because although the artists might’ve used materials they bought at a local hardware store, most of the time they never recorded which materials they were. So in order to understand and fix them and so on, conservation scientists need to understand very exactly what the composition is of whatever it is, and why and how it’s doing—progressing towards failure the way it is. So they need to be able to analyze the composition of a variety of materials in combination that you and I wouldn’t think of, so they’re interest in high end spectroscopy and chromatography and microscopy is profound these days.

You and I understand the interest and need for nondestructive testing. But you and I don’t care if when we put an instrument on a surface it leaves a small mark. We don’t really care, they do. So we must provide them with nondestructive testing techniques that don’t touch at all, don’t leave any trace of their use. And if we can’t do that, art conservation scientists are allowed to take tiny, tiny samples from artworks. Well from places that the owners and viewers don’t notice, but they have to deal with tiny, tiny quantities of sample. You and I might think were hard done by if we have to use only a few milligrams or something; I’m talking another order of magnitude or so smaller than that because the job is to do no harm to the artwork but still deal with all the issues.

There’s this huge interest in analytical techniques—it’s one of the trends. There are a few labs around the world in partnership with museums and galleries and art conservation scientists, where they’re using some seriously big analytical facilities. There are groups in Germany, France, and this country where they go and use the national labs’ synchrotrons to get high beam, high intensity beams, I would say x-rays or something, so they can examine a tiny, tiny samples and get all the information out to it. They can and that was unheard of a dozen, 15 years ago, but now I have such an interest in analytical techniques.

The NSF in this country gives grants for that sort of thing. Occasionally, not often, but occasionally. They have the same sort of interests that we would understand. I suppose in some ways you’d have to say it’s slightly more extreme ways. One of the problems that modern materials have brought is fixing waterborne artwork, waterborne coatings, so did latex paint. You’ve got to be able to repair it in a way that doesn’t change or damage the existing. We are intrinsically waterborne ourselves, so every time we touch it… so they have to learn compositions in materials they can use for filling in cracks and so on. They can then remove from a waterborne coating without damaging the original material.

Modern art, since the second World War, has had a lot of organic pigments available. Well, in the old days it was easy to tell whether this pigment was a cadmium based one or an iron based one, something like that. But now you’ve got all these pigments which are only slightly different one from the other and they’re all the same carbons, hydrogens, oxygens and so on. Getting an exact match to the original color that the artist used, it’s not trivial when you’re faced with all the organic pigments that we know about now.

And in the old days, old masters’ paintings were typically varnished, so you could disguise essentially the difference in gloss between the repair and the original material by just covering it was varnish which brought the gloss across the whole thing to the same value as well. If you’re trying to touch up, say, a big metal sculpture where there’s a bit of rust or something’s happened in one corner, you’ve got to not only get the color exactly right, but you’ve got to get the gloss exactly right. So we have to match gloss as well as match the colors. So this is lots of things to think about.

Alison Rohly: Dr Battocchi, how did you first become interested in bronze art and architectural conservation and how does your background in materials and coatings help with your approach to conservation?

Dr. Dante Battocchi

Dante Battocchi: My interest in conservation comes from a long time ago when I was a friend with a student who was developing a polymer under a grant from NCPTT; she was an artist and a chemist and so she was developing a selectively removable polymer to be used in art conservation. I was doing another project, but we are very good friends and so I kept learning and listening about what she was doing and got an interest in this bronze art conservation field. And when it was time that I decided to open a small business, Elinor Specialty Coatings, and we were deciding what to produce and what to develop as a product, we decided to go with that particular polymer. We licensed it from NDSU and we developed it into a commercial product. So I’m still in contact with Tara and I keep her informed of what her polymer is becoming. And I discuss pretty regularly with the NCPTT on what’s going on and stuff like that.

It’s two fold. A friendship and also the commercial opportunity. I am a jack of all trades in materials. I have a couple specific interests, but I pride myself that I can approach different people in different areas. And so conservation, especially metal conservation, has a lot of little aspects. I think that my background helps me to tailor my solutions or my discussions to the specific problem. Conservators have very, very wide, broad interests. Sometimes I think it’s good to be a little more of a generalist to understand what they need and what they are looking for.

Alison Rohly: Excellent. So could you specifically talk about a project or two related to bronze art protection?

Dante Battocchi: Yes. One of them that we hope is going to give us good visibility is that we provided the product that is called Bronze Shield, based on this polymer that was developed here at NDSU, to a conservation company that applied it to the Arthur Ashe statue at Flushing Meadows in New York. Flushing Meadows is where the US Open of tennis are played. We hope that that is going to be our showpiece to show that the material actually works, and it really does the job.

The second one, my first approach was that I’ve been invited once to a conservation site and there was a very big statue from the 1800s of the general on a horse. And so I worked with the conservator to clean it and to take out the old coating that we didn’t really know what it was. We re-did the patina and we applied a clear coat and then the wax. That one was my first approach to see how conservators worked and how deep they work; even on a big piece of metal it needs to be because the surface needs to be accurately cleaned and worked inch by inch. So I like that.

Alison Rohly: Excellent. And that’s sort of where the Bronze Shield developed was initially from the company that you started and now it’s being applied currently to various statues and sights.

Dante Battocchi: Yes, we have been in communication with a lot of conservators in the past few years. A few of them and knew about the work at NDSU and now they all know the product from the commercial side. And so we have been giving and selling it to conservators for their projects, mostly for private conservation projects but also for municipalities and stuff like that. So for public art.

Alison Rohly: So from your perspective, what are some of the most relevant challenges today with specifically bronze art conservation?

Dante Battocchi: Just to take a general approach. I think that every conservator has a personal approach to what product or what solution needs to be applied to the particular [object], so it’s kind of a difficult endeavor to give a product and have them test it, because testing takes a lot of time and everybody wants to give it a little of a personal touch. Another way is that there are lots of bronzes that are out in the field, they have old conservations on, so that is a very difficult way to de-paint or to strip the paint on, especially if there are not too many records available for that. Some staff just have more records on previous work than others.

With my commercial hat, one very difficult thing to do is that when we give out the product for testing, it is very difficult to get feedback back. I don’t know if that one is a question off the length of the test or because when one project is done it is out of sight and out of mind. But having that feedback will be very important to know if the product or the polymer or the solution needs to be further developed or if it’s okay like that. It’s challenging on the scientific side to keep the surface protected, but with the ability to remove whatever coating we put on for the future removal, but also, on the product side, it would be good to know if it’s working or not in the current time to see if we need to modify something or not.

Dr. Alison Rohly

Alison Rohly: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk about your research with us and conservation.

Dante Battocchi: Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Advocating for preservation with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana (Episode 96)

]]> Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/C9FE9C2A-EF84-B0B3-AFD984F89EAECC96.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CA0304B7-95EE-B882-C4A3B56E39E20C2B Advocating for preservation with the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana (Episode 96) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Frank Perez, president of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. In this podcast they talk about the Project's history and role in advocating for the preservation of queer history in Louisiana. 755 no full 96

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Planning. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Frank Perez, president of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana. In this podcast they talk about the Project’s history and role in advocating for the preservation of queer history in Louisiana.

Catherine Cooper: Frank, I wanted to start with the question of what is the LGBT+ Archives Project, and how did it start?

Logo of the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana

Frank Perez: The LGBT Archives Project is a statewide collective, non-profit organization that works to promote the preservation of materials that chronicle queer history in Louisiana. A lot of people think that we are an archival repository, but we’re not. We basically reach out to the community and try to locate materials and say hey, if you’ve got anything that needs to be preserved, here are your options. So, we connect donors to institutions around the state. We have a very good collaborative relationship with museums, libraries, archival repositories throughout Louisiana, and we’ve been around about eight years.

We actually, when we talk about how we got started, about ten years ago, a local activist, who recently died, by the name of Stewart Butler, was 79 or 80 at that time, called together some people who are interested in local history, and pointed out the fact that he had a lot of material that he had saved from thirty, forty, years of activism and was worried about where it was going to go when he died, and pointed out that there were others in the same situation. And that kind of got the ball rolling amongst a group of people to figure out what can we do. Originally, two men by the name of Mark Gonzalez, who was a longtime activist, and Otis Fennell, who owned a gay bookstore here in New Orleans, decided that they would do oral histories and they were going to call it The Legacy Project. And they only did one interview, they interviewed Stewart, but the more they got into it, they realized they really didn’t have the expertise, the equipment, or the time to successfully do it. And The Legacy Project kind of fell by the wayside, but from its ashes grew the LGBT+ Archives Project.

Frank Perez

About a dozen of us met once a month at Stewart’s house, in 2012, trying to figure out what we could do. And we spent that year kind of surveying what was out there. So, we sent questionnaires and did site visits to universities, archives, libraries, private institutions, like the Historic New Orleans Collection, just everyplace we could think of to basically find out what was there. And our basic question was: Do you have LGBT material, and if you do what do you have, and do you want more? And if you don’t have any LGBT material, would you like some? We were delighted to discover that everybody we talked to was interested in acquiring this material.

So we, as a group of lay people, you know none of us had degrees in library sciences or archives or anything like that, we all had day jobs, we were all volunteers, decided that it would be wise not to try to reinvent the wheel, we didn’t have the money or the expertise to open up our own museum or archive. We concluded that the best thing we could do would be to raise awareness about the need for preserving these materials. So that’s how the LGBT+ Archives Project was born. I guess you would date it to 2012 – 13. So, we’ve been around seven, eight years.

Catherine Cooper: When you have people that come to you with these materials, what is your process for directing them or matching that collection to a repository? Is it geographically based?

Frank Perez: Ideally the best practice is to keep a collection close to the area that generated it, or in which it was generated. Ultimately, the decision of where a collection goes is up to the donor. We don’t recommend, we don’t endorse, we just kind of say this is what’s available. Now, the advice that we give and the options that we lay out for the donor depend on the nature of the collection. Collections can be quite varied. If it’s journals diaries, letters, minutes from meetings, any kind of paper documents, that’s going to want to go to an archive. That’s what an archive deals in, paper, rare primary source material. But if it is a three-dimensional object, say a gay carnival costume from a masquerade ball, well archives are not interested in three dimensional objects, that would have to go to a museum. So, it just kind of depends on the nature of the material itself.

Another concern is audio and digital files. Some institutions don’t have the money or the staff or the expertise to handle audio visual equipment or digital born materials, so that’s another factor. But to answer your question, it really depends on the nature of the materials.

Catherine Cooper: And are you actively trying to find these materials in Louisiana?

Recipients at the Gay Appreciation Awards

Frank Perez: Yes, there are a couple ways we do that. We are very fortunate in that the more our name gets out there and the more people become aware that we exist, people will actually contact us with everything from super huge collections to what is called ephemera, these are posters or programs from events. So sometimes people reach out to us and we’re happy to help them, but we also contact people that we know have big collections, and in addition to people, also organizations. So, any organization that is LGBT themed, should really consider designating some area repository as they’re official place to put their records. So organizational records are very important, that’s minutes from board meetings, that’s agendas, that’s posters, flyers, pamphlets, that sort of thing.

One of the ways that we do that, that we’ve found to be very successful, is through an annual event that we conduct called the Oracle Gala. It’s an annual gala fund-raising event. What we do at that is we honor a donor, whether it’s an individual or an organization, who has made a substantial donation of materials to an area institution. What that enables us to do is approach people and organizations and say, hey, if you donate your materials to A, B, or C, we can make you the honoree at our Oracle Gala. And that seems to have been an effective way of motivating people and organizations to donate their materials.

Barbershop quartet at the 2019 Oracle Gala.

Catherine Cooper: Would you say that has been one of your most successful avenues for engaging with communities? Are there other ways that you reach out?

Frank Perez: Oh, there are a lot of other ways that we do that. We do a number of programming events throughout the year. And these could be events like the Oracle Gala, I just told you about. We also do an annual membership meeting where we have a keynote speaker. But we also conduct workshops, social events, things like that throughout the year. We have done panel discussions on the history of the AIDS epidemic in New Orleans. We’ve done workshops on personal archiving at home, for hurricane season; we’ve done social mixers with other LGBT groups. So, we do a lot of different things that engage the community.

Catherine Cooper: So, looking through your website, you also have digital and digitized materials that are housed there. How do you decide what content to post?

Frank Perez: Well, if it’s available, we’ll post it.

Catherine Cooper: [Laugh].

Frank Perez: The problem is we’re an all-volunteer organization, and we all have day jobs, and we have no full-time paid employees. So sometimes we have a lot of stuff that needs to get uploaded, pictures and videos, and they’re just in a backlog, they’re in queue. So, to answer your question specifically, if it’s anything that has to do with LGBT history in Louisiana, we’re happy to post it.

Photo thumbnails from the Southern Decadence Gallery on the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana website.

But we do have a photo gallery of events and organizations and people, and we’ve got a tremendous backlog of photos that need to be processed and uploaded. If anybody would like to help us volunteer to scan pictures, or help with that, we could certainly put you to work with that. We are always expanding our bibliography which is online. We have a very extensive listing of materials that have been done, research that have been done, whether it’s magazine articles, doctoral dissertations, documentary films. We have specific bibliographies on HIV coverage in the newspapers in New Orleans in the eighties, transgender violence bibliography, so forth and so on. So, we’re always looking to expand that as well.

We’ve got a note on the bibliography that says, “If we’re missing anything that you know about, please let us know.” What that enables us to do is help researchers. So, in addition to facilitating donations to institutions, we’re also in a position to help researchers. We get contacted pretty regularly by graduate students, filmmakers, researchers, authors, whomever, wanting to know what’s available on a certain topic. We’re in a great position to say, if you’re interested in A, B, C here’s where you need to go, here’s where it is, here’s what’s available. So that saves researchers a lot of legwork and we’re happy to do that.

I should probably mention that we do have a pretty active oral history program. We collaborate with, we have a partnership with, the T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History at LSU, which is like one of the best in the country, to conduct oral interviews. These are audio, not visual interviews. We’ve done, I don’t know a little over half a dozen, maybe a dozen, interviews so far, and they’re currently in the process of being transcribed. They have to be transcribed and checked for accuracy before they can be uploaded. But we will eventually have that available on the website as well.

Catherine Cooper: Are there similar programs to the LGBT+ Archives Project of Louisiana in other states?

Frank Perez: Yes, and no. The closest thing would be what’s called The Invisible Histories Project of which we are sort of a part, we collaborate with them. That is an organization that is working to preserve queer history throughout the southeastern United States from Texas to Georgia. They got started after we did, and they were pretty pleased to discover that we were already on our way here in Louisiana. They kind of do a state by state approach. They are based out of Alabama, but they have a great website, but we have collaborated with them on a number of projects. Throughout the country, especially in larger cities, like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and others, there are archival repositories that deal with very specific LGBT materials, but what we do here, with the archives project in Louisiana is unique in that we don’t operate our own facility or repository.

Two people posing with a Gay Easter Parade poster.

Catherine Cooper: If people want to get involved, either with your project or with similar projects in other parts of the country, what would you recommend?

Frank Perez: I would recommend that they visit our website, and email us, and ask what’s available. Depending on what people’s talents and interests are, we can usually find something for them to do. We’re always looking for volunteers. People can follow us on Facebook, like our Facebook page, we have a pretty active social media presence. We are a 501-C-3 nonprofit, so we are always looking for financial support. People can donate on the website. So those are a couple of ways.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Looking at a Career with Master Mason Dom DuRubis (Episode 95) ]]> Fri, 27 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CB6AE574-CB47-BFA7-4151EDE9568CA7D7.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CB6C62A4-ACCF-7546-6B55287D876382AE Looking at a Career with Master Mason Dom DuRubis (Episode 95) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Dominic DeRubis, historic preservation mason at HPTC. In this podcast they talk about Dom‰s career with the National Park Service and how he originally joined up with Williamsport Preservation Training Center. 897 no full 95

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Dom DeRubis teaching at a PTN event at HPTC.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Jason Church as he speaks with Dominic DeRubis, historic preservation mason at HPTC. In this podcast they talk about Dom’s career with the National Park Service and how he originally joined up with Williamsport Preservation Training Center.

Jason Church: Dom, you are well known as a red mason and instructor. When and how did you get into this?

Dom DeRubis: My dad was very big on education because he only had one year in Italy. So he wanted us all in the family to go to college and he was a coal miner it was very hard to go and have finances. My brother went, he became a superintendent of a school district; my sister went, she’s a head nurse. I come along, I like to work with my hands.

My uncle comes over from Italy with a stone trade. My dad said to me, “If you’re not going to college,” I was sixteen years old, “Go up there and see your uncle, he’s going to teach you a trade that you’ll have for the rest of your life.” Since I liked working with my hands, I’ll do it at sixteen.

So, my uncle basically started me out as a mortar mixer, had my hand, and as I advanced, then they put the trowel in my hand. I spent five years, not three, five years as an apprentice because that’s how they did it in Italy. It was only a three-year program, but I had to take it five, that’s fine.

I went through the ranks. I worked my way up to his foreman and then basically he retires his business and he said, “You can take over the business.” I tried it. Things were bad at that time—these were the seventies, eighties. So, I’m teaching, in the meantime I took a night teaching job at the Votech teaching adults.

Well, I had a Park Service individual taking my adult class, and he said basically… From the Park, he said, “We’re looking for a mason.” And I’m looking for work at that time, it’s in the spring of the year and I said, “Boy, that’s good, I can do your work.” And he said, “Well you have to apply.”

Well, masons don’t apply. They just go and say “Are you hiring?” or “I’m a contractor.” I said, “Yeah, I’ll do your work, that’s fine.” And he said “No, no Dom, you’re going to have to apply.” I said, “I never applied for anything in my life, but I’ll fill out that application.” Very basic, I filled it out. And he says, “The cert is closing tomorrow, you have to hand carry this to our office at the Allegheny Portage National Historic Site.” I said, “I’ll do that; I want to do your work.”

So, in the meantime, it was WPTC from Williamsport in Maryland, they want to hire me. I said, “I’m willing to do your work.” But I’m thinking this is just a temporary hire, I just want to do the work. I’m now gathering up a whole lot of contracting work, too. And I took the interview with them and they said, “Well”—this was probably in April—and he says, “We’re not hiring until July.” And I said, “Hey, listen buddy, I can’t wait until July. I have to have enough work in the summer to get me through the hard winter.” I said, “I have to take all the work I can, can you give me anything at all?” He said, “No, I can’t.” And I was going out the door and he basically said, “Keep this date open” July 27th or something. And I said, boy, that’s a pretty strong indication he’s going to give me the job, but I… still, me and my partner, we’re working.

So he called, and he called my ex-wife and he said, “Do you think your husband would like to have that job?” And she said, “I’ll ask him, he’s really busy.” And she said, “He called, and they want to hire you.” And I said, “I think I’m going to take a shot at it. Maybe there’s some future in this Park Service work for me.” So I went to Johnstown. We worked there and I did the stone work.

Dale Lupton and Dom teaching a class on masonry tools at a IPTW conference in Frederick, MD.

What happened was WPTC had a building in Richmond, Virginia and it was a butter brick job. Butter brick went out in the 1800s. Mr. Hicks, who was the superintendent at that time, he came up to see me and he says, “Dom, I know you’re a good mason.” He says, “Can you do butter brick?” I says, “Yeah I can do them.” He says, “Who taught you?” I said, “My uncle. He come over from Italy and we put an addition on a courthouse, it’s butter brick and we had to match it. And he taught me.” He said, “I need you in Richmond.”

Now, I’m a local boy that doesn’t like to drive in a small town. I said, “I’m not going to Richmond.” I said, “No, you hired me for Johnstown. This is where I want to work and when I’m done here, lay me off. I have a business going on the side, now, with my partner.”

He comes back up and he says, “Listen.” I said, “You can’t make me go to Virginia. I was hired as local help. I know you can’t make me do this. I can quit and go, my business needs it.” “I just want to talk to you.” And he says, “I can’t find anybody in the United States or any contractor that can do butter brick. And you’re the only I guy I know, can you help me out?” I’m pretty easy going and I says, “I only have one old clunker truck and I have a family car.” He said, “We’re going to give you a vehicle to use and I’m going to pay you overtime to drive from your house to Maryland.” And he said, “I’ll give you all the overtime you want.” He basically said to me, “We need you to do this brick front.” I looked at it and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that in about two weeks.” And I got it done, a couple of arches and the brick front and they liked it, the butter brick and I said, “That’s fine, now I’m done with this traveling stuff.” I said, “I don’t want to travel but I’ll finish your job in Johnstown.”

So he comes back up, and now in the meantime, I’m teaching at the Votech at night. I took and got certified to teach in the daytime and they’re going to move me up as a full-time instructor at the Votech. And I have the job nailed down.

Dom DuRubis mixing quick lime.

Mr. Hicks comes to see me and he says, “I need you to do another butter brick job in Richmond around a two story building.” Now I’m going to Votech now. I said, “We’re done here, lay me off, I’m going to Votech.” He said, “We’ll talk about it.” I said okay. He said, “Listen, I’m closing it and putting in heat in December. You’ll be nice and warm. Where are you going to work in December, nowhere.” I said, “I understand that.” He said, “Can you just come down and do the two-story building?” He said, “I’ll provide you with a driver.” I said, “Wow, that’s pretty awesome.” I said, “Yeah, I need the money before Christmas” and he said, “All the overtime you want.”

So, I did the two-story building. It’s Christmas party and Mr. Askins, who started HPTC or WPTC, he came to talk to me and he said, “This organization really needs a mason. We’re really hurting for a really good mason,” and he said, “You fit the category very well. Would you work here?” And I said, “I don’t think so. I don’t like to travel, I don’t even like to drive and you’re a hundred miles away from me.” Basically, they pull me in the room and they said, “It’s winter time, you’re not working out there. I know you’re off. You’re not working. We’ll provide you with work and we have a driver and a car for you through the winter.”

I go through the winter. They’re getting more work for me and I’m saying, “Lay me off because I’m going to Votech in the Fall.” Mr. Hicks said, “Let me talk to you.” He said, “Bring their package down, what they’re paying you and your benefits. How much do I have to beat it to get you to work for us?” I said, “It’s going to take quite a bit because I’m going to be leaving home and traveling.” Now I said, “If you can beat the package by ten thousand dollars a year,” I said, “I’m willing to talk to you about it.” So he said, “Okay, I think I can do that, because I don’t have masons.”

He talked to whoever he had to talk to in DC, and he came to me on a Monday morning and he said, “Fill out the application,” and I did. And he said, “You’re the best qualified, you’re going to get the job.” He said, “Actually, I’m going to give you fifteen thousand dollars more.” This is in ’89, you’re talking about a good raise. He said, “I’m going to give you a work leader and I’m going to step you out which takes ten years to step out in the Park Service. I’m stepping you up right to step 5 to get you the money you want.” So, I said, “I’ve got to go home and talk to Votech, my wife, kids, see what we come up with.”

Dom DuRubis patching a marble tablet.

Now, I was certified to teach but I didn’t have all my credits. I had sixty credits that they gave me for my knowledge of masonry. But I had to go back to college and I had to take General Ed, Psychology, Math. I’m not a student type person, I’m a hands-on person. And I talked to my wife and I said, “Maybe you could help me through college and I’ll take the job with Votech.” She said, “No, you have to do this on your own.” I said, “Well, I’m not going to school. I never liked school, I’m a hands-on person. I’m going to go down there and do hands-on work that I know how to do. I know I can instruct, but I don’t know about this college.” I said, “I’ll go down and talk to the superintendent, Mr. Hicks.” I said, “I’m going to take the job,” and he said, “That’s good.” Then I said to him, “Remember one thing, I worked for my uncle for twenty-eight years, I never quit. You provide me with work, I’m going to be here every day before anybody will be here, and I will never take sick time off.” He said, “Wow, that’s quite the dedication.” I said, “I’m very dedicated and I like my work.” And I said, “I’ll prove it to you.”

He gave me the first job and he said, “You have three weeks to lay these bricks at Thomas Stone in Maryland, 500 hundred bricks.” I was laying 800 in a day and he gave me three weeks. I went down there and I did it the first day. I went back and he said, “How’s it doing down there,” and I said, “I’m helping the carpenters. I did that in one day.” He said, “You couldn’t have.” I said, “Well you didn’t even have a lot of work there.” He said, “You got it all done in one day,” he said, “I’ll kiss your feet if you did that.” And I said, “Don’t say that, because it is done.”

He said, “You know that was kind of new work, we’re going to get into historic preservation, where it’s a lot slower.” I said, “I do preservation work. I restored churches, steeples, tore them down piece by piece, put them back together.” And he said, “And you’re a teacher?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “We’re a training organization, can you teach masonry?” I said, “Absolutely, I can,” and that’s how my whole career started. I fell in love with historic preservation.

I retired and gave a whole year of sick time back to the government. And I still come back at seventy-seven and that’s my whole career.

Jason Church: What’s your favorite project you ever worked on?

Dom DeRubis demonstrating brick laying at an NCPTT training.

Dom DeRubis: Wow, I worked at so many… My favorite project? There was one at Friendship Hill that was very, very challenging. Friendship Hill was the Albert Gallitin House, he was the second Secretary of the Treasury and it was around Pittsburgh overlooking the Monongahela River. And they had a gazebo, it was oval shaped. From one end to the other, it must have been sixty feet. And they had coal mined under it, and it was falling into the river. They wanted it moved. They wanted it the exact same height, facing the river exactly and they wanted it thirty feet back into the yard. Now you’re talking about a gazebo and it’s oval and I said basically to one of the architects, “Who is going to lay this out for me?” They said, “You’re going to lay it out.” I said, “I don’t know, you’re talking about moving every stone and making it the exact same height and it’s an oval.” I said, “This involves pouring a footing, a stem wall and then stonework and having it exactly the same, exactly square with the other gazebo.”

How am I going to get an oval moved? So I started thinking, I can’t tear that down yet. I’m going to use lines and I’m going to put batting boards the whole way around. I said, to move any building, you have to start with a square. I can’t bend lines in an oval. I have to put the oval in a square. So I took and I put my lines and I shot the height for my batter boards all the way around and I put nails in for height. Now I have the height over there, now I have to run lines from each end and through the middle to get it square, now I have it basically in the area. And I thought, that’s good, I know I’m going to have it square and the height. So I said I can start dismantling, but I want to get every stone exactly right, every stone, even the small ones. How do you do that? I said, I know how to do it now. We’re going to reverse lay the whole thing. And I told the guys, “When you pick up that stone, don’t turn it walking over to me and I reverse build this on plywood in the yard. And we moved it. I was off a half inch, in that whole move in the inside paver, one half inch.

I think that was maybe my favorite, maybe my hardest project with the Park Service. I liked the challenge.

Dom removing old mortar during a gravestone restoration.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Documenting Slave Structures and Tenant Cabins (Episode 94) ]]> Wed, 19 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CB8CE265-EDEF-E9C1-85B37A426C7C3F7A.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CB8F88E1-BA44-C6AA-F7F556881810A2D1 Documenting Slave Structures and Tenant Cabins (Episode 94) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Jason Church, Chief of Technical Services at NCPTT. In this podcast they talk about his new project scanning and documenting slave and tenant cabins across the United States before this vernacular architectural form disappears. 1136 no full 94

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Jason Church setting up laser scanner at Magnolia Plantation.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Planning. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Jason Church, Chief of Technical Services at NCPTT. In this podcast they talk about his new project scanning and documenting slave and tenant cabins across the United States before this vernacular architectural form disappears.

Catherine Cooper: This is Catherine Cooper. I’m here with Jason Church, Chief of Technical Services at NCPTT. Jason, it sounds like you’ve got a very ambitious new project. Would you like to tell us about it?

Jason Church:Thanks for sitting down and talking with me today, Dr. Cooper. Yes, we have a very different project than what NCPTT has done in the past. Most of my work has been cemetery related or research and materials. And we started a documentation project. We started it this summer. We had two US ICMOS interns, Ina Sthapit and Sukrit Sen and myself, worked for 10 weeks here in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana along the Cane River, and we documented existing slave dwellings and tenant cabins. So we were able to document nine standing structures that, most of them, not all, but most of them were constructed and were used as slave cabins before the tenant farming systems started, and then they were occupied most of the time by the same families or descendants of the same families really until the late 1960s, is sort of this different labor field.

And for those who don’t know what tenant farming is, and that’s one of the big parts of this project, is to bring awareness to the tenant farming system that existed all through the South. Even the mid-Atlantic States. When the civil war ended and slavery was abolished, we still had to have this large labor force in America to drive the economics and the agriculture that we had. And Hollywood and common mythology would lead us to believe that everyone sort of happily shook hands at the end and the slaves were freed, and that’s really not what happened. Realistically, what happened was most of the slaves, not all, but most of them, had nowhere to go. They had no skillset other than what they had learned to do and sort of were stuck in the same area. People generally didn’t just walk down the road and go to a big city and start all over again.

Most people stayed right where they were at and plantation owners took advantage of this by saying, “Well, you can do your same job, you can live in your same house, and I’ll pay you now.” But the reality of that economics was, “I’ll pay you for the same labor that you did as a slave, but however, now you have to pay me rent for the house that you live in. You have to pay me for the clothes you’re wearing, you have to pay me for the food you’re buying.” And that sort of started a new type of slavery, of economic slavery. So these people a lot of times were stuck on the same plantation in that they agreed it was: you work the fields, and you get a percent of the share at the end of the year. And a lot of times, you never quite made it…

Slave cabin along the Cane River in Natchitoches.

As one gentleman, who grew up as a sharecropper farmer told me that every year, he heard the same thing: “You’re one bale short this year. If you’d just made one more bale, you would’ve made money and been out of debt.” But the reality is, it never happened for most people. So you were constantly in debt, so you had to stay and work the same field, the same job for generations. And you owed money because you had to pay rent, you had to buy food, you had to buy clothes and cloth, but you also had to buy the seeds and the fertilizer and rent the mule to harvest and work your part of the farm or your share of it. And all of that would be deducted from what you were going to earn at the end of the year. And the reality for most people, and this wasn’t just an African American thing, there were lots of white sharecroppers and tenant farmers as well. But the reality is for most, if you had an illiterate workforce, who’s to say that you ever really kept track of how much you spent and how much you earned.

So this system lasted from the end of the Civil War, really up through the 1960s and late sixties even. And really what ended that system of tenant farming was that mechanized machinery for harvesting and planting became cheap enough to replace the workers, which were close to free anyway. So now it was cheaper for the farmer not to support this large labor force. And you might have 50 or 100 people working a single farm, you could go down to maybe three or four people and mechanized equipment. So the reality of that is in the late sixties and early seventies when everyone was essentially evicted, you got a mass migration a lot of times to cities, a lot of youth went into military at that point, Vietnam was happening. So it was an easy economic driver to leave. What happened then was if you don’t have this labor force, you don’t need the houses that they occupied. So a lot of tenant farmers and slave cabins were torn down in the sixties and seventies. And after that we’ve lost the majority of them, so a lot of them were purposely tore down then. But the reality is most have been demolition by neglect since then. So, we have very few of them left.

So we decided at NCPTT that this was a national needs sort of, we were losing this whole vernacular architecture style and this whole way of life is disappearing with these buildings. So we wanted to try to document what we can, what’s still standing, not only to preserve the architecture, which is what we do, but also preserve the memory of not only the enslaved but of the tenant farmers that work these fields and lived in these houses. So the project started when I moved to Natchitoches. I saw all these, I had no idea, just these very cute little vernacular structures that dotted the landscape going down Cane River.

Capturing an oral history with former sharecropper Elvin Shields.

And I noticed every year there were less and less of them. And I actually didn’t even know what they were. And I was fortunate enough to run into a gentleman Elvin Shields, who is a historian here a Natchitoches who explained he himself grew up at Oakland Plantation and was a tenant farmer until he went off to Vietnam. And he sort of explained the story to me and brought my awareness to not only the structures but that way of life. And Mr. Shields estimated that there were around 800 of these houses just along the Cane River, what we call Downriver, so in that area. And right now there’s about two dozen left. With more and half of those being owned by the National Park Service. So we know those are protected. Park service owns them, they’re maintaining them, they’re preserving them. So we’re very worried about the other ones. So we started this project to sort of document them while we could and for the documentation for right now what we’re doing is using a FARO laser scanner to do 3D models of the interior and exterior of the houses.

And it really is a race against time. One of the houses that we scan… And unfortunately we didn’t get a very good scan because it was so overgrown. We scanned it on a Tuesday, we were told on Thursday it collapsed. And when it went, it didn’t just quietly fell over. As it leaned enough, the wall exploded. We had wood 20 feet out into the yard splintered. So these things, when they go, they go. And we were able to capture that in a 3D scan. It would’ve been nice to have gotten a better capture. We were not able to capture the inside of it because it was just too unstable. And it was really heart wrenching when it went, when the walls came down to find out it was furnished. And to me it was really heart wrenching to see that kitchen table, this really rough hewn board table sitting in the kitchen… Just how many people ate at that? And how many stories, and… I could just picture people sitting around and enjoying life and talking and telling each other about their day and all of that is now gone.

That’s really why we’re trying to capture them as we can. We accomplish that. All the scans are on YouTube, on NCPTT’s YouTube page and our website, we were able to capture nine of the structures last summer. That’s sort of the beginning of it, is to capture those and mostly to be able to start telling the story of the tenant farmers through their architecture.

Catherine Cooper: So you said that this was the start of the project, what’s next for it?

Jason Church: So we really started the project to A: We had just gotten a laser scanner, we’d never used it for anything. That was our first project, and part of it was these are very simplistic, very small structures. So it was a perfect case study in simplicity for a laser scan. But we wanted to make sure that we could learn to use the equipment and accomplish something in our backyard that would make a difference. Once we had sort of gotten it down pat, we knew what we were doing. We want more, more, more.

Interior of cabin at Oakland Plantation.

We want more slave cabins, more tenant houses. We want to travel all over Louisiana, all over the South, the mid Atlantic. So right now what we’re looking for is literally, who has structures that are still standing? The more original, the better. Unoccupied is perfect, that way we can do the inside and outside. We have been contacted by other National Park units. We will be going in the fall to scan other National Park sites that have slave cabins. There are a couple of SHiPO agencies that have contacted us with slave cabins that we’re going to document. And that’ll be great, and I’m excited to capture ones that are Park Service and state owned, but those are also protected and they’re not going anywhere. The Park Services is not going to let any of their structures fall down and state agencies aren’t either. So one of the things we would really like to find are private homes. Ones that are owned by people who will give us permission to come and document them. And if they have the history behind them, even better.

So really what we’re looking for now is wanting people to contact us. We’re going to set up a website where people can email us and say, “Hey, we’ve got this structure we’d love for you to come,” to really anything. If your house museum has one, we’d love to know about it. If you are a private individual that still has them on their property, we would love to hear about it. We’re happy to cut away the brush, long as they stable enough for us to be able to set the laser inside it. We’re good. We did a lot of work with machetes and clippers this summer to sort of prepare the sites for scanning. We’re more than happy to do that, but just trying to find any and all of them. We’re really going to start scanning again in the fall. So basically what we’re doing right now is lining up permission and sites, trying to find ones in sort of clusters and areas that we could travel to.

Yeah, we’ve got some lined up in Florida right now, in Tennessee… Basically that’s what we’re doing right now is looking for more structures. And we’ve had a lot of people interested, Joseph McGill with the Slave Dwelling Project and I have talked, and one of the goals that we hope for the future is to partner with him as he goes around and does his amazing work. He sleeps and camps out in slave cabins. We’d like to travel with him and document those cabins. Just trying to get more and more to be able to start building a more holistic view of what the architecture was like and what the life was like of the tenant and slave communities. So not just here in our small community in that condition, but be able to expand through the U.S.

Catherine Cooper: How far flung do you see this project becoming?

Jason Church: Ideally, what we would like to do, sort of as part of phase two, is to be able to start a database that will list the location and of course the documentation of each of the structures. And not only that, but once the database is available to the public, we would love to crowd source it and find people, if you have historic photographs of tenant cabins or slave cabins and you know where those were taken, we could then enter those in the database as another way to document structures that are lost. So we don’t have to only document the structures that are still standing. It would be nice eventually to start being able to crowdsource that, and hear from people, and start the document ones that are already gone. And not only the buildings themselves, which is initially what drove us into this, but we’re really right now looking to collect more histories.

Now, I know realistically we’re late, and this would have been awesome 30 years ago. So really what we’re finding now are the children of tenant farmers. It would be awesome to still find tenant farmers who were still actively farming. Most of the people we found were young, maybe teens or preteens when their family quit tenant farming. And their stories are very valuable and amazing, we’re trying to document those. But yeah, definitely oral history is to go along with the structures cause that’s only half the story. I mean, the building is great, and as a preservation organization that’s what we do, but the social history is absolutely as important. So hearing from people, hearing their story, what it was like living there, what it was like living in that time period, in that community, growing up as a tenant farmer, is very important. So we’re looking right now for people who want to talk to us and tell us their story.

If we can line up people, we’ll physically do interviews as we travel, otherwise people can call us. We’ll talk to them that way. But trying to sort of piece that together into a database that we can do more of the YouTube videos like we’ve been doing, where we can talk about the social aspect in conjunction with the documentation of the building, historic photographs, any of that. We want it. We want to be able to really have a more holistic approach to what these structures look like, who lived in them, how they’re used, what the farming was like, really what everyday aspect of it was like. And eventually… So we’re doing the 3D modeling of the houses, we’d like to move into also doing blueprints and measured drawings from those 3D scans as sort of another way to preserve the structures.

Catherine Cooper: You mentioned that you are hoping to have a website up for people to be able to reach out and submit things. Before that becomes live, how can people reach you if they have photographs, or stories, or cabins, or houses that they’d like to bring to your attention?

Historic photo of tenant cabin along the Cane River.

Jason Church: That’s a great question. We have been posting things on our Facebook page here at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, people could comment on those posts. To go on our Facebook page and look and see some of the posts, there’ll be a post about this podcast, they shouldn’t post that we have made from some of the videos, you can comment on that, or you can email me directly, which is jason_church@contractor.nps.gov. We’re just happy to talk to people about the project. It’s something that we feel passionately about. We want to talk to people about it to try to capture more and more before they’re gone. Because were literally losing them every day.

And the thing I run up against the most is, I’ll talk to people who are really interested in it and they’ll go, “Oh this is a great idea.” And they’ll tell me where the cabin’s at and we’ll get there and we’ll find what was the cabin. I’d say half of the ones that we investigated were no longer standing. And I don’t mean it was leaning, we found a pile of lumber that we could tell it was a house, or maybe one wall is still standing. The floor’s there and the walls are laying out in the field. That’s what we’re finding more than actual standing cabins. So a lot of people have told us, “Oh I was just there. You can go document it.” And then you start discussing it with them, they go, “Well, I guess it was a few years ago that checked on it.” And the cabin’s gone.

And a lot of people I’ve talked to have said, “Well, if you had talked to me two years ago, we had half a dozen, but now we tore them all down.” So we’re realizing there’s fewer than we thought, which just speeds us up even more.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much for talking with us today about the project and where you’re hoping to go. I hope people reach out.

Jason Church: Definitely, and go check out our website, NCPTT.NPS.gov, and look up tenant cabin, or just tenant, and the post will come up and go check them out. Check out our videos on YouTube, check out our Facebook page, and by all means, if you have resources, contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast, show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> The Caddos and Their Ancestors (Episode 93) ]]> Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CBB45F93-DC3C-6240-1CC001D159958AF1.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CBB8AEDF-0FAE-8CEA-A0F931FD92197F48 The Caddos and Their Ancestors (Episode 93) National Park Service The Caddos and Their Ancestors Archaeology and the Native People of Northwest Louisiana, Where They Are and Their Place in History: "Our historic records only go back a couple of centuries, but we have evidence of people here for the last 12 to 14,000 years. That, of course, we know most of that time through archaeological research, through the study of the objects, and the alterations to the landscape that people left in the past. It's a different perspective on the past. 1247 no full 93

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with archaeologist Jeff Girard. In this podcast, they talk about Girard’s book, The Caddos and Their Ancestors.

Jason Church: Now Jeff, I know you are the retired regional archaeologist, but we’re sitting here in your office where you’re at work, so how retired are you these days?

Jeff Girard: I’ve been working on a grant from the Cane River National Heritage Area in the past few years working on the collections of the Williamson Museum.

Jason Church: So, that’s the repository here at Northwestern [State University].

Jeff Girard: Right. It was started in the early 20th century by George Williamson, and it is continued today. And there’s collections from all over the state, mostly from Louisiana, but some from other states as well. We’re trying to organize the collections now. They’ve accumulated for many, many years. It’s never been put into an electronic database of any sort, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Jason Church: So, how many objects do you think are at the Williamson?

Jeff Girard talks to a school group from a dig site.

Jeff Girard: I have no clue. It’s in the hundreds of thousands, certainly.

Jason Church: Yeah. So, I want to talk to you today. You have a new book out, The Caddos and Their Ancestors, and subtitle is Archaeology and the Native People of Northwest Louisiana, Where They Are and Their Place in History. So, tell us a little bit about how you started, why you did this book, what it meant to you.

Jeff Girard: Well, I think the overall point is to give folks some sort of notion of the immense amount of time that people have lived in Northwest Louisiana. Our historic records only go back a couple of centuries, but we have evidence of people here for the last 12 to 14,000 years. That, of course, we know most of that time through archaeological research, through the study of the objects, and the alterations to the landscape that people left in the past. It’s a different perspective on the past. We don’t have specific individuals or specific events that we know about so much, but it’s more looking at changes in people’s life ways through that immense amount of time.

I did retire 2015 as the regional archaeologist. I worked for 26 years in this area, so I have a lot of information, and I also did public programs and I had little PowerPoint presentations that I would do on various topics.Once I retired, I decided, well, I’ll try to put these together in some way. I didn’t want it just to go away, and I thought maybe I could do a website or something. So, I started to write little narratives linking the various talks that I did, and I realized, well, I might be able to make this into a book. I sort of wrote a few chapters and sent them to an editor at LSU Press, and they liked it and said, “Give us the rest of it,” and I did. So, that’s how it actually came about.

Jason Church: In the very beginning of the book, you use a really good analogy that I’ve never seen before about linking archaeology and objects to words on a page. Can you walk us through that analogy?

Jeff Girard: Yes. I’ve kind of thought that the point is to try to get people to realize that archaeology isn’t just collecting old objects randomly. People will bring things to me and say, “How old is this or what does this mean?” I say, “Well, I can’t really tell because the context is missing. I have to know something about how it was found and where it was found.” The analogy I use there is it’s like bringing individual words into somebody and asking what things mean, when it isn’t the words themselves so much, it’s how they’re put together in sentences, and how the sentences are put together in paragraphs that really provides meaning.

Jeff Girard at the Fish Hatchery Excavation

Jeff Girard: It’s the same in archaeology. We can’t just look at individual objects and interpret them so much as we know their physical relationship, how they were found together, how they were found on the landscape, and also, try to get people to realize when they’re collecting things out there that that’s important that you take that out of context. You take that object out of context. It’s like taking a word out of a paragraph, and you just have a jumble of things that don’t mean anything. So, it’s the organization of the objects that we find are as important as the objects themselves.

Jason Church: So, I noticed one of the themes that sort of runs throughout the book is that a lot of these major sites were found when the landowner tried to build or plow up a mound on their site. Is that still a current issue today?

Jeff Girard: Oh yes. Alterations to the landscape that are going on today are just incredible and have been, and so we lose a lot of the archaeological record of the past in that. Also, sometimes we find things that we wouldn’t ordinarily find. But it is an ongoing problem, and it’s something where we know that it’s a limited database that we have. So, we try to look at what we can because it’s going away. I think we’ve located most of the mounds. Some of them, the exceptions, might be places where they have been plowed down or eroded down, and there’s just a little remnant of them left, and those places we might find some interesting things that there once was a mound in a certain area, and we just got the lower portions of it left, and we might not be able to recognize that on the landscape. Some of the older mounds, we’ve traced the Caddo culture back about a thousand years, as I point out in the book. There’s some other mounds that tend to be located up in the uplands, up in the hills, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if something’s a natural rise or it’s a mound. It’s something that surprises us.

Jason Church: If I’m a landowner and I run across the remnants of one of these mounds, what is the best thing to do?

Jeff Girard: Contact somebody; hopefully the Louisiana Division of Archeology in Baton Rouge. We no longer have a regional archaeology program. I used to be the regional archaeologist, but that was cut out by budget cuts a number of years ago. The best thing is to be able to contact somebody. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of archaeologists out there. It’s difficult, but the people at the State Exhibition Museum, the Bossier History Center, museums, and sometimes libraries and stuff have the contacts where they can get to somebody who may be able to evaluate it in some manner or another.

Jason Church: So would you recommend, take a few pictures, go talk to someone?

Jeff Girard: Yes. Take a few pictures. Send them to the Louisiana Division of Archaeology, Cultural Recreation and Tourism in Baton Rouge, and they’ll be happy to take a look at it.

Jason Church: As you go through the history, what are some of the major sites in the Caddo culture that have yielded the most information for us?

Jeff Girard: Well in this area, going back before the Caddo culture, the earliest one that has been a major importance is a site called the Conly site, and it’s in Bienville parish below Lake Bistineau. It is very interesting because of its unique preservation circumstances. It was a place along a loggy bayou that was buried under 12 to 15 feet of alluvial clays. So, things are preserved there that normally don’t get preserved such as animal bone and plant materials. We know in detail what these people were eating at that time. And at that time, it’s also very interesting because it dates about 7,500 years ago, and it is one of the earliest places that we have a major archeological site in Louisiana. There are also human burials at the Conly site, and they’re the earliest burials that we have in the state of Louisiana, and some of the earliest in the southeastern United States. That’s an incredible place. It gives us a look at a place very long ago, and gives us a look at it in very much detail that was just extraordinary. The preservation of bone was really good, and so we have deer bone, we have fish bone, even little fish and crawfish, and all kinds of things that got preserved underneath that clay. But, later on we have, as far as the Caddo sites themselves, we have places in north Caddo parish such as the Mounds Plantation site, which is still preserved very well. It’s on private property, but the landowner takes very good care of it. There are seven big mounds that were arranged around a plaza at Mounds Plantation. There are only two that are left that are of substantial size. Most of them are smaller or just been plowed down. But it is a site at the beginning of what we think of as the Caddo culture, and is some of the earliest Caddo pottery that we find.

In one of the mounds that was dug in the early sixties, there were burials in the bound of the leaders of the community, and they were buried with some extraordinary objects and beautiful pieces of pottery and other items that came from far away from other places. So, it’s a very interesting place. Contemporary with that, there was a place called the Gahagan site down in Red River Parish, and it’s been destroyed. The water washed it away in the 1940s, so it’s no longer there, but it also had a burial mound with extraordinary objects in it. Those are now at the Louisiana State Exhibition Museum in Shreveport. But, some of the items came from the Cahokia site in Illinois, which is across from St. Louis, which at that time, and we’re talking here about between about 1050 and 1200 A.D., it was an immense place. It was essentially a city and there was over a hundred mounds up there at Cahokia.

So, we have objects that came from there that made it all the way here into Louisiana, and they showed up at the Gahagan site, including objects of copper. Of course we don’t get copper around here naturally, but it came from where we got copper today in the Great Lakes region.

Jason Church: So, do you think the Caddo were traveling that far or were there trade routes between?

Girard taking core samples at Los Adaes.

Jeff Girard: I’m not sure so much it was trade as much as it might’ve been people just visiting up there, pilgrimages, because the objects themselves aren’t sort of commodities, everyday things that you would trade. They’re very special items and very sacred items and they wind up in the burials of the leaders of the communities. So, I think that it was more of a—if people knew about Cahokia, knew there was this incredible place up there. So, a lot of people traveled up there and brought back things that were of incredible interest.

Jason Church: Yeah. It would have been quite a pilgrimage at that time.

Jeff Girard: You have to travel across the Ouachita and Ozark mountains to get up into to that area now, so immense journey. Of course there’s no horses, no wheeled vehicles of any sort. People had to either travel by water, which would have been difficult across the mountains, obviously, or they had to walk.

Jason Church: So, when we get later into the Colonial period where you had Los Adaes and Fort Saint John Baptist here in Natchitoches, you paint sort of a dark picture of what become of the Caddo and the Natchitoches Indians. Can you talk a little bit about that time period?

Jeff Girard: Up until when the French first got here in 1699-1700 and then established Natchitoches here 1714, it was mostly a still Caddo area. I mean there was just a handful of European colonists and everybody else was Caddos, and they lived throughout the area. The Caddos continued to be dominant in this area throughout until about middle 18th century, the middle 1700s, and then with the Spanish period after the 1760s, things started to change a lot. One of the problems was disease, the demographics. The Caddos lost much more substantially in terms of the population and even though the disease affected the French folks as well, they could replace the populations because more and more Europeans were coming into the area. But there weren’t more and more Indians coming into the area. So, demographically, they started to lose out in terms of overall population levels. Also, they did become increasingly dependent on things such as firearms, gun powder, things they couldn’t replace. Instead of stone tools, it became iron tools. So, they had to trade and they were trading things like horses, livestock, cattle. They were stealing from folks in Texas and bringing it down here into the Natchitoches area, and eventually that was going down to New Orleans, and manufactured goods were coming up the other way. So, in the long run it was not good for the American Indian groups at all, and they became secondary when they were culturally dominant in the early 18th century.

The Europeans, the French, never enslaved the Caddos, I mean because they had trade relationship with the Caddos and the other groups. But what happened is really who bore the brunt of that was the Apaches; that there were the Comanches, Wichitas and Caddos were all taking Apache prisoners from Texas and bringing them into this area. Mostly, it isn’t like the African American slave trade where there was gang labor on plantations. It was mostly like women and children and things like that, a household of people. It was different than what we generally think of is as slave trade.

I tried to keep the book focused on archaeology and not try to write a history of the Caddos, because there’s been several others that are very good about Caddo history and go from the 18th century into the early 19th century. But one of the problems in the Colonial period is we don’t really have an archaeological site that we can say “This is where a group of Caddos lived in the 1700s,” so I do things like Los Adaes and I do things from Natchitoches here, and from a site up in De Soto parish that was actually lived in by a Frenchman named Pierre Robleau. He was married to a Native American wife, and they had trade connections because they were living amongst the Adaes, so one of the groups of the Caddos up there, but actually the archeological site that we have was a Frenchman. It wasn’t the Indians themselves.

Archaeology of a Caddo Site.

Jason Church: You mentioned that, archaeologically, that a lot of the Caddo pottery during this time period takes on European forms.

Jeff Girard: Yes.

Jason Church: Do you think that was out of ease of trade? It was easier to trade with the Europeans if they have the European forms?

Jeff Girard: Yes. I think there was a market and that’s what the European people wanted. It’s mostly very utilitarian sorts of things like pitchers, and big storage jars, cooking bowls and stuff that would be stonewares in European terms, but there just wasn’t a trade. They were hard to get, so it was easier to get the Indian pottery for that. The relationship between the Caddos and the French was one of trade and it was a very important relationship to both groups.

One of the things that people often ask about is what kind of houses did the Caddos live in and how do we know? The reason that we know is that the Caddos built houses that had posts in the ground. They put posts in the ground in a circular pattern and often times the posts, those houses, burned down and when they did, the posts leave a charcoal stain in the ground. So, if we excavate enough area, we can uncover the configuration of the house at its base.

As far as the upper part, we know from historic documents in the 18th century, mostly from missionaries in East Texas, what the upper part of the houses look like, and they were still making these in the 18th century, but they go way back probably a thousand years. They’re making cone shaped houses that are thatched with grasses. This style house goes way back and we can detect it through the archeological record. As far as their economy, certainly beginning in the 10th or 11th century, we have evidence they started to grow corn and a little bit of beans and squash. They were doing probably some gardening of other plants even farther back in time than that. These plants would have been oily and starchy seed plants that were very nutritious such as sunflowers. We still eat amaranth, chenopodia, somethings that are weeds nowadays, but they do have seeds that you can eat and that are nutritious. But after about 1200 A.D., the Caddos were dependent on corn, on maize agriculture. That was very, very important to them. So, they were farming and living in settled villages. They also were continuing traditional food acquisition of hunting and mostly deer, but also small game rabbits and squirrels and things like that and fishing. Whenever we find a Caddo site where we have bone preserved, lots of fish bone. So, fish was very important in their diet.

Jason Church: You mention in the book a little bit about Clarence Webb.

Jeff Girard: Yes.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about Clarence Webb, who he was and what his contribution was.

Jeff Girard: Clarence Webb was a pediatrician in Shreveport, and he got interested, way back in the 1930s, in archaeology. I think one of his sons was a boy scout at the time, so he worked with his son. He dug some very important archaeological sites. He was one of the first to look at places where nobody else was doing it at the time, one of which is the Gahagan site back in the 1930s before that site was destroyed, that he’s the one who excavated in there.

He excavated at a site called Belcher up there north Caddo parish that I’ve described in some detail in the book because is it very important. It’s a later Caddo site. It’s between about 1500 and 1700 A.D. He also worked at the famous Poverty Point site in northeast Louisiana, which is now a world heritage area site.

Dr. Webb had sort of two careers. I mean he was recognized by professional archaeologists as one of the pioneers of the field. In fact, he formulated some of the pottery types that we now use all the time, and some of the way we put the archaeological record together, the systematics that we use for this area. It was Dr. Webb who first formulated that in conjunction with working with other professional archaeologists,

Jason Church: But he maintained his pediatric career.

Jeff Girard: Yes, yes he did and he was very well known. In fact, I think he was President of the American Pediatric Society at one time, so he had a very successful career in the medical field as well. I can’t remember when he died, but it was the early 1990s [1991], and he worked right up to that time. He donated his collections, his research collections, to Northwestern State University and we have them here, and that’s one of the things I’m helping catalog. Also, some of his libraries and his correspondence are in the archives here at Northwestern.

Jason Church: You were able to work with him.

Archaeology of a Caddo Site.

Jeff Girard: I came here in 1989 and the first few years I was here, he was still alive and I was working with him a little bit as he got his books together and his papers together, and I would go up to Shreveport and meet with him and turn over things that he had organized. He was wanting to have things very well organized before he donated them.

Jason Church: Well, Jeff, thank you so much for talking with us today and telling our listeners a little bit about your new book from the LSU Press, The Caddos and Their Ancestors. We really appreciate it, and I highly recommended if you’re interested at all in not only just archaeology in general, but the history of Native Americans and especially the original occupants of Louisiana.

Jeff Girard: Right. Thank you very much.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Creating Coast Salish Imprints-The Public Art of Susan Point (Episode 92) ]]> Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CBD0840C-B342-584F-DD69F3543EF88E10.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CC1A1FDB-0C8D-11B7-2AEA43A813EA9D8C Creating Coast Salish Imprints-The Public Art of Susan Point (Episode 92) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with Robert Watt, author of ‎People Among the People: The Public Art of Susan Pointâ€,. In this podcast they talk about his new book, and the importance of Dr. Pointâ€,s art in the revitalization of Coast Salish art forms 887 no full 92

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people in projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Robert Watt, author of “People Among the People: The Public Art of Susan Point”. In this podcast they talk about his new book, and the importance of Dr. Point’s art in the revitalization of Coast Salish art forms.

Susan Point carving the large spindle whorl “Good Luck”. Jeff Cannell, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts

Robert Watt: My first hope was to produce a book that would be a celebration of the public work of a very great artist. I said several years ago, if we were in Japan, Susan Point would be termed a national treasure. And that’s how I think of her. And so doing this book, I think gives many more people that chance to appreciate the dramatic scale of her accomplishments. I think it also helps to ensure something that is so important to her and that is the business of a Coast Salish aesthetic and cultural imprint in this part of the world.

House posts in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Jeff Cannell, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts.

I quite often meet people who, if the discussion turns to First Nations art they immediately talk about totem poles. Well, totem poles were never part of Coast Salish culture. Carved house posts—typically more internal elements in a big house than external elements—but certainly totem poles were not a part. And the styling of Coast Salish pieces is very distinctive. And my hope is that people who have a chance to read this will come away with that understanding. They will understand that the people here, the First Nations here, had their own aesthetic, their own style. I think through her art, Susan has succeeded in achieving that.

Catherine Cooper: The spindle whorl seems to be a very important motif. Could you tell us a bit about why?

Robert Watt: I think that’s a question maybe best answered by Susan herself. Early in her researches she discovered and admired the historic spindle whorls in various museum collections and she was inspired by them. She created new designs using the form. And of course the circular form as you know for First Nations cultures, not only in this part of the world but in many other parts of the world. The circle of life and the way it allows you to talk about the importance of four: four seasons, four elements, all those things.

Catherine Cooper: One of the things that sort of struck me with the number of materials she’s worked with is it’s always: if it’s new and she can learn, that also seems to be a bit of a theme.

“Salish Gifts” in cast concrete with bronze lids and set on colored stone. Kenji Nagai.

Robert Watt: Oh yes. Yeah. She’s been a pioneer in using so many different materials, far more materials I think than any other First Nations artist. Certainly in our area and perhaps right across Canada. I can’t bring to mind any other First Nations artists that has so dramatically and aggressively explored different media. One minute it’s metal and the next minute it’s cast concrete and the way that she locates associates and mentors to teach her new techniques and then also people that she can work with to bring her ideas fully to life.

So for example, the great stained glass window—art glass window in Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver involved a very close working relationship between a glass artisan, Yves Trudeau, and Susan, who did the design and adjusted the design. But at one point she went to Seattle with Yves Trudeau. When the design had been completed and accepted by the cathedral people she went to Seattle with Trudeau to work with the glass blowers and I think it was Fremont Glass in Seattle.

“Tree of Life” stained glass windows at Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver, BC. Kenji Nagai

And she was there for days with Trudeau, being involved with the process, watching the glassblowers produce the sheets of glass in a range of colors. That’s been part of, an element of, her career right from the start: working with skilled artisans, in various fields to enable her to produce something in a medium that she wouldn’t be able to do if she was working solely by herself. In that process of collaboration, she’s always front and center. She’s always watching and she knows how she wants something to look at the end. And she’s very patient and is always ready to go back at something to achieve a particular result. And she’s a real perfectionist and very meticulous. She doesn’t stop until she’s satisfied that no other result is going to be possible.

I think another part is, and this really struck me, was when she received a commission, one of the first things that she did was to take a very close look at where the work was going to be and what kind of relationship it might have with the building or the landscape that it was going to be part of. So her initial research was into the Coast Salish aesthetic. Later researches, piece by piece, were centered around the stories and the history of the places where the work was going to go.

Cover of the book, “People Among the People.”

So for example, the dust cover of the book shows the four corners piece, which is on the wall of one of the larger buildings at North Seattle College. And the coloring, and some of the framing elements in that design, relate directly to a stream and a particular red earth color that was important for the First Nations people who lived in that part of what is now North Seattle. And that sort of care and attention is very, very characteristic of all her work.

Catherine Cooper: So you’ve known Susan for many years and watched a lot of this work come about. Have you also seen a resurgence of Coast Salish art since she started?

Robert Watt: I’ve become aware of it and I remember being on Vancouver Island and visiting friends North of Victoria in Saanichton and I went to do some shopping at a small shopping center or mall, and there were some beautiful carved pieces forming part of the entrance way in one of the larger stores there. And I could see right away that they were Salish because I saw the elements that I had come to understand as Salish through Susan’s work. And then I found a label identifying them as the work of one of the Marston brothers; and the Marstons, and a number of other young artists, are now all working in using Salish aesthetics and so their work is quite distinctive. And I think Susan has been at the vanguard of a resurgence, or a Renaissance basically, in Coast Salish work.

Catherine Cooper: One of the other things that has seemed incredibly deliberate and important about the way you constructed the book is the inclusion of her native dialect.

Robert Watt: Yes. And that was a suggestion that was made to me by the main editor that I worked with: Mike Leyne of Figure 1. And it was wonderful to work with him. He’s a consummate professional and he made a number of suggestions to me too, that I think were particularly important in giving the book it’s final appearance and impact. And one was his suggestion to organize the pieces rather than chronologically, which was my thought as an historian, to organize it geographically beginning in effect on the Musqueam lands then going out from there in a series of circles. And taking this geographic look, almost like a giant spindle whorl in a way, reaching out from Musqueam to, in the end, places quite distant. But his other big suggestion was, he said, Is there not an opportunity here to introduce people to Halkomelem, the traditional language of the Musqueam, the downriver dialect?

Part of Susan Point’s work “People Among the People” in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC. This is the Grandparents house post in the piece “Grandparents and Grandchildren”. Kenji Nagai, courtesy of Archives of Coast Salish Arts

And I thought it was a great idea. And he said, well, how can we do that? So I first discussed it with Susan, who was enthusiastic and then with… I was very, very fortunate to be able to enlist the help of elder Larry Grant of the Musqueam people, who is head of their language program. So Mike and I together settled on the words that we hoped to integrate into the text and then worked with elder Larry Grant to receive the correct Halkomelem word. And we also had similar help from Dr. Barbara Brotherton, who is the curator of Native American art at the Seattle Art Museum. And she was very, very helpful in, in effect, doing the matching sort of thing. But for the first peoples of what is now Washington state.

Catherine Cooper: And the pronunciation guide in the back is incredibly helpful.

Robert Watt: Yeah. And that was there with the approval and support of Larry Grant who got the agreement of the Musqueam people that it could appear there. Because it’s something created originally for the language program at Musqueam and in effect directly borrowed from their printed resources.

Catherine Cooper: Do you view this book as an effort at preservation and education?

“Aerial Hunter” bus shelter design in Seattle. Courtesy of King County Metro Transit Archives.

Robert Watt: Yes. A very good question. And yes, I do. Maybe one way of underlining that is, delightfully, Susan’s work as an artist continues and as we speak, she is working on a number of large new commissions. And so the book is a portrait in time. It begins, the earliest work is 1981-82 and the most recent is 2017. And as the decades unfold, it may will be that one or two of the pieces succumb to the elements. Nobody wants that to happen, obviously, beginning with Susan, but you know, she’s nothing if not a realist.

So as you see with the bus shelter piece in Seattle, that’s the one in the book that no longer can be seen because it was painted on plywood and it inevitably, because it was open to all the winds that blow in downtown Seattle and the rains that fall, and the sun beats down, it ultimately had to be retired. I think the book is a very important record of really, really important work by a very great artist.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Painting Palettes for Miss Griswold: Continuing an Art Colony Tradition (Episode 91) ]]> Wed, 04 Dec 2019 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CC3F9B33-0872-B25C-723843DCF3B652BD.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CC511333-C7FF-44C8-66A8FE477F65B279 Painting Palettes for Miss Griswold: Continuing an Art Colony Tradition (Episode 91) National Park Service Guests: David Rau and Matthew Marshall at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Subject: Inception and design of Miss Florence's Palette Trees and their new book highlighting the collection of over 200 artistsâ€, palettes. NCPTT: Catherine Cooper 1316 no full 91

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with David Rau and Matthew Marshall at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. In this podcast they talk about the inception and design of Miss Florence’s Palette Trees and their new book highlighting the collection of over 200 artists’ palettes.

One of Miss Florence’s Artist Trees from 2016

David Rau: Miss Florence’s Artist Trees came about in 2004. In 2002 we just had completed our new building, the Krieble Gallery, and it was really a state of the art, beautiful modern space. And we were still trying to figure out how we were going to incorporate Christmas into that space. Christmas has always been important here because our namesake, Florence Griswold, was born on Christmas Day in 1850. We’ve always had a tradition of going kind of above and beyond during the holidays, but with the new building, in that modern space, we really weren’t sure what the best fit was. I kind of took a page out of the tree that I always see at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They bring out this beautiful Baroque Christmas tree every year and it becomes a thing that folks visit season after season. So I said, well, what can we do that would be something we could do over and over again but it wouldn’t get old.

And that’s when the spark came that, because we spent so much time here giving out paints, palettes… You know, we have en plein air Sundays where we give visitors a palette with squirts of paint on it, and we give the school children’s small palettes. We handle a lot of these medium sized palettes. And so that’s when the idea came to us that we would give them out to the artists that we’re familiar with in the area. Old Lyme is rich with creative painters. And we would give them a blank palette and ask them to paint on it in their signature style and then give it back to the museum as kind of a donation. And we would put them on these different trees year after year. So the first year we started with 50 and that filled up a nice tree, but we had a lot of other decorations to put it in between. It just kept going and going, and you know, now we have 212 and no one has asked us to stop yet, so there’s more coming.

Catherine Cooper: How do you select who paints a palette for Miss Griswold?

Looking closely at a palettes on a tree.

David Rau: You know, it’s a combination. The artists that were part of it originally, the first couple of years were pretty obvious because they’re folks that show in the area, live in the area, are involved in the museum in a creative way one way or another. So that list was pretty easy. But throughout the year, sometimes staff members have a friend, or they go to a gallery and they send me a link. People who see the trees…any artists that they know all of a sudden they think it’d be perfect for that. You know, we give out my card and they send me a letter or a link and I just ask to see some of their work, so I know the caliber that they’re at.

It’s a sliding scale and some of them are famous artists that would be difficult to gather or really thrilled to have. Others are just really friends of the museum that it’s just really nice to have an object by them on the tree. It’s not a juried thing, it’s kind of a gut feeling. But it’s also a yes, yes, good, kind of thing.

Catherine Cooper: And what guidelines do you give to them?

David Rau: I send them a letter saying, “Thank you so much for being willing to donate.” You know, their paintings are very valuable. You know, even though it’s a smallish size in the open market some of them could get a lot of money for those. So I always thank them for their time and enthusiasm way in advance. We ask that they paint on the palette that we give them or if they need a surrogate, keep this shape and the size for the most part the same.

“The Griswold Museum” painted palette by Douglas Smith

So we have had a couple of ceramic artists that couldn’t make ceramics with the wooden palette, so they made ceramic versions of the palette where they match the size. And then we just say, because this kind of grows out of the history of artists coming to the Old Lyme art colony and painting on the doors and walls of Miss Florence’s house, that the palettes are kind of an extension of artists, living, contemporary artists, doing something for the museum and leaving it behind. So we ask them for maybe something that kind of represents them and their style, but also is appropriate to give Miss Florence as a gift. Some of them want to know if it has to be Christmas-y. And I say, “No, it is really open. It can be whatever you want as long as it’s kind of appropriate for Miss Florence and hang on a public tree.”

I mean, the very first year somebody asked me if they could do something pornographic and I said, “Well do you make pornographic art?” And they said, “No, I just wanted to know what the limits were,” and I’m like, “Well, don’t do that.” Something that’s appropriate for Miss Florence that’ll hang nicely on the tree.

The Florence Griswold house in the snow

Catherine Cooper: So you mentioned that the palettes are reminiscent of the panels in the dining room. Could you speak to that?

David Rau: Florence Griswold was a sea captain’s daughter. And so the Griswold house is an 1818 house that the captain bought for his young family and raised three daughters and one son. But when Miss Florence was 49 years old, she was alone in the world. The rest of her family had either passed on, or gone away. She was not married, and had no children. And so one of the only respectable things for her to do as a Victorian woman would be to run a boarding house out of her house.

But as luck would have it, in 1899 an artist from New York City, Henry Ward Ranger, stopped by, looking for a place to bring his fellow artists the following summer. And true to his word, in 1900 they showed up with a merry band of artists. They moved into her house and took over most of the public spaces, but they were wanting to make it look as much like an art colony house as they were experiencing in other places, Europe, and other places in the US. And so they asked her permission to paint on the doors of her house. And when the doors ran out, they painted on wooden panels that they installed in the dining room. And so from early on it was a museum, a house filled with objects and art to look at. And even though when Florence died and everything was sold off, all of her belongings, the doors and painted panels always stayed in situ.

Two doors with painted panels in a parlor of the Griswold house.

So they really are the jewels of the crown. And then the palette just kind of updates that with contemporary artists who still want to participate with the museum in this kind of artistic and creative way that’s, you know, long lasting and ongoing.

We probably need to tell our [artists] in the future that some of the materials need to be long lasting because we’ve gotten some that are 3D with stuff that is a little ephemeral. So, I’ll have to remind them that we want it to last as long as possible so that their supplies should be as durable as possible. You know, some folks have ribbons attached to theirs and those are long-lasting, but another artist decided to use dried flowers. And so those, you know, although we handle everything as if it’s a museum object, those things after time will slowly deteriorate. It would be nice to have things that are going to last a little bit longer than dried flowers, but we’ll see what we can do, and try to keep it as the artist intended for as long as possible.

Another thing that’s interesting is a lot of the artists, because they make the palettes for the deadline, they haven’t had the time to varnish them the way they need to do to really make it last a long time. Several artists have asked us to hang it on the tree for one season, and then give it to them so they can varnish it, let it dry, and then it’s ready for the following season; some of these things mutate. We actually got one one year that was still wet; the paint was so thick that we had to handle it with care, because it was still wet; but we got it on the tree and then positioned and high enough that nobody would touch it so that the oil paint eventually will dry. It’s always an adventure.

“Mountain”, painted palette by Eric Aho

Matthew Marshall: I think it was kind of a conceptual mountain scene. It was the peak of the mountain they had built up with layers of paint, the different shades of gray. And when they got to that white peak, the snowy peak, it was just pure wet oil paint.

David Rau: Several inches thick; it probably dried, not on the tree, but in the box in January, February, March, the following year. We think it’s dry now, though. It’s been several years.

Catherine Cooper: It can start creeping down the tree a little bit each year.

Matthew Marshall: Yeah, that one’s gotten a little lower each year.

David Rau: We tell people not to touch them anyway, but if they come out with a white finger…

Matthew Marshall: We know…

David Rau: They were busted.

A boy looks at one of the palette trees

Matthew Marshall: I think a lot of times when we go to hang, we look at the fragility of the palettes. I mean some of them are two-dimensional, strictly paint on a palette. And then we have the three-dimensional ones. The Guy Wolff pot palette is three dimensional, each pot is adhered to the palette separately. And then we have some made out of ceramic. We have some with these really lush ostrich feathers that just beg to be kind of pet. So we do try to keep that in mind, knowing that it’s an event that a lot of families come to and that we want to encourage young children to really spend time and to look and immerse themselves in these trees. But we also don’t want to taunt them with these little delectable three dimensional objects right at the base of the tree.

David Rau: Yeah, so it does play into it. It is a museum, though, and they could easily touch anything on the wall as well. So we have big signs reminding folks not to touch; and there’s enough staff wandering through that we do keep an eye on it. We’ll have four trees this season, we had three previously. But earlier years, where we had so many, we hung the palettes so high that we had to give out binoculars so that people could see them. Those we never worried about because those were very far away from where human hands could touch. But now we’re trying better to have them mostly all at eye level, where you look down or look up and you don’t have to strain your neck to see them. It’s a challenge, but it’s always a fun challenge.

Matthew Marshall: I think the sweet spot is around 70 palettes.

David Rau: So one year we went up to about 70 per tree and it was getting a little tight and we knew the next year to go to a whole other tree; it means then we’re going to go down to 40. Had to kind of do the math cause we didn’t want them to seem skimpy. They were very full last year, so I think with four this year and doing slightly larger additional ornaments, the trees should really be… Nothing will seem skimpy. It should seem like a beautiful presentation, but still room for next year and the year after.

Blue themed palette tree from 2016.

Catherine Cooper: How do you theme them each year? Who gets to decide?

David Rau: We never like the trees to look the same. Very often before we decorate the trees, we put tables around each of the trees and Matt and I kind of decide on which types of palettes and subjects are going on each one, and then we just sort, but we come up with a new sub theme each year. Matt kind of comes up with the colorways and the themes and I think he has got some interesting ideas for this year.

Matthew Marshall: Definitely. It’s interesting for us. We have been doing this for so many years now, both David and I obviously have been here since the inception of the palette trees. We see these each year, but we look at them every year with fresh eyes. It’s kind of like Christmas morning when we’re unpacking them and it’s like, ”Oh my gosh, look at this.” It’s so exciting. And sometimes you—I mean, I hate to use the word you forget about a palette, but it’s one that might not have been in such a prominent location last year. And so you see it and you’re like, “Wow, gosh, I forgot that this one was here. Let’s really try to build something around this one.” So it gets to be organic, I think. You know, as we’re bringing them out, the themes almost find us where we’re like, oh there’s a group of palettes that look like artists’ palettes where they put the deliberate color wave on it, or there are a group of palettes with the Griswold house featured on it, or they’re ones that are strictly Christmas themed. And we’ll kind of group those together, and that’s how we kind of decide.

David Rau: And then the other challenge is when we hang them—because some are horizontal, some of them are vertical, some of them are in between—not wanting to set up any kind of a rhythm on the tree that looks like, you know, a stripe. We have to mix and match them so that they play visually nice on the tree. The Christmas trees are artificial, but the branches are never exactly where you need them to be. So there’s a lot of bending up and bending down because it’s almost like laying out paintings on a wall, but we’re laying out palette shaped paintings on a giant cone. By the time we walk away, we feel like they look beautiful and they look balanced. I don’t think it’s as effortless as it actually looks. We try our best not to let them see us sweat.

Catherine Cooper: And do you close the galleries down while you’re doing this?

Matthew Marshall: We do the setup of the actual bare tree on Monday when we’re closed to the public. So they’re pre-fluffed, they’re pre-lit. The tables are set up so that on Tuesday morning David and I come in bright eyed and bushy tailed and we say, all right, today is the day. We lay out the palettes and we are open to the public. We use this as an opportunity to educate the public as we’re decorating. A lot of times we’ll have folks that come in and say, “What are these? Are these for sale? Is this a fundraiser?” So-

David Rau: “Is this a Christmas Bazaar?”

Matthew Marshall: Yeah. No. So it’s a great opportunity for us to talk to visitors. We’re a little more quiet in November. Folks are waiting to visit until the Magic of Christmas officially opens. We usually do set up the week of Thanksgiving or the week just prior to. A lot of folks have so many other things on their plates that last thing that they’re thinking about doing is taking a leisurely stroll through the galleries. So we tend to not be too busy, so we’re able to really focus a lot. But we are open to the public in theory.

Family visit to see Miss Florence’s Artist Trees

David Rau: But we put out a sign explaining what we’re doing and a lot of folks love seeing art or exhibitions being made. It’s almost like a behind the scenes. With the palettes on the tables, it doesn’t look like a construction site. It just looks like something exciting is happening and you can tell that people really kind of enjoy the special pre-look that they get. We ask those people to come back to see the magic when it’s done.

Catherine Cooper: Do you have people returning year after year?

Matthew Marshall: We really do see it become a tradition where multiple generations come in year after year and kind of share in what we call the Magic of Christmas. I can say, personally, there’s one family I can think of immediately, where I saw them come in when their children were toddlers and now they’re off to college. I’ve gotten to know this family through the tradition of them coming in and taking their Christmas card photo, and that feels so special to me. And it really kind of embodies the whole spirit of Christmas and the concept of the community coming together at an art museum in particular. It’s just, it’s wonderful to see that reaction.

David Rau: And that was kind of the impetus for the book because the same families come back every year and they try to remember which ones have they seen before, which ones are new. And because they’re so attached to these palettes and this tradition, they come out and say, “Has the museum ever thought about doing a book or doing some kind of publication, because we would buy one, because we just love this so much.” And you know, we realized early on, because it’s an ongoing growing collection, how do you do a book when it’s still growing? But we thought the 16th year was a good measure and also when we finally got over 200 palettes we thought, well we’ll at least do the first book. I’m not saying a series is coming, but at least the book is now officially done. But there are more palettes that are still being made, so it’s a moment in time.

Two pages of “Miss Florence’s Artist Trees”.

Matthew Marshall: Each palette has its own page and just has the basic tombstone information underneath it. It has been met with great joy.

David Rau: They’re selling; they’re selling and they’re selling. I mean one of our challenges is that several of the artists, not requested by us, but they would paint on both sides. The palettes have two sides, a front and a back, and during the Christmas season we didn’t do anything special with those. We just hung one side facing out, and one side hiding in, which is kind of interesting because one of the panels up in our boarding house is double sided and the artists themselves turned the one to face the wall. And so there’s always at least one hidden. So, our hidden palettes make sense and we try our best to remember which one was facing out each year. With the book, those double sided ones got both of their sides pictured and shown. So, A) It’s good for their record keeping that the artist has both of their donations represented, but also during the show years when one side is facing and people are dying to know what the other side is, the book is a great opportunity for them.

The new book, “Miss Florence’s Artist Trees: Celebrating a Tradition of Painted Palettes”

Catherine Cooper: Did you re-photograph all of the palettes?

Matthew Marshall: We did. That was an intense couple of days, I must say. We hired a professional photographer who we work with quite frequently. Having to photograph 200 plus objects in matter of two days, each one requiring different lights set up, some of them having reflective surfaces, some being three dimensional, some being two dimensional, some being two sided. The photographer himself deserves an award because he put up with a lot those two days. It was well worth it, oh my goodness, when he started to send some of the images my way, just seeing the crispness, the clarity, it was amazing to know that we now have archival records of these palettes that are so true to life. That is just a great, you know, side effect of the book project. It just allows the palette project to live on forever and also we can use those photos in other manners other than just this, this book.

But there was a lot, a lot went into the actual design aspect of the book. And one thing that I love about it is the spiral bound binding because when we were designing it, we realized that if each palette was going to have its own page, we were going to have over 200 pages in this book, not including an index, not including a forward, not including the covers. So we knew it was going to be a thick book. Working for a museum, and we’re all about preservation, the last thing I wanted someone to do was buy a brand new book and have to break the binding so that on page 86 they could see their favorite palette. Having a spiral bound book, you’re able to lay it completely flat. It was a very conscious design decision to go with the spiral bound.

Catherine Cooper: So I do have to ask this because it’s completely unfair. Do you have a favorite palette or set of palettes that you look forward to opening every year?

David Rau: I’ll let Matt tell you, but first I have to say that both Matt and I are artists on the tree. That took a little soul searching, like, “is that appropriate?” So we can’t say those, if those are our favorites. We won’t mention our own palettes. But you’d love to say they’re like your children and you love all of them the same. What is amazing, though, is I do have some favorites and I have some of least favorites, but I’ve also had folks show me or point at something that I might not like as much and they’ll say, “Oh my gosh, that’s my favorite.” So I realize that it really is up to people’s personal opinion and some of the ones that you’d think “Really, I don’t know…” people say, “Oh my gosh, I look forward to seeing that one every year.” So, go figure.

Matthew Marshall: Definitely. If I had to choose, I would say some of my favorites are-

David Rau: Are you going to pick mine?

Matthew Marshall: I don’t know…The Christmas themed ones are always something special for me because being the designer that helps design the trees, I look at them as part of a Christmas display. So for me, personally, it’s linked directly to Christmas. And I love the angels in particular. I just think putting an angel on a tree is so quintessential New England Christmas, and that to me is always a special part. Bringing the angels out of the boxes and putting them on the tree. So, that’s something I look forward to every year.

“Untitled” [Paper Snowflakes Trompe l’Oeil], painted palette by Michael Theise

David Rau: If I had to pick one…early on there was a trompe-l’oeil palette that really fools your eye. It looks like an old palette made out of old wood with the paint on it and then some snowflakes cut out of paper and then hanging on them by thread. Well, the artist lives pretty far away and I didn’t want to burden them by having to come all the way to the museum, so I actually met the artist in a Home Depot parking lot one night halfway between the museum and their studio. And I was very gracious and thanked them, but I really thought I was looking at a crafty palette that he just cut out some snowflakes and stuck it on there. Cause in the light of the Home Depot it really looked like just a palette with some decoupage snowflakes. And it wasn’t until I got back to the museum in good light that I saw that every aspect of that, the paper snowflakes, and the thread, and even the ancient wood was all painted by him. It’s really kind of a masterful piece. That one’s always been kind of near and dear because he didn’t hesitate to say yes when I asked if he would consider doing a palette for us. I think that just shows not only their eagerness to share their own work, but in their universe, the museum seems to be a very special place and they can acknowledge that by this kind of wonderful donation of a little bit of themselves.

Catherine Cooper: Thank you so much.

David Rau: Well, you’re also doing us a favor because we’re talking about the book, talking about the new palettes is getting us revved up for our 17th year of decorating Miss Florence’s palette trees.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Building a Career in Historic Masonry (Episode 90) ]]> Fri, 15 Nov 2019 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CCB0A7E8-EBB0-9221-43BF3D2DA483F10E.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CCB18D11-ECB7-C632-8D518DE217A0EF54 Building a Career in Historic Masonry (Episode 90) National Park Service Jason Church with Theodore (Teddy) Pierre Teddy Pierre is a historic brick mason 1029 no full 90

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Preservation mason Teddy Pierre working on Africa House at Melrose Plantation.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Theodore Pierre. In this podcast, they talk about Pierre’s career as an historic brick mason in Louisiana.

Theodore Pierre: I was born into it. My dad, in 1971 was cited by the local chapter of the AIA in New Orleans as craftsmen of the year. He had that kind of reputation. He was respected. I’m his namesake, because my name is Theodore Pierre, Jr. And I was his only son, and I just happened to really like what he did. He built his own house. We had a working fireplace. We had a fountain in the yard. He was a major influence in my life. My mother on the other hand, was a woman with some education. She had education. So, I was caught in a kind of a nexus between the physical work, my dad’s occupation, and my mother who wanted me to do something academic. At least get a college degree.

But she didn’t have any problem with me emulating my dad. It was just something that I did. From the day I was 12 years old, he told me, “All right, tomorrow morning you’re coming out to work with me.” And from that point on, I worked with him every Saturday, every weekend, during the summers. I had a built in job and that continued all the way through the time when I graduated from college. The day I finished college, I handed them my degree and I said, “Okay. For the next three or four years I’m going to be your apprentice. I’m going to work for you every day. No more school getting in the way of me learning what I could learn from you.”

And he this fabulous repertoire of projects that he could select on his own. To decide, well, I’m going to go do a fountain over, here or I’m going to do a fireplace over here. And it wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized what he was doing was he was selecting those projects to give me experience in those areas. Yeah, we could’ve just done brick veneer every day. And some people did that, and they became really good at it. Fast and accurate and so on. But that’s not what he did. It was also a turnkey operation. We get a job, we did all our own site prep, all our grading. That’s where I learned all of that, the whole schmear. And I learned it from the ground up, basically the ground up, the way craftsmen taught their sons in the 1960s and 70s. That’s what my dad was doing with me.

I worked with him for about five years. And then decided I wanted to go and do some other things. And then I went back to it. I just decided, I tried working in an office for awhile. Because, I had a degree in architecture and of course, there was always the idea of me perhaps starting an architectural firm and that sort of thing. Just wasn’t for me because I hated working indoors. It just didn’t work for me. Not only the working indoors, but the finished product. I like the physical finished product and I like to be able to claim the finished product. That’s just the way I’m built.

Jason Church: So, how did you get into historic masonry?

Theodore Pierre: My dad had that sort of bent to him. And then it was just appealing to me as well. It was a way for me to distinguish myself from other bricklayers. Because some of those guys found it very useful and financially rewarding to just do one kind of work. And some guys, all they did was brick floors. Some guys, all they did was walls. But, because we had that variety in my dad’s practice, I began to find out, and it was just so interesting. Because there was an incident in my life where after Hurricane Betsy, maybe five or six years after Hurricane Betsy, my dad got a call to go out to Evergreen Plantation. And Evergreen has the largest collection of slave quarters, intact, in this part of the country. Or maybe in the country at large. And so the work that needed to be done, because the hurricane was so destructive in that part of the country. Fireplaces, brick piers, and that sort of thing. And all of them using soft red brick. They were historically significant structures. It was very interesting because Evergreen Plantation is located maybe two miles from where my dad was born and grew up in Edgard, Louisiana. So, he was going back home when he went out there. And I saw how that all worked out, and I saw that the volume of work, the decisions that have to be made and so forth. And I just found it very appealing. Plus, I’ve always been attracted to history. Even as an architecture student, I liked the historic work more than contemporary work. I like the idea of taking something that once was intact and worked very well. It went into decline and I like to be the one who brought it back to life, is the way I think about it and thought about it.

And so, then what happened was my father passed away, and I got the call to come back to Evergreen. And in many cases I was redoing work that my father had done because my father had used the inappropriate materials. And I could see the damage that was being done to the bricks. So I had a chance to redo some of the work that my dad had done. I found that very appealing. And Jane Boddie is the woman who runs that plantation for the Stream family, I think. Jane Boddie was very appreciative of what I did. And I also had an apprentice with me at the time, two guys who were part of the preservation resource center project that I was involved with. And I brought them out there. After that program shut down, I left them as their instructor, and wound up going back into the field.

And one of the first projects was this Evergreen Plantation project. There are all kinds of ties that go along with it. But my dad, what he did wasn’t purposely done. It was just a matter of the amount of information at the time, just wasn’t that pervasive as it is now. There’s no excuse for people using inappropriate materials today. There’s just no excuse because we know too much about what’s being done and there are too many organizations that are screaming at you and saying, “Don’t use Portland cement base mortar on low fire brick.” You just don’t do that. And if you do it, you really are making a statement counter to what everybody else in the world is telling you.

Jason Church: So in your career, tell us about a project that stands out that you have enjoyed the most or you feel like you’ve given the most to.

Teddy Pierre instructing volunteers at a HOPE Project in Chalmette National Cemetery.

Theodore Pierre: It’s a small project, but because of what I was able to bring to the project, and that was the Metoyer Tomb restoration. Started off as a fairly typical job. I got a call from a local organization, the Cane River Heritage Area, to come and look at restoring this tomb. It had lots of problems. It was an 1853 structure that had been mistreated over the years. Soft, red brick, brick roof … a gable shaped roof, two wythes. It had plaster that was slapped all over it, Portland cement based plaster. Theodore Pierre: One of the jobs they wanted me to do was to remove the plaster, get back to the original brick, and finish it off with a lime wash, a lime paint finish. In order to do that, we had to take that Portland cement plaster off. With that self-supporting gable brick roof, once you removed a single brick out of that system, the roof was compromised. Well, it wound up collapsing. But again, we kind of anticipated that would happen. What made it fun for me was the fact that when it came time to rebuild that structure, I had two choices.

One was to build a plywood form, leave one end of the gable open, insert the form, build the roof, and then remove the form. Well, I had three choices. I could have just left the plywood in there and let it deteriorate. But, what I just determined, I said, over time what’s going to happen with weather beating on this thing, It’s gonna fail again. Because one of the things I found was evidence of there having been a failure in the past. That the roof had probably collapsed.

Well, I came up with the idea of a metal A-frame that would fit inside. You’d never see it, but it would be total support for that roof. There happened to have been a very convenient little shelf on the inside. The frame would sit on that shelf and support the roof. I was told by more than one person, “Oh, the state will never give you approval for doing something like that.” What I wound up with was an aluminum—I decided to go with the aluminum because, the aluminum wouldn’t rust and it would be lighter in weight than doing it out of steel.

Well, I came up with a design and so forth, a price and so on. And then I wrote a letter to the State Historic Preservation Office, and we got the approval. And, by the grace of God, one of the people who was involved with the project … was Mr. Jason Church. He was asked by the State Historic Preservation Office, because they don’t have resident brick masons in their office, to act as a consultant on the project and give his input. So, I got a call from Jason Church one day. I was on the job site and he vetted me. He asked me a lot of questions about what I was proposing and I got approval to do it. And so I was able to build that thing, set it up. And now I feel as though that project will be at least intact for at least 100—150 years. Who knows how long it will be there?

And maybe we have started another way of thinking about these projects, so that you wouldn’t go back with that same system. But you would still wind up with the same aesthetic. That was the most interesting project that I’ve done—so far. The next one is the African House. That is the one. But I’m not finished that one yet. That’s another story for another day.

Jason Church: For people listening to this, what would you say to either masons that are already learning the trade or people who are thinking about getting into the trade? What would you say to them?

Teddy Pierre lifting a headstone out of the ground before resetting.

Theodore Pierre: I’d say you find a craftsman whose work you find of value. You may have to go to an organization that can assist you in evaluating what you’re looking at. And I’m talking about an organization like the Preservation Resource Center or the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Who could give you some advice on how to evaluate a craftsman. And then don’t be in a hurry to go out and do the work on your own. Be a student for as long as you possibly can. Because you will be a student for the very rest of your life. Item one.

The other thing is, whenever there are conferences, in other parts of the country, make yourself available. You need money, you need a few dollars to get yourself to at least one of those conferences. Once you get the bug, you will learn so much. There’e so many people who are doing wonderful things. And there’s a network of folks who want you to succeed. Because, they want to make sure that the finished product is one that’s going to last for the next 150 years or so. That’s the most important thing, is to find that network. And find one of those craft categories, they’re probably 10 to 20 of them, that best fits what you are suited for, what you like to do. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

If you’re a bricklayer, put yourself in a position where you need to learn a little bit more about carpentry or plastering. Don’t be closed minded about what a preservation craftsman is all about. Because, there was a lot of cross pollenization in the past, and it’s reflected in the work that’s done. And you want that latitude that allows you to be a resource to the people in your area. Also … it’s really important to invest, and that’s what I’m talking about, is to invest your time. Oh.

To invest your time in becoming an expert. And all an expert is, is a person who knows more than the next person. That’s all that qualifies one person as an expert over another person. You want to be an expert. And when you talk to a potential client, many of those people who will be your clients have already been online. They already know what vocabulary, what mindset you should have. And you must be able to communicate that to them. Otherwise, you won’t get the job. They’re gonna keep looking until they find someone who meets that criteria that they set up.

So, that’s a lot to think about. But, that’s the way it works in any career area. It is in fact a career area. And you have to think about it in those terms. Yes, you get dirty. But you also take a shower. I mean, your hands get dirty, but you also get an opportunity to do something unique. You realize that what you do cannot be outsourced. It starts and stops with you.

Jason Church: It’s a good statement. Well, Teddy, thanks for talking with us today. We will talk to you again when you finish Africa House.

Theodore Pierre: Africa House, yes sir. I got a big story to tell you about Africa House.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Conserving Captain America: Using Klucel M on Comic Books at the Library of Congress (Episode 89) ]]> Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD4B3837-9CF0-A619-6FDF7B05DE5BFACC.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD54D1CA-AF75-2E86-49E7E14B2164E3A2 Conserving Captain America: Using Klucel M on Comic Books at the Library of Congress (Episode 89) National Park Service Jason Church with Cathie Magee and Michiko Adachi Increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape. 1077 no full 89

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Cathie Magee, and Michiko Adachi. In this podcast, they talk about Magee and Adachi’s efforts in conserving six original Captain America comic books.

Cathie Magee: Well we did the project as interns at the Library of Congress. We were both there as third year graduate fellows. It’s a part of our graduate education to do a third year externship for our conversation degrees. We had both gone to the Library of Congress. I was in the rare book lab and Michiko was in the paper lab. This was kind of a joint project between labs, which happens sometimes. It was the curator who approached conservation?

Michiko Adachi: Well the supervisor, Claire Dekle, who’s a senior book conservator; I think she thought it was a good joint project to do for us. That’s how she brought it to us. It originally came from the serials division who takes care of the comic books at the Library of Congress.

Cathie Magee: Library of Congress has thousands. How many hundreds of thousands?

Michiko Adachi: 131,000?

Cathie Magee: A lot of comic books. I don’t know how many have been treated, but not many.

Michiko Adachi: Not many. I believe not many come to the conservation division.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, opening to No 1. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: This was kind of a pilot project for the lab in a way. One of their hopes for us was to have us develop a sort of protocol for addressing the materials. Most of the comic books are printed on newsprint, which is extremely acidic. I think most people know it doesn’t age well at all. They can be quite fiddly to repair. Some of the challenges are getting tide lines in the paper.

If you use an adhesive that has a lot of water in it, if it dries, you end up with these visible rings of degradation products that form around where the water was. That’s an aesthetic that we want to avoid. We don’t want to cause those. Then the other challenge is just, handling the paper can be extremely delicate. Newsprint as it ages tends to start cracking and then flaking and little pieces will just break off. They are a real challenge to conserve, which is probably one of the reasons why not many of them came to the Library.

Michiko Adachi: Also, the important thing is that the treatment has to be streamlined because there are multiple pages in each comic book. That was also an important factor to consider.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, ¾ view. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: They end up being very time consuming because they’re 64 pages in a comic book. The project that we were given were six comic books. They were the first six printed Captain America comic books from 1941. It’s not the original art, it’s just the printed comic books. They had been stapled together through the spine. Each comic book has its own section of newsprint stapled through the fold.

Then those six books had been stapled through the spine with these big, heavy duty staples. I think there were 10 of them. Then that sort of makeshift text block was glued into a case binding. It’s a really common library style binding that’s cloth covered. It was really only bound with adhesive. Getting that off was fairly easy, because it was practically falling off because of the glue had decomposed.

Getting the comic books apart was one of the first steps. One of our supervisors, Claire Dekle, did that part by gently lifting the legs of the staples. She kind of sawed them off because we didn’t want to just lift the comic books up because we really feared we would continue to damage them. Then once they were apart, we could really see that the staples had obviously caused a lot of perforations in the spine.

Captain America Vol. 2, No. 1-6, 1941. Before treatment, opening to No 2. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Michiko Adachi: You couldn’t open the comic book from its natural binding because of the staples.

Cathie Magee: That’s why we had just found them in the first place. We should backtrack a little and say that the intention of this project was to treat these as research materials. They’re obviously not circulating, but they are requested by researchers really frequently to be viewed. The researchers get to sit in the reading rooms and leaf through the comic books.

They could not do that with these books in this state, because the paper was very fragile and the binding, these six things stapled together, it couldn’t open wide enough to be read fully. We really feared that if somebody tried to force it open, they’d end up causing a lot of damage. The curator really wanted these in a state where they could be handled safely by researchers.

Michiko Adachi: Also, because it’s the Library of Congress. It does have to be accessible to the public. That’s also important.

Cathie Magee: It is their mission.

Jason Church: Do you know the history of those bindings?

Cathie Magee: No. I don’t think we ever knew who did that. I don’t think it was believed that that happened at Library of Congress. Elsie has been known to rebind things in library bindings and lots of libraries do that, where the books are meant to be more functional than art pieces.

Michiko Adachi: I believe most comic books are stored the way they come in.

Cathie Magee: Yeah. That happens in conservation. You end up discovering some work someone else did, and you have no idea who, but you’re silently cursing them, whoever they are.

Jason Church: Once you got the bindings apart, what was the treatment for the individual comic books?

Michiko Adachi: The papers exhibited a lot of tears, losses. We weren’t gonna fill the losses, because that would have been too time consuming and visually just bridging it would have been enough. It was mostly mending the tears so that they could be handled again.

Cathie Magee: We’d call it stabilization.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Cathie Magee: Rather than aesthetic compensation.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Michiko Adachi applying test mends to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Cathie Magee, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: For that we used a solvent reactivated tissue that Michiko and I developed. That was our main role in this development of the protocol for treating these things. I mentioned the tide lines and Claire Dekle had done some testing on the inks and discovered that some of them were soluble in or sensitive to water or ethanol. We didn’t want to just put down wheat starch pastements.

We didn’t want to use a paper that was too thick because that obscures the media. We need these to be legible. We also needed something that would flex. We had to find the right adhesive. We have a standard set of adhesives that are pretty common in almost every paper lab. We can give you a list of those. That includes the wheat starch paste and methylcellulose and some other things, synthetic adhesives.

We tried a number of those. Library of Congress conservation makes its own repair tissues ahead of time, just in bulk, because we go through them so much. We had tried some of those with different adhesives. They just didn’t work the way we wanted them to. They were a little too opaque, and a lot of them were too stiff. They popped off when the paper was flexed. I should also mention that we …

Michiko Adachi: The adhesion strength wasn’t that great.

Cathie Magee: Yes, that’s the reason. To do all of this testing, we were given a discarded comic book from the serials division at LC. It was artificially aged by the preservation and research …

Michiko Adachi: Testing.

Test mends applied to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Cathie Magee, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: … testing division. Yes, thank you. It was from 1956, so it was a little bit later. They put it in the aging oven for a while to get the paper to a state that was closer to Captain America. Then we used that to do all of our testing. We have this lovely image of these different strips all laid out with the different adhesives. We had settled on one particular kind of paper just to knock one variable out. It’s a paper that we’re familiar with. It’s a machine made Japanese paper. It’s very thin. We were comfortable using that.

Then we were experimenting with these adhesives, and then reactivating those adhesives with different solvents. After a few test runs, we decided that what we were using wasn’t working. Sylvia had this idea to try Klucel M. Sylvia Albro, who’s the senior paper conservator at LC. She had gotten a little baggy for us and we made some up. It’s something I had used previously at the Walters Art Museum, where I am now. I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s a good idea.”

Michiko Adachi: I think Klucel G is a common adhesive used in book and paper conservation, but there is a paper out by Feller that Klucel M yellows a little bit more. I think maybe that is why people have shied away from M, but because of the higher molecular weight, higher tact, we thought we would give it a shot. We did like Klusel G. It was just the adhesion wasn’t strong enough.

Cathie Magee: It was nice and opaque compared to the other.

Michiko Adachi: Nice and transparent.

Cathie Magee: I’m sorry. Thank you. It was nice and transparent compared to the other adhesives, which were a little more opaque. We made up a new set of testing papers. It’s a simple process to make this stuff. You just paste it out and lay on your paper and it’s done.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, we found that Klucel M worked.

Cathie Magee testing the solubility of the printing inks on Captain America. Image by Michiko Adashi, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Yes, it worked brilliantly with ethanol, which was wonderful for us because that really minimized the tide line formation. Really, it was just wherever there were two inks printed on top of each other, like green is yellow over blue or something.

Michiko Adachi: Was sensitive to ethanol and the latter. The other inks weren’t sensitive to ethanol. That was the solvent we decided on using.

Cathie Magee: We did end up toning the mends with acrylic. We had a spray booth in Library of Congress, and we have an airbrush. We could airbrush our acrylic paint mixtures onto the paper to tone them first. I think that kind of gave that thin paper a little bit of extra structural integrity because it’s so thin. Klucel M is really viscous. We were only using a 2% solution. It’s really quite thick.

Michiko Adachi: And because the paper was white, toning really helped to integrate the mend into the medium.

Cathie Magee: Exactly. We could put it over that colored printed material and you can barely see it. It’s really fantastic. I was delighted how well it worked.

Jason Church: Once the pages were mended, what was next for the comic books?

Michiko Adachi: Because it needed to be handled, the decision was made that each sheet would be encapsulated in a polyester film. It won’t be in its original form. It will look a little bit different, but that is the decision that was made. We had to encapsulate each sheet. We actually had to make the mylar encapsulation too.

Cathie Magee: We did. This is high quality. These were custom cut, by us, by hand.

Michiko Adachi: Welded with an electro-, what, oh no, ultrasonic welder.

Cathie Magee: The ultrasonic welder, made by Bill Mentor himself. We did have to cut the comic books down the center fold, which is a step beyond dis-binding.

Michiko Adachi: It’s that the ideal, but if we kept it in a bi-folio form, you wouldn’t have been able to read it in the right order in this binding.

Cathie Magee: Yes. Okay. Let me clarify that. If we had left the comic books stapled together through the center fold, that fold would have eventually failed. I guarantee it because the paper was just so fragile. It had started to tear along that folder anyway. It was really only a matter of time. You can go back and mend those any number of times, but then you risk in doing a lot of damage to the newsprint.

We had observed that this newsprint was so fragile, that if it flexed at all, it really risked exacerbating the existing tears. We really needed to keep them flat. In order to do that, each page was separated from its conjoin and then it was encapsulated between two sheets of Melanex that was much, much wider than the … It’s smaller than eight and a half by eleven, but it ends up the finished book has a margin of 11 centimeters. That’s where the pages flex.

You can turn each page without actually bending the page. You’re bending the Melanex as you flip the page. Then the rigidity of the Melanex really supports the comic book page. These can be accessed really, really easily by researchers. They do have to wear cotton gloves, but that’s to prevent getting fingerprints on the Melanex, which is nice. It’s got a nice margin around each page too, so they have space to grip the Melanex without actually even getting a finger on the, on the newsprint.

Jason Church: How will this be rebound?

Captain America No 1., 1941. After treatment in new binding. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Each individual issue was given its own binding. We call it a scrapbook style binding. We took this stack of newsprint pages in Melanex and actually, we stack them and clamp them and then drilled holes with a drill to create sewing holes. We used a linen thread to sew them together. A lot of people do it with posts, with metal posts, like regular scrapbooks. These were actually a little too thin for that. We had to improvise and use linen thread. We made covers out of laminated binders board and covered them in a lovely blue cloth that the curator picked out, because she thought it was appropriate.

Michiko Adachi: For Captain America.

Cathie Magee: Yes. We made our own labels and we bound each one in a big scrapbook. One of the trade-offs is that it’s gone from being this little tiny book object to six, big, hefty scrapbooks. The storage space has gone from this to this, which is something to consider when this kind of treatment is proposed for future objects.

Jason Church: Is this extreme treatment because of the extreme condition that these first six Caps were, or is this something you foresee for other comics in the collection?

Michiko Adachi: I think it was because it was an exceptional … Yeah, the extreme condition, because it was just so deteriorated. The paper was just so brittle.

Cathie Magee: I think this is something that we would avoid if we could, and maybe it would depend on a case by case basis if something was really popular but in bad condition, then this is the route they would ask us to go.

Jason Church: I know you said that these were frequently requested. Do you think the recent popularity of Captain America may have led to this treatment as well?

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, I would assume so.

Cathie Magee: That seems entirely likely. Yeah. These books are available to anyone who requests them.

Michiko Adachi: Yes, yes, again, because the Library of Congress is a public library.

Cathie Magee: Yes. Government institutions.

Michiko Adachi: Yes, it has to be accessible to everyone really.

Jason Church: Very important question. While you’re doing all this work, did you read them?

Cathie Magee: Some of them.

Michiko Adachi: Yes.

Cathie Magee: We have a lot of great pictures of Hitler getting punched in the face.

Jason Church: Yes.

Cathie Magee: I am not a comic book fan, so it was a surprise for me to realize that there’s the Captain America story and then there’s all these other characters that I have never-

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, Caveman and Tuk.

Cathie Magee: It’s a very 1941 cultural aesthetic that was eyebrow raising from a 21st century perspective.

Michiko Adachi: It was interesting. I didn’t know Captain America’s shield wasn’t round.

Cathie Magee: Oh yeah. It started out as not round.

Jason Church: Until later.

Cathie Magee: No, it’s like by issue three or something. It’s a round …

Michiko Adachi: It was interesting to see how he was depicted. Some of the volumes his jaw is more angular, like strong, whereas some of them are softer.

Cathie Magee: There’s that one issue where he disguises himself as a woman.

Michiko Adachi: Oh, that must have been yours.

Cathie Magee: That was one of mine, yeah.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah, it was funny. He had eyebrows over his masks.

Cathie Magee: Really? I hadn’t noticed that.

Michiko Adachi: That’s how they depicted it.

Cathie Magee (left) and Michiko Adachi (right) applying test mends to King of the Royal Mounted. Image by Claire Dekle, courtesy of Library of Congress Conservation Division.

Cathie Magee: Yeah. We should also mention that, there were six issues. Michiko and I each treated two. Then one each was treated by Claire and Sylvia. We were constantly consulting with them on our work, and the direction we were going. What was too much? Where should we draw the line in terms of mending? Then ultimately what the goals were from this mending material.

I should also mention that the reason we presented this poster at this conference, which theme is innovation and treatment is that not a lot of people will use Klucel M because of the study that Michiko mentioned. But the PRTD lab at LC is doing more research on that adhesive, and we included some of that in our poster, but they’re going to continue that, to investigate the degradation qualities of Klucel M. It’ll be really interesting to see what they find and maybe more people will start using this stuff as a result.

Jason Church: You said this was an internship. Where are you headed or where are you at now?

Cathie Magee: I’m at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, working on medieval books.

Michiko Adachi: I am a fellow at the MFA Boston, in the Asian conservation studio.

Jason Church: Well hopefully we can talk to each of you at a those locations on projects you’re doing in the future.

Cathie Magee: Yeah.

Michiko Adachi: Yeah.

Jason Church: Thank you very much for talking with us.

Michiko Adachi: Thank you.

Cathie Magee: Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Paths through History: Accessible Trails at Voyagers National Park (Episode 88) ]]> Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD69B2F8-CD9D-798D-FE4D0D8537B4BC83.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD6BD142-B9F5-F317-82B499A169C1D386 Paths through History: Accessible Trails at Voyagers National Park (Episode 88) National Park Service with David Driapsa and Jason Christensen Increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape. 382 no full 88

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Four men, three in NPS uniforms, standing over a trail under construction. Left to right, Mason Meyer, Jamie, Callais, Jason Christenson, and David Driapsa on the accessible trail under construction at the comfort station at Ellsworth Rock Garden, Voyagers National Park.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Debbie Smith as she speaks with landscape architect, David Driapsa, FASLA, and Jason Christensen, a maintenance worker at Voyageurs National Park. In this podcast, they will talk about increasing visitor accessibility while preserving the character of the historic landscape.

View of raised flower beds and stone sculptures on the granite outcropped hillside Ellsworth Rock Gardens (David Driapsa, 2010)

Debbie Smith: David and Jason, thank you for joining me today. David, could you tell me a little bit about Ellsworth Rock Gardens?

David Driapsa: Ellsworth Rock Gardens is an historic district in Voyageurs National Park. It was the summer home of Jack and Elsa Ellsworth, and they spent a number of years here, decades, building these beautiful gardens of rock. They laid up glacier rock on the granite outcroppings and then planted flowers in raised beds. It became known as the showcase of Lake Kabetogama.

Debbie Smith: How long did it take him to build the gardens?

David Driapsa: I’m going by recall, but I’m thinking something like 20 years or some more possibly.

Debbie Smith: Do you know when he started to build them?

David Driapsa: I know that he stopped in about 1966. He worked on these gardens between 1944 and 1966.

Debbie Smith: Why is there a need for this new trail? I know there are a number of trails here already.

Rock sculptures on a section of granite outcropping Several of Ellsworth’s rock sculptures on the granite outcropping.

David Driapsa: Well, the real need, Debbie, is for a universal accessibility, so people with maneuverability disabilities can access this historic landscape equally as anyone who is mobile.

Debbie Smith: I noticed when I came here there was very steep steps at the current landing.

David Driapsa: Yes, there is and I counted those. There are fifteen risers, which would make it very difficult or impossible for some people to access.

Debbie Smith: I’m interested in this trail because it goes through an historic district. How is the trail going to blend in with that historic landscape?

David Driapsa: Well, that is the beauty of the preservation treatment. It is a solid trail that will be wheelchair accessible, and the top surface is grass just like the surrounding area. So, it does not impair the visual quality of the historic resource.

Debbie Smith: Jason, can you tell me, I’ve seen some of the construction documents and plans that David created. Can you tell me about the layering in the lawn?

Construction drawing showing the layering of the basecoat, geotextile, geogrid, paver cells, sandy loam, and turf. Path Construction, Ellsworth Rock Garden. (David Driapsa, 2011)

Jason Christensen: Sure. We first we flagged the lawn where the trail is going to go. Next, we dug down 10 inches till we found a good solid soil to work off of, and then we brought in a sandy clay material that we packed in layers. After that, we lay a separation fabric of a geotextile material over the new soil, which is basically the base layer for the trail, the foundation of the trail. And then, over that it’s the geogrid, they look like big cup holders. That’s the final grade, and the grass grows through the geogrid when it’s all said and done, to match the surrounding grass.

Debbie Smith: I can see some grass in the grid coming through, and I understand it was seeded this year. Is that correct?

The plan view site plan depicts the three trails. Section of the Accessible Path Plan, Ellsworth Rock Gardens (David Driapsa, 2011), with color added to show path through the lawn (purple), comfort station path (yellow) and switchback path from dock (red).

Jason C.: Yes. It was seeded about a month and a half ago.

Debbie Smith: It’s amazing how much grass has already grown through.

Jason Christensen: Yes, it’s coming up real nice.

Debbie Smith: I understand you started in May. When do you hope to complete the project?

Jason Christensen: Well, also involved in the project are new his-and-hers comfort stations, a big dock with much more dock space, and a switchback trail for accessibility up the slope. We hope to be done with the accessibility part of the project by this fall (2018), and to complete the project we’re looking at probably mid-summer (2019) to have the dock in and the comfort station built, and everything wrapped up.

Debbie Smith: Jason, I noticed the difference in the trail. Around the location for the comfort station, it’s a crushed gravel. Can you tell me how this construction is different from the trail?

Jason Christensen: The trail edge is outlined with 5 x 6” green-treated timbers that we fill with a crusher fine, so it’s a real good solid surface.

Debbie Smith: Does it compact down with time?

View of the walkway lined with timbers Compacted crushed stone walkway at the site of the new comfort station

Jason Christensen: Yes, and we run compactors over it so it’s completely solid and crowned in the middle so it sheds water off of the trail.

Debbie Smith: Is it something that you will have to maintain by continually rolling over, or will it just stay in place?

Jason Christensen: You might be looking at maintenance-free for 10 to 15 years. You might have to occasionally add bit more gravel, but they maintain themselves pretty well.

Debbie Smith: I understand that at I. W. Stevens historic site within Voyageurs National Park, there’s a similar type of a trail that’s been recently put in. It’s also handicap accessible. David, could you tell me a little about that project? I understand you also designed that site.

David Driapsa: Yes, I.W. Stevens Resort is another visitor day-use historic site, and the main trails are handicap accessible. There are backcountry trails that are not accessible, but the main ones leading from the boat dock all the way over to the picnic area are accessible. Even the boat dock is accessible, so the visitor gets an overview of how Mr. Stevens lived from his home to his sauna and the lawns and the cabins.

Compacted gravel path lined with timbers passing through mature pine trees Accessible trail at I.W. Stevens day-use area.

Debbie Smith: These are two examples of where handicap-accessible trails have been constructed at Voyageurs. Do you know if there are more planned?

Jason Christensen: Yes, recently at the Ash River Visitor Center where they constructed a nice handicap-accessible trail, and picnic areas at Rainy Lake City and Camp Marston on Rainy Lake. There are plenty more sites to come.

Debbie Smith: Thank you both for talking with me today.

David Driapsa: It’s a pleasure being here.

Debbie Smith: Thank you. Bye now.

David Driapsa: Bye.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Shining Silver Pt. 2: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 87) ]]> Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD849E62-9ADC-206A-885692329DE9A8FF.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD85796E-C67B-2C41-26D1A7371490E6A7 Shining Silver Pt. 2: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 87) National Park Service In this second part, Catherine Cooper continues an interview with with Ingrid Neuman at Rhode Island School of Design Museum about silver conservation work on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970. 1194 no full 87

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper and Ingrid Neuman for the second half of their conversation about the upcoming Gorham Silver Exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum. In this podcast, they discuss the history of Gorham Silver in Rhode Island, and why the RISD Museum decided to mount this project.

Catherine Cooper: It sounds like such a huge undertaking. So three years in preparation, and then it will be up for a few months here. What led the RISD Museum to actually decide to do something to this scale?

Design drawings for the Athenic peacock vase, including three different configurations.

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it was interesting. I would say about six years ago or seven years ago, we hired a new curator of decorative arts and design. We hadn’t had a curator of decorative arts and design for quite a few years. Elizabeth Williams came to us as a doctoral student, an advanced doctoral student, and she was writing her PhD on Gorham silver. So, it was a perfect match because she was coming to Providence where Gorham silver was first created by Jabez Gorham in 1831 or so, and then eventually the company was taken over by his son, John Gorham, later. Elizabeth Williams, the curator of the exhibition, is a specialist of Gorham, and so it was a natural fit when she came to the museum. She knew of course that we had 2,200 pieces of silver, plus I believe about 2,000 design drawings that are very special because you see the 2D version of the elaborate silver artwork, and then you can also see the result of the design drawing. She was very excited by all of this, and it’s really been her life’s work.

Silver Athenic vase with decorative peacock feathers.

At least a dozen design drawings will be on view. The Gorham archives are located at Brown University right up the hill, so we’ve also been able to pull a lot of historic photographs from the actual company, which will be in the exhibition as well as in a beautiful book of Gorham silver published by Rizzoli. We have a paper conservator here at the museum, Linda Catano, who is working on cleaning and repairing the tears and presenting the drawings in such a way that they won’t look like finished works of art. They’re really design drawings. They would’ve been tacked to the wall. They would’ve been very casual, not matted framed works of art. They’re working on a nice way to exhibit those so they look like design drawings.

This exhibit will be focusing in part on some very innovative techniques that John Gorham, the son of Jabez Gorham, insisted on. I think there was a little riff between the father and the son because the father was very traditional. Everything was done by hand. That was in 1831 up to about 1860 or so. Then John Gorham took over and he introduced the steam-powered die-cutting machine, for instance, for the silverware. I get the sense from different readings I’ve come across that the father was much more of a traditionalist, and the son of course wanted to make advances, use mechanized processes to crank out the silver a little bit faster.

They were quite profitable. I think Jabez Gorham thought his son was going to take the company down, but the son was actually on the right track in that it was very profitable. The company grew from something like 40 employees to 400, this kind of thing, and actually had to relocate. The original Gorham Manufacturing site that the father owned and operated was here in Providence, very close to the museum. That’s what’s kind of cool about the whole project is that we’ve had some walking tours. There’s a lot of history. It happened really right around the corner from the RISD Museum. When the son decided to mechanize and the father passed the company to the son, they moved over to an area called Elmwood, which is further from the museum, but it’s still in Providence, but it’s just farther. They had to make many more buildings to accommodate the much larger number of employees.

Display showing silver stamping techniques

The exhibit will highlight, I think, some of these new mechanized processes that the son introduced. There’s going to be a really interesting process area where you’re going to be able to see a lot of the dies, meaning these are molds that were used to press the silver into to create, for instance, the elaborate silverware. When I say silverware, there are many unusual implements that I would say most people do not have today, for instance, fish forks, and knife rests that have little unicorn heads on them, and berry spoons that have raspberries wrapping around them. One of the most fantastic sets of serving implements that you will see are called the Narragansett Salad Service. It’s a large spoon and a large fork that would be used to serve salad. The reason why it’s called Narragansett Silver Service is because if you look really closely, there’s little sea urchins, and snails, and all sorts of sea creatures that wrap around the handles in a really intricate pattern. They’re just stunning. It’s not something that you would just look at for one second. You really need to examine them closely, and imagine people cleaning all the surfaces that are minute.

We didn’t just put these pieces, say, in an ultrasonic cleaner, which, for instance, a lot of jewelers would do that if you took your jewelry to a jewelry store. We cleaned them by hand with minute pieces of cotton wrapped around bamboo skewers and very thoughtfully cleaned and in some cases didn’t clean areas that we left black to allow the higher levels, or the ornamentation that is raised on the silver pieces was cleaned to a higher degree than, say, the recesses so that you get the effect of these design elements popping off of the surface.

Catherine Cooper: Silver is an interesting material to work with for a wide variety of people. But for you, why do you find it so fascinating to work with?

Ingrid Neuman: Silver is interesting because of course it’s metal. Everyone knows it’s metal. I think people associate metal with being indestructible. It’s metal, but what people don’t realize is that metals have various softnesses and hardnesses. For instance, silver is considered a rather soft metal. There’s something called the Mohs scale of hardness, for instance, where all materials are rated by their hardness. There’s also something called the electromotive scale of metals where metals react with other metals in various ways based on their reactivity. There’s a lot to metals. I think that silver of course, we love silver in this country. Silver is loved in all countries. It’s a very precious metal. It’s soft. It can be manipulated in wonderful ways.

Gorham was very active. This particular exhibit will feature 120 years of silver-making. Not only did they use silver, they often gilded the silver, which we refer to as vermeil in French. The silver itself is, as you know, very sensitive to atmospheric pollutants, we call it, or chemicals that are in the air like sulfur. That’s one of the biggest deterrents to keeping your silver shiny all the time. Sulfur can come from eggs, egg salad, eggs, or it can come from exhaust fumes from cars. It can come from burning coal in the 19th century. Sulfur has always been with us in different forms. That’s why the silver often tarnishes. It’s not only from sulfur, but often from sulfur.

When you add gold to the top layer, the gold of course is very sensitive. It’s very soft. It’s sensitive to abrasion. It’s not so sensitive to atmospheric pollutants. People know that, say, from gold wedding rings or other gold rings. They might wear gold jewelry. It doesn’t tarnish, so that’s why it’s very nice to have the gold on top of the silver. But it is sensitive to abrasion, and over-cleaning, and rubbing, and scratching, and that kind of thing.

Catherine Cooper: You mentioned that the Gorham Manufacturing is local to Providence. What did that do to the landscape here?

Fruit stand embellished with gold grape vines and a fox.

Ingrid Neuman: Right, that’s a really important element to consider when you appreciate all of the work that’s gone into these stunning Gorham pieces is that when the company moved over to the Elmwood area, the process of working with the gold in particular, it’s my understanding that the process working with the gold is actually a fairly toxic one. Vermeil, or gilding, when it’s applied to silver requires the use of some fairly stringent and toxic chemicals. There’s many forms of applying gold to silver, but there’s amalgam gilding, for instance, that was done earlier on and is still practiced in other countries, is not practiced in America anymore because it used mercury, for instance, to apply the gold. There was a process where you applied the mercury to the silver, put the gold leaf on top, heated the whole work to vaporize the mercury so it would go into the air. It was very toxic for the workers, and that is something to think about when you see the gold applied to the silver. That’s amalgam gilding. Amalgam gilding can be very lumpy. You see that on the Cubic Coffee Service, for instance. It’s a bit uneven.

Other forms of applying gilding by electroplating, for instance, which is what you see on the majority of the gilded pieces in the Gorham exhibition, was much smoother. It was a much thinner layer. It looks more clean basically. It also required the use of chemicals like cyanide and different toxic chemicals like that which were toxic to the employee, but also there was leftover. There was residue. There was material that unfortunately was put out into the environment surrounding the complex, the Gorham complex, the manufacturing complex in Elmwood. To this day, it is an issue. There’s been many environmental cleanups. There’s a body of water there called Mashapaug Pond. Then of course there’s the earth itself that has been cleaned and continues to be cleaned. The EPA is involved somewhat and other entities that are concerned about cleaning up. It’s a work in progress. It’s getting better incrementally, but it’s going to take a while, and it is an ongoing project. It is sort of a dichotomy of the beauty versus the toxicity of the implementation or application of gold.

Catherine Cooper: With some of these objects, and you also mentioned the son taking over the business from the father, how did Gorham promote itself? How did it keep the interest and keep people buying these pieces?

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it seems like they were very clever in making some wonderful standalone pieces maybe that were very unique. There was only one of them, they were unique, or there were only a few of them, six or seven produced. For instance, a very good example of that is something called the Cubic Coffee Service, which you will see in the exhibition, which involves a tray, coffee, creamer, sugar. What was really wonderful about this piece is it’s faceted. It was important at the time that it was created because it basically mimicked the whole idea of skyscrapers, and building tall buildings, and this architectural innovation that was going on in urban areas.

The Cubic Coffee Service is unique. As I mentioned earlier, there were always design drawings for every piece and so forth, but we don’t own the design drawing for the Cubic Coffee Service. We own Cubic Coffee Service itself, which is fantastic. However, during the course of this project, sometime in 2016, one of our staff members, I believe it was the curator, was watching Antiques Roadshow, as most of us do at the museum. We love that show. She was watching the American version, not the British version. A woman was on the show who had a manila envelope, out of which she pulled a folded design drawing of the Cubic Coffee Service. It was just a match made in heaven because we didn’t know where the design drawing was. The curator reached out to the woman and so forth. The owner of the design drawing didn’t know where the actual Cubic Coffee Service was, which is here at the RISD Museum. We were able to borrow the design drawing for the exhibition, which is pretty fabulous.

The Gorham lady’s writing table (right) contains 47.5 pounds of silver in addition to mother-of-pearl and ivory inlays. The Gorham lady’s dressing table from Dallas (left) has 78 pounds of silver.

We have a very special ladies writing desk and chair that is a composite material. There’s 47.5 pounds of silver in the Gorham ladies writing desk, which is really hard to wrap your mind around. [Edited]

Catherine Cooper: So, there’s pounds of silver. How much weight does the wood add to this desk?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes, we need to weigh it, and we will be weighing it prior to creating a crate because it is very important to weigh these pieces. Some of these pieces are quite heavy, as you can imagine. The desk is also made up of a lot of different fruit woods, and also a fair amount of ivory, I’d say. We’re not the only one that has one of these gorgeous Gorham writing desks. The museum in Dallas, the Dallas Museum of Art, also has a similar one I’m told. I have not seen it yet. It will also be traveling, so there will be two desks traveling with this show.

Catherine Cooper: Would that have been an object that they made a lot of?

Ingrid Neuman standing in front of the exhibition title wall with the promotional teapot and spoon on either side.

Ingrid Neuman: No, I’m not entirely sure how many Gorham writing desks there are in the world. But for instance, you will also see in this exhibit a very large spoon in the Melrose pattern. It’s solid sterling silver. Sterling silver is 92.5% silver, 7.5% copper. Solid sterling silver, it’s not plated. It’s not just the surface. This is a very, very large spoon. It’s over a meter in length. There were six or seven of those, for instance, produced. They were promotional to get someone’s attention. Perhaps you’d put it in a window that people would walk by in a city, that kind of thing. I know the Cubic Coffee Service spent some time in a window to attract people to come in to purchase other Gorham pieces. This particular spoon is very neat because it was used promotionally. They sat a small baby in the bowl of the spoon to express to the viewer exactly how large it is. They also took this particular silver spoon to the zoo and used it to feed an elephant. These historic photographs will be visible. You can see them in the catalog.

The Admiral Dewey Cup is made from 70,000 dimes. The design drawing for the cup is hanging behind it on the wall.

In another example that I’d like to highlight, the Chicago History Museum has a wonderful Admiral Dewey Cup, it’s called, but it’s not a cup like you would drink out of. It’s approximately six feet tall, and it’s made out of 70,000 silver dimes. Not all the dimes are recognizable as dimes. Many of them have been melted and reformed into basically a trophy cup. That’s what it looks like. There’s an enamel pendant of Admiral Dewey. That’s why it’s called the Admiral Dewey Cup. Anyway, they own this six-foot, 70,000-dime Admiral Dewey Cup, but we have the design drawing, which is also about five feet tall. So, we’re bringing them together for the exhibition, which is really the point of the exhibition is to bring everything together and make it all make sense for the public so they can really understand from beginning to end how these beautiful pieces were created.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Shining Silver Pt. 1: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 86) ]]> Tue, 30 Jul 2019 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD9E1DD2-A86B-F73C-2CB6B238903FF770.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD9F03EE-0D4B-5148-78B9929EBE33FAD4 Shining Silver Pt. 1: Conserving Objects for the RISD Museum Gorham Silver Exhibit (Episode 86) National Park Service Catherine Cooper speaks with with Ingrid Neuman at Rhode Island School of Design Museum about silver conservation work on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970. 1218 no full 86

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join Catherine Cooper as she speaks with Ingrid Neuman, the objects conservator at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, commonly referred to as the RISD Museum. In this podcast, they talk about Ingrid’s work on the upcoming Gorham Silver Exhibit at the RISD Museum, and her strategy to handle this large scale project at a small museum.

Catherine Cooper: Hello, this is Catherine Cooper. I’m here at the RISD Museum with Ingrid Neuman. So Ingrid, could you tell me a bit about the work you do here at RISD?

Ingrid Neuman: I’m the sculpture conservator here at the RISD Museum. We have a collection of about 110,000 artworks. It’s an encyclopedic collection, so it goes all the way back to the times of the ancient Egyptians and up to contemporary. We collect a lot of contemporary artists.

I’ve been here for 11 years. I’m really only the second sculpture conservator we’ve had at the RISD Museum. I’m the first full time sculpture conservator, so there’s a lot of backlog to take care of. I rely heavily on the student population who, both from Brown University and from Rhode Island School of Design, who are very interested in learning more about what it’s like to work in a museum.

As a sculpture conservator, I’m responsible for not only obviously sculpture, but three-dimensional, you know frames, for instance, wooden frames, gilded frames. I’m somewhat responsible for furniture that is also considered three-dimensional of course, but it really is a separate specialty unto itself. I would say about half of my time or so is spent on upkeep. And then the other half is spent on exhibitions. We have a pretty rigorous exhibition schedule.

Since April, 2016 I’ve been working on an exhibition called Gorham Silver Designing Brilliance 1850 to 1970. When we embarked on this particular exhibition, I thought it was going to be pretty reflective of most other exhibitions we work on where we start about a year, well, six months to a year in advance with a checklist from the curator. And then we survey the material that the curator would like to exhibit and then we start conserving it. We start preserving it, stabilizing it, condition reporting, cleaning it, repairing it, you know, preparing it for exhibition. But in this case, I soon realized that this exhibition was really unique in the history of the RISD museum and that the curator was going to select 1200 pieces of Gorham Silver out of our collection of 2200, so a little bit over half.

It’s the largest exhibition we’ve ever put on. We’re using so many. The sheer number of silver articles that we’re planning to present, the 1200, and that pretty much all of the silver was going to require some intensive cleaning, because it hadn’t been exhibited that much in the past. We do have a small silver gallery at the RISD Museum in the Pendleton House, the historic House that we have attached to our museum, but maybe there’s 30 or 40 pieces exhibited there.

Ingrid Neuman cleaning silver tea cups.

I could only possibly complete one piece a day and that I wasn’t probably going to make my deadline if it were to be just me at a table sitting by myself. Plus it seemed like a really wonderful educational opportunity because we’re surrounded by colleges. Many students call me, email me, want to get involved in the museum. They don’t know how. There are many kinds of activities in conservation that would be too advanced for someone new who is interested in conservation.

So silver cleaning seem to be perfect. So basically, there are many ways that I was able to arrange to have several students help. Of course there was word of mouth, there was emailing, but some of the students for instance, at Brown University, used their Facebook accounts within their departments and so forth to reach out to like-minded students. For instance, in the Archeology Department at Brown. I’d like to give a shout out to the archeology students at Brown who really came down the hill to the museum en masse to help us. They were particularly wonderful silver volunteers, because of their attention to detail, because they’re archeology students and they’re used to that level of detail. Not every student, for instance, would have the attention span, to be perfectly honest, for doing very detailed cleaning of silver and all the crevices and so forth. So they were a particularly wonderful population to work with.

Catherine Cooper: Overall, how many volunteers did you have on this project?

Ingrid Neuman: Well, it was interesting. It started out with probably 10 or so students and then when each individual had a roommate or a friend at their college, this kind of thing, we ended up with exactly 90 volunteers. A few of them were staff members in that 90, but the majority of them came from, you know Roger Williams University, Rhode Island Community College, Brown University, definitely. And early on there were some RISD students as well and RISD professors.

Volunteers sitting around a work table cleaning silver objects for exhibition.

It was very exciting to have so many people that were also excited about working on the exhibit. As you know from your experience, silver cleaning can be somewhat repetitious and it’s not for everyone. It involves a lot of manual dexterity and manual repetition. It’s also very bright and shiny and it can affect your eyes, for instance.

But we didn’t have all 90 people, of course in, you know, one room all together, all the time. The way I structured it was in general, the volunteers would come in the morning and I would say typically we would have five to eight volunteers at a table. We would all sit at a long table together. So we would be comparing notes and everyone would have a spoon to work on, or small tureen, or a Yoyo, or a fish fork, or something like that. There were different, very unusual, some very unusual pieces. And we would talk about the issues and we would kind of work together. In fact sometimes with some of the larger pieces, like the epergne and the larger compotes that had multiple pieces, we would pass them around and we would work on them collectively, because often it was really almost too much for one individual. And so we would collectively work on them. And we used materials that were quite foolproof in the sense that you couldn’t go too far with the conservation materials that we were using.

Catherine Cooper cleaning a set of cut glass decanters for exhibition.

Catherine Cooper: So that was one of the ethical considerations on bringing in so many people who aren’t necessarily trained in the profession yet, to protect the objects?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes. You know, I’m aware that as a conservator, in general, we do not employ a lot of volunteers to do actual hands on conservation work because there are so many ethical concerns in terms of knowing how far to go in the cleaning. When to stop, when to ask questions. But I felt that if I arrange the group so that we were all on one table together, we were all sharing our concerns and we had a lot of very strong light sources and we could talk about the issues together, it was more of an educational experience.

Some people were actually silver makers. They were students of jewelry and they knew a lot about how the pieces were actually made and they would educate everyone, and it was a wonderful experience. There were a few silver collectors, who also had pieces at home. I remember one day when we were working on a Gorham silver yoyo, and one of the older gentlemen who were helping us actually had a similar Gorham yoyo at home. So he had taken a real interest in the collection because he was a collector himself.

This project was very large, unusually large. I wanted to start as soon as possible. So we started the preparation for the conservation of the silver in April, 2016. And in fact, we’re still performing conservation on the silver works of art at this point. And it is, you know, now, December, 2018. We had to continue a momentum for a long period of time. And that was tricky. You didn’t want your volunteers to just disappear. A handful of volunteers decided it wasn’t for them. And that was totally fine. But there was really a hardcore group who expressed interest, came regularly. In fact, I was so excited by a core group of very diverse young people who took an interest in this project that we made a short film, which featured four or five of the students from different departments. Because I wanted to highlight the fact that it wasn’t one typical type of person that took a fancy to this project. And they spoke about what they got out of it. And you can see this very short film on the RISD Museum website.

Catherine Cooper: So one of the things that I remember from when we were cleaning was there were coatings on these objects as well.

Ingrid Neuman: So when these functional silver Gorham pieces were in use at people’s homes, they didn’t coat them. They would use them, they would put their string beans in the dishes. They would eat with the fork, they would play with the yoyo. Honestly, the hand oils probably from playing with the yoyo would keep the silver very shiny. Just like when you wear silver jewelry and if you handle it you’re actually kind of self polishing it with your hands.

Volunteer cleaning Gorham silver tray for exhibition

But what happened was a lot of the Gorham silver that we own was, prior to our accessioning it, it was owned by a large corporation that bought out Gorham, called Textron. And for obvious reasons they wanted to coat the silver so it wouldn’t tarnish and they could display it in various showrooms for promotional reasons. And so the typical coating that was applied and still applied today in many, many museums, is called cellulose nitrate. And it is a coating that is wonderful in the sense that it levels really beautifully when you apply it by brush or by spray gun. It levels so that it’s not uneven and it fills in all the nooks and crannies of the silver and it can look beautiful for a long time and it also keeps the silver from being tarnished, so you don’t have to polish it. So it’s a wonderful, that’s a wonderful feature.

But what happens is, fast forward 30 years, 40 years, it’s a natural product, cellulose nitrate, so it turns yellow. It discolors, because it’s natural. And all of a sudden the silver, especially, it’s more obvious on the silver than the gold, because it turns yellow. So the silver has a very odd coloration. It shifts it to being a warmer silver than a cooler silver. Originally, the coating is clear, then it becomes yellow. So there’s a color shift.

So that’s why we want to get it off because it’s not really representing the silver in its original format. The gold on the other hand isn’t typically coated because it is gold. But in this case, we did find coatings on the gold and they were very yellow, so we took them off, which involved using acetone. Fortunately, it’s very easy to take it off, but it’s very tedious and it’s very obvious when it’s on there because you use a cotton swab, like a q-tip, use some acetone, the q-tip turns yellow. You know there’s a coating. I would say about maybe a third to a half of the pieces that we cleaned were coated. So more of the silver pieces were coated, not so many of the gilded or vermeil pieces were coated.

Catherine Cooper: With so many objects that we have been cleaned with such care, how are you going to transport it when this exhibit travels? Because that’s another big part of this exhibit is it’s not just going to stay at the RISD museum. It will go elsewhere. Yes?

Ingrid Neuman: Yes. So very often exhibitions stay at their home institution. In this case, our venue, the RISD Museum, will have the Gorham Exhibition from May 3rd until December 1st, 2019. But then it’s actually going to travel to the Cincinnati Art Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio, from March 3rd through June 7th, 2020. And then to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina from July 25th to November 1st, 2020. And then it will come back to our museum about December 2020. It will be on the road for about a year. And in preparation for that, we’ve had to think seriously about how to keep the silver from tarnishing, because as we spoke about earlier, we removed a discolored coating that was on the surface, but we didn’t re-coat the silver because we frankly didn’t have the equipment to do that kind of thing.

Cleaned silver objects on cart ready to return to storage. Some objects have been wrapped in anti-tarnish copper-impregnated sheeting while others are waiting to be wrapped.

Also, I wasn’t sure I wanted to put a coating back on and have someone have to remove it again in 30 years or those kinds of issues to consider. So in this case we went with the more passive technique, it’s called. An active technique would have been to coat the silver directly, but a passive conservation technique is to protect the silver. So in this case we’re using a specially formulated polymer sheet film that has copper particles in it and the copper particles embedded in a polyethylene matrix actually serves as a sacrificial component. The pollutants will react with the copper particles in that film that’s surrounding the silver and will not actually infiltrate into the bag in which the silver is placed. So we’re hoping that we’ll have really limited tarnish. We might have small amount. After all, the silver will be exhibited in cases that will have charcoal also embedded in it.

Charcoal is a wonderful adsorbent for chemicals. Charcoal is very porous and so there’s thousands of little pores that can adsorb chemicals. And so by putting charcoal paper, it’s literally paper that’s embedded with charcoal, into these exhibit cases, we can also maintain a more or less tarnish free environment for the silver.

These particular exhibit cases that are being created for us, some of them will be historic in nature. They will appear to be historic, even though they’re newly made. And they’re going to travel in at least one or two tractor trailer trucks. And then the silver, which will be crated for reasons of security, because also silver is soft as I mentioned—it can easily be scratched or dented. So very wonderful crates will be made and we will have at least four tractor trailer trucks, perhaps more. We’re working on using computer diagrams to calculate how to fit. It’s like a big puzzle, how to fit all the crates and all the exhibit cases into these various trucks. And we will tour the exhibit that way.

We begin the installation in three months on March 27th. Basically what’s involved here is that now that we’ve prepared all of the silver for exhibition and we’ve protected it from tarnishing and so forth, the installation crew, which is comprised of about five individuals, will be installing the exhibition for a bit over a month before it becomes available to the public.

Catherine Cooper: Will the parts as they go in be sort of on view or just everything happens in a back room and then the doors will open?

Three cut glass decanters with stoppers sitting in a silver holder.

Ingrid Neuman: Yes, pretty much like that. There’s two rooms. The exhibition is going to be in the newest portion of our museum. Our museum was built originally in 1877 and since that time we’ve had four other appendages built onto the museum.

The most recent edition was built in 2008 and it’s more of a modern edition and it has very large rooms. Two of the large rooms in the modern edition will be the area where this Gorham Exhibit will be. It will take a good month to create the walls. We’ve pre-ordered exhibition cases. In fact, some of the exhibition cases will be an imitation or a reflection of the 1901 World’s Fair, in which Gorham was very much represented. And so there’ll be some historic references looking back to the past and the material will all be on view at once and the public will not be able to see it until it’s completely installed.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to the first podcast on preparing the Gorham Silver Exhibit at the RISD Museum. Please join us again next time for the second half of Catherine Cooper’s conversation with Ingrid Neuman as they discuss the history of Gorham Silver in Rhode Island, and why the RISD Museum decided to mount this particular exhibition.

]]> Cultural Protocol While Working in Hawaiian Cemeteries (Episode 85) ]]> Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CDBA4A6E-C0EC-B477-D4F0F40C675C71DF.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CDBAF050-08E1-45DF-8EC98CCB76354EB7 Cultural Protocol While Working in Hawaiian Cemeteries (Episode 85) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Kaile Luga and Ka`ohulani McGuire about cultural protocols and working in the cemeteries of Kalaupapa National Historical Park. 1201 no full 85

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Cemetery at Kalawao on Kalaupapa.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kaile Luga and Ka`ohulani McGuire. In this podcast, they talk about cultural protocols and working in the cemeteries of Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

Jason Church: This is Jason Church, and I’m here on the island of Molokai, and I’m here with-

Kaile Luga: Kaile Luga.

Jason Church: What do you do here at Kalaupapa?

Kaile Luga: Currently I’m an NCPE intern with CRM here in Kalaupapa.

Jason Church: What does your job entail?

Kaile Luga: Well, we’ve been here for a few weeks, but so far I’ve been doing a lot of building assessments to update the park’s LCS assessments that need to be updated every six years. So I’m looking at historic buildings and rating what condition they’re in, and also historic monuments, and grave markers.

Jason Church: … And I’ve been here at Kalaupapa for 10 days doing a cemetery workshop. It’s been an amazing event, but one of the things that’s been very different is before every work day, and after every work day, and sometimes during the work day, we’ve been doing what you guys call protocol. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is?

Kaile Luga: Well, here in Hawai’i protocol is very important, Jason. Protocol basically mainly entails giving an oli (chant) or a mele (song), which is usually a chant, so you do that before you start work in order to ask permission to be in the area that you’re going to be in. Also to ask permission from the kupuna, or the ancestors, who have been acquainted with that area, or associated with that area, and who are resting in those areas for permission also. Not only that, but also ask the ‘āina, or the land, that we’re working on for that permission, which is very, very important.

Jason Church: I know we’ve been working in the cemeteries, so are there specific oli just for the cemetery work, or is it pretty much anytime you’re doing work with historical objects?

Kaile Luga: I would say it’s anytime you’re doing work, not only with historic objects, but just out in the land in general, because really we aren’t the first people to walk on this land. There are people who walked this land before us. Why we do protocol is to honor them.

Jason Church: At first it was something really new and exciting, and then now by the end of 10 days, when I go back to the mainland to work in cemeteries, I think I’m gonna have to keep doing it. It’s become part of the work day, definitely.

Kaile Luga: Awesome.

Removing invasive vegetation from a grave at Kalaupapa.

Jason Church: Can you give us an example of some of the oli that we’ve been singing before the workday?

Kaile Luga: One very important oli that we’ve been using is to ask permission to be in the area, also to ask for knowledge is Ē Hō Mai. It’s actually one of the more basic oli, so a lot of people here in Hawai’i are well acquainted with that oli. You would do that before going out to work, you would do that before sometimes going into a classroom. It’s a very important and simple oli, but do you want me to do it?

Jason Church: Yeah.

Kaile Luga: (chanting in Hawaiian) So basically, you do one of those verses three times before the beginning of the work day.

Jason Church: I think one of the other important things that they kept telling us is to also, as you’re singing and listening to it, to sort of drop everything, and all negativity has to go away before we work. Which is something I can say is definitely new. I’ve not experienced that before. So that was an important part, I think it lightened the whole day, it made everything go better.

Kaile Luga: Yep. Definitely. Something here in Hawai’i is you don’t namunamu, mai namunamu, don’t grumble, especially when you’re doing work in wahi kūpuna, so places associated with ancestors and people who have lived here before us, or just doing work in general. When you’re farming, mai namunamu or else the kalo [taro; a main staple of the Hawaiian diet] is gonna turn out bad.

Jason Church: Give us an example of one of the oli that we did at the end of the work day.

Kaile Luga: Okay, so at the end of the work day the oli that we mostly use is He Mū, and He Mū is actually kind of an older oli. If I can recall correctly. I’m pretty sure it’s in Hawaiian Antiquities, which was written by David Malo and later translated by Emerson. This oli, I’m sure it was used throughout time until today, but for a while it was kind of lost, and a lot of oli weren’t really practiced until a group of Hawaiian practitioners came together, and they decided they were going to revitalize oli, and have protocol be a part of everyday work. So the Kanaheles went and they found this oli, and they kind of put it out there for everybody. And so this oli that we use at the end of the work day is He Mū. It’s basically cutting off any thing you may have taken with you during the work day. We’re gonna kind of enter the more spiritual realm right now, but you know working out in the cemetery there are good spirits and bad spirits, and working anywhere there are good spirits and bad spirits, but really you just want to leave everything that you took with you there. You don’t want to take it with you, at least that’s what I was taught. That’s the mana’o (thinking or thought) that was taught to me.

Jason Church: Yeah. I know that we did He Mū this morning before a lot of people flew out, because they wanted to make sure that they left any spirits on the island, here on Molokai.

Kaile Luga: Yeah. And it’s not scary stuff, it’s not just scary stuff. You also don’t want to be affecting the place itself either with your energy, so just to drop, cut everything. That’s at least what I was taught. You gonna back me up with He Mū? Jason Church: All right, I’ll try.

Kaile Luga and Jason Church: (chanting in Hawaiian)

Workshop participants begin the process of leveling a concrete grave marker.

Kaile Luga: And so noa is basically like everything is free, and honua is the earth. At the end of the day, everything is free. Free from haumia, which is defilement.

Jason Church: Are there any others, other than the two standard ones we’ve been doing? Any other ones that we should know about?

Kaile Luga: Any other chants? It all just depends on what place you’re at, Jason, but something that I wish we could’ve got on videotape or something was we took a huaka’i or a field trip out to Kalawao, and people were just … especially the kids from UH-Hilo. Man, they were just inspired to pull out their oli, and their hula (dance), and it was beautiful.

Jason Church: Now, what’s the one you guys tried to teach us that none of us could learn?

Kaile Luga: The one that we tried to teach at the end actually is a pule that was taught to me. So a pule is like a … it’s a chant still, but pule is usually translated more like prayer. It’s a pule that was taught to me while I was doing work on Hawai’i Island, over in, and we were working in the ‘ohana (family) cemetery, and we were working around a lot of unmarked grave markers out in the field, also when we were doing our surveys. This pule is called Pule Ola Lō’ihi which is like a prayer for long life. But yeah, it’s asking to have a long life, and usually we would do it after we were done working, just to also … working around grave markers and cemeteries is such a deep … pretty serious, it’s a pretty serious place.

Jason Church: Definitely.

Kaile Luga: Just to remind yourself that life is precious, we all want to live long and happy lives. So this pule, it’s asking for a long life, and I can do it for you I guess?

Jason Church: Yeah. Let’s hear it.

Kaile Luga: (chanting in Hawaiian) So basically in this Pule you’re asking for a very, very long life, until your eyes are squinty like the `iole, the rat, and until your skin is like the hala (pandanus leaves or tree), so all worn.

Workshop participants preparing to sing their end of the day oli to the cemetery.

Jason Church: And even when we were working out there, so we sang before, we sang after, but we would also … and I’ve always done this even before we were here working in Hawai’i, was if we have to step on a grave or climb on a grave, we also sort of ask forgiveness, and apologies to those that we may have bothered. Thank you very much.

Kaile Luga: No problem. Thanks, Jason.

Jason Church: I’m here with-

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Ka`ohulani McGuire, I’m the cultural anthropologist at the park.

Jason Church: So, what do you do out here, Ka`ohulani?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: My main job is ethnography, and oral history work. I’m kind of like the park liaison between the patients and the park. Besides that I also help with cultural protocol. Before I came to the park, cultural protocol wasn’t really done much, so it’s something that I felt was important to do, try to incorporate Hawaiian culture into everything that we can.

Jason Church: During our cemetery workshop, we’ve done songs and chants and oli, between work and end of day. Besides the ones we’ve done out here in the cemetery, what other kind of protocols do you have?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: We do protocol for different reasons, but basically the main reason we do protocol is to pay respect to the place where we’re at. Like say if our work crew is gonna be working at the crater, and it’s the first time they’re going there to start a new project, we always do things at the beginning of a project, and we always have a closing at the end. So, we would do protocol there, and it would be asking for a similar thing, we do E Ho Mai, a lot, asking for a blessing, asking for the knowledge of that place to be revealed to us, and we’re also asking for knowledge that necessarily is not really visible, but knowledge from the unseen, and the spirit world as well, and from our ancestors, our kūpuna. We do protocol in relation to, for example, we found recently an inadvertent burial, and so when we did the reburial, we did protocol for that, and it’s different chants and different culture protocol in relation to burials and working with iwi (bones of the deceased).

I’ve also done repatriation work. Not with the park, but with … before I came to the park. There’s definitely protocols and chants specifically done in that kind of work.

Jason Church: You mentioned that you are liaison between the park and the patients. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: I’ve been coming to the park for about 17 years now, and I actually have been working for the park service for the last 7 years. Because I had a relative that was a patient here, I was able to early on establish a really good relationship with the patients, because I had family here. Even after my ethnographic study was done I continued to come back to the park, I maintained those relationships, and so when the park was getting ready to hire an anthropologist, they asked me to come on board because Kalaupapa is really sort of like a closed community, for the most part. It’s a lot more open now than it used to be, but it was … it used to be much harder for outsiders to come in and break in to the community, and to gain their trust. Because I already had that establishment with the patients, and close ties with them, it’s worked out really well.

I do a lot of oral history work, not so much formal oral history any more, more informal talk story. I spend a lot of time with them, I do consultation on park projects, find out what they think about the work that we do, and how we could improve it, their vision for the future of the park after they’re gone.

Jason Church: So, what do they think about all the cemetery work we’re doing?

Replicating a missing cast concrete element on a grave marker during the workshop.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Well, I’m currently doing consultation with them right now. For the most part, they’re happy with it. They really are because they remember times when the cemetery was overgrown, when it wasn’t taken care of. Like Kahaloko Cemetery out in the middle of the peninsula, they remember when you couldn’t even see it from the road. It was just all trees and bushes. When they first came in ’42, the patients, the last bunch of big patients that came in ’42, they didn’t know it was a cemetery. They couldn’t tell from looking from the outside in. They are very happy.

Jason Church: How many cemetery sites are on the peninsula?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: That’s an interesting question. We talk about that quite a bit because at Papaloa there’s 11 sites, but in my view, it’s really all one big cemetery.

Jason Church: Sure. It definitely looks like [it] with the occasional wall between them.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yeah. It’s just that they divided it up by religion. Really religion and not really ethnicity. Because the Chinese and the Japanese have their own Buddhist beliefs, it’s really by religion than ethnicity. There is the one in Makanalua 00:01:14] across from the crater, Kahaloko. There is the ones at Kalawao by St. Philomena church. Yeah, there’s several there. And then throughout the peninsula there’s unmarked burials here and there that we’ve found.

Jason Church: Because all these burials are just since it was an established …

Ka`ohulani McGuire: 1866, yeah.

Jason Church: Yeah, so there were definitely burials before that.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Right.

Jason Church: So do you want to mention just briefly what Kalaupapa is and why there are patients here, that sort of thing?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yeah. Kalaupapa was a former leprosy colony. Now we refer, the State has actually adopted the term “Hanson’s Disease” instead of leprosy. So in 1866, patients were sent here as a matter of segregation by the Hawaiian kingdom and I really feel like the king really had his hands tied in a way. He wasn’t sure how best to deal with the problem. And he was under a lot of pressure by foreigners that were afraid of the disease and wanting to segregate people. And Kalaupapa is basically a natural prison because it’s got water on three sides and almost a 2,000 foot cliff on one side.

So it seemed like a logical solution at the time. So, since 1866 people have been sent here against their will, separated from their families. It caused a lot of heartache and pain for Hawaiian families and it is no longer a leprosy, active colony, since 1969 the segregation law was lifted and patients are free to travel wherever they want and to come and go as they please. But for them, this place is their home. This is what they know, they were sent here, many of them as children or young adults and this is where they feel the most comfortable.

Jason Church: Now we talked about, yeah everything I had read before I came here talked about the heartache, but it’s amazing how everyone pulled together to make such a community here. I mean we’ve only been here two weeks and it’s amazing how many people I’ve met and how many people have hugged me and the handshakes. I don’t think I’ve ever been hugged as much in my entire life by people I just met as here.

Ka`ohulani McGuire leads workshop participants in a ceremony to honor the graves that were conserved during the workshop.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: That’s Hawaiian culture, generally.

Jason Church: Yeah, it’s a very open place and a very welcoming place, I feel.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: You know, for the patients, I would say 20, 30 years ago they weren’t so used to having people touch them. One of the nurses that used to be here, she’s retired now, she tells a story how one patient would come in at 5:00 every morning to the care home and she wasn’t sure how he would react if she gave him a hug and a kiss. And she just started doing that and he finally got used to it and every day he would come and say, “Where’s my hug?” And I find, yeah, patients are a lot more open now to visitors and to touching and that kind of thing. In the past it wasn’t like that.

One story I can tell is the nurse’s quarters, it used to be separated, it still has a picket fence now, but that was a separation line. All the administration staff lived on one side of the fence and the patients couldn’t enter beyond that white picket fence. And so this was … happened in the 1990’s and some friends of mine were here visiting and they invited a patient over for dinner and they were staying, visiting someone that lived at the nurse’s quarters. And so they were waiting for him to show up and it was 20 minutes past the time they had agreed on for dinner and they were getting worried. So they went out to go look for him and they went out to the sidewalk and there he was on one side of the picket fence, standing there crying because he couldn’t make himself cross over that line. Because it had been so ingrained into him that he couldn’t cross that line because of the separation.

So they took his arm on each side and they all walked across the line together.

Jason Church: So if people do want to come to Kalaupapa to visit, people from the outside, there are tours here. How would one come to Kalaupapa?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: So we have a tour, we have Damien tours and you can fly in. We also have the mule skinners from topside Molokai and you can ride the mule down or you can hike in. And that’s just for day tours. If you want to stay overnight, you really have to know someone in the settlement that’s a resident, a patient, or an employee that works here and they can sponsor you in — six visitors at a time.

Jason Church: So there are tours available from Damien Tours to come visit?

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Yes and it runs six days a week, Monday through Saturday. One of the things that people tell me a lot and it always amazes me when visitors tell me this, even if they’re only here for the day. They all seem to tap into the feeling of the land and the ‘āina and many of them have told me they feel that this is such a powerful, sacred place. And many people also at the same time feel a lot of heaviness and sadness. Especially out at Kalawao.

Jason Church: Yeah, there definitely is different feelings, depending on where you’re moving around on the peninsula. There definitely is a different vibe in different areas of the peninsula. Well, thank you Ka`ohulani for talking with us.

Ka`ohulani McGuire: Nice having you guys here, we loved it. Thank you.

Workshop participants place a lei and pray over the grave marker they have conserved. (The tarp is still on the slow the drying of the lime render.)

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Pig Skin and Wieners, the Early Influences on Preservation Architect Jack Pyburn (Episode 84) ]]> Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CDF081F4-D930-E46E-E25E5F13156BABC6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CDF10B1E-EE07-E12E-894F1AAA43C20F7A Pig Skin and Wieners, the Early Influences on Preservation Architect Jack Pyburn (Episode 84) National Park Service with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent Jason Church speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. They discuss Pyburn's career influences and current preservation projects. 1394 no full 84

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the “Preservation Technology” podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jack Pyburn, preservation architect at Lord, Aeck and Sargent. In this podcast, they discuss Pyburn’s career influences and current preservation projects.

Jason Church: The first thing I want to ask you, Jack, I know you as a preservation architect, but I notice when I Google your name, that’s not what comes up first. It’s Jack Pyburn, football. Let’s just get that out of the way. I want to know why it comes up Jack Pyburn, football.

Jack Pyburn: Well, I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, not far from here. I went to Byrd High School in the class of 1963, which was one of only three high schools (two white and one African American) in Shreveport at the time. Byrd and Fair Park were the two white high schools. We played in the highest classification in the state, triple A at the time. I’m the youngest of four boys. My brothers ahead of me were athletes. I was the largest of all of them by a fair margin. It was just sort of assumed (by me) I was to participate in sports, and particularly in football, which I did.

I played football through high school, I did okay. I was not a great football player, but I did okay, partly because of my size. Actually, my favorite sport was track (throwing the discus). In fact, I competed here at Northwestern a number of times in high school and had good competitors from Natchitoches at the time. I broke the state discus record my junior year and again in my senior year. After my junior year, I really thought I would not play football anymore. I didn’t enjoy it that much, honestly. I loved track, it was something I got a lot of pleasure of and did okay at. I had a four year track scholarship offered at Tulane.

Come football season my senior year, and I said I wasn’t going to play my senior year because I wanted to focus on track, the head football coach, the only time he ever spoke to me, and certainly the only time he ever came to the house, came to my house and basically cajoled me into playing football my senior year in high school.

Again, I was not All-State, maybe All-City and District, but nothing particularly special. A&M football recruiters showed a tepid interest in me. However a local alum from A&M did, and I ended up taking a one year make good football scholarship to A&M and giving up a four year, full track scholarship to Tulane, which does not compute as rational thought, but it’s what happened.

Jack Pyburn’s Texas A&M Varsity Football photograph.

I got to A&M knowing I wanted to study architecture, I did all right my freshman year of football. It’s a mystery why I wanted to study architecture because I had no exposure to it in high school. The A&M athletic counselor tried to talk me out of architecture with the pitch that civil engineering was just like architecture. I spent a semester drawing nuts and bolts in civil engineering until I announced that was really not what I was interested in.

I made the A&M team, I got a full four year scholarship after my freshman year. My parents, my father in-particular had a policy that as a son, you worked your way through college. They did not pay for college for me or my brothers. All of us ended up going to college and as the youngest I am forever grateful for the guidance. I was basically working my way through school playing footballand had chosen architecture as my degree. Gene Stallings came from Alabama to A&M my junior year. He was a very demanding coach.

Architecture was a five year program before the four and two six year program was offered. Football was a four year eligibility. After the four years, I figured I was going to spend a year focused on my academics and low and behold, I got drafted by the Dolphins. I had no intention I was going to be drafted. I heard I was drafted on the radio. I decided to go try professional football, and if I made it, I figured the Dolphins would figure a way to get me into the reserves or differ my service. It was the height of the Vietnam War. If I made the team I would lose my deferment. If I was not back in school by September, I’d lose my deferment.

I made the team, the Dolphins did not have an alternative to the draft for me and, I was called up to the draft board in Shreveport for induction in December of my rookie year, 1967. For some unexplained way, I was deemed to be ineligible for service and thus Vietnam. As a result I, went back to play a second year of football in Miami. After my rookie season I went back to A&M for my first semester of my fifth year of architecture.

I played the second season and completed my second of my fifth year of architecture in the following spring. I graduated in 1969, and at that point I had enough football.. I told the Miami coach I was going to retire, so to speak (quitting was an ugly word)., Because I’d always been playing football, I figured I needed some experience in architecture. I had met an architect in my Miami barbershop so I asked him for a job. He gave me one to my surprise. It turned out his partner was Mark Hampton of the Sarasota School.

Texas A&M yearbook photo of the Shreveport Student Club, note Jack is in the center of the back row.

It was a very trying exercise to try to study architecture and play football under Gene Stallings. Probably not unlike trying to study architecture and play football for Nick Saban, but from an academic standpoint, he let me keep my scholarship the two spring semesters I needed to get my 5th year., In my sophomore year the dean of the School of Architecture, Ed Romieniec met me on the elevator, just he and I, and he told me I had to choose between football and architecture or he would. He ended up being a strong supporter after he knew I was seriously committed to architecture, and helped me through that last couple of semesters. I am forever grateful to Ed.

Miami was in its second year of existence my rookie year. The team had trained in Sarasota their first year. A bunch of folks from the circus that trained in Sarasota decided they were going to try out for football as a promotional or economic venture. One circus actor who tried out was a guy who had an act of doing wierd things with his bare feet. He like driving nails in boards with his bare feet. He decided he was going to enhance either his circus act or enhance his income by playing professional He was going to play football with no shoes on. It worked for his circus act, why not football?

Expansion teams, of which Miami was one, were made up of two groups. They were made up of rookies like me, just come out of college, wet behind the ears, and old veterans who were expendable at all the other established teams and thus available in an expansion draft. One of the guys in the expansion group, who had a very illustrious career but was on the downhill side of that career didn’t want anybody screwing around with the last remaining vestiges of his football career. The first play of the first practice, the veteran player broke the cricus actor’s foot and off we went. That’s an example of kind of the rag knot group we were. Miami was a very rag knot group at the time, and consequently we didn’t win any games, but I had a good time. I enjoyed photography, We would have sports news photographers traveled on the team plane. I got to be friends with the news photographers, particularly Jay Spencer who was the photographer for the Miami Hearld. He taught me a lot about photography

There were two treats from my friendship with Jay.. One of that was he would give me photos he took of play action where I was in the photo. The other treat was that he gave me camera equipment, well used camera equipment but bodies and lenses I would have never bought. I had a good time during the two years of pro football. I got to travel and see places and things that I had not been able to do as a kid. I got to see the major cities of the country that gave the the opportunity to see environments and buildings and environments I had studied.

Jason Church: When you started practicing architecture, what got you from architecture into preservation architecture?

Wiener designed Big Chain Grocery Store in Broadmoor area of Shreveport.

Jack Pyburn: Well, I’ve thought about that. As I said a minute ago, I really did not have a lot of exposure to architecture. We were not a family who was artistic. We did a little bit of going to arts events, a symphony every once in a while. My mother did sew and taught me to sew. In retrospect, I think that was a formative aesthetic and building influence.

My dad was in the oil business. He was a drilling contractor in rural Louisiana. I spent a lot of my youth in rural Louisiana and east Texas. We were stoping at plantation stores. We were just going fishing and eating a can of Vienna sausage and some saltine crackers, and the plantation stores were the only place in the rural environment where one could get something to eat. I was exposed to the vernacular rural architecture that was formative as well. I love the rural context. I enjoy the innate intelligence of rural populations, it represents such talent and potential.

The other piece that exposed me to architecture was … the most underexposed modernist architect, Sam Wiener, whowas very active in Shreveport.

It is one of the amazing modernist architecture stories in the country, I think. I went to Broadmoor High School, I want to Youree Drive Junior High School and Arthur Circle School. I was the first class of those schools, those were all modern schools done by Wiener. My good friend lived next door to Sam Wiener’s modernist house on Longleaf Drive in Shreveport.. I got the newpapers for my morning paper route at Weiner’s sweeping modernist Big Chain Store.

I then went to architecture school, and modernism was what was taught. A&M’s pedagogy was a modernist Bauhaus education. I think all of those things infused me with architecture by osmosis In retrospect, the most telling early experience that suggested I would end up focused on preservation architecture was my terminal project, my fifth year project. I selected the Shreveport riverfront because of the historic buildings on the riverfront.

Wiener designed City Incinerator Building, Shreveport, LA.

At the time, Shreveport was planning the future of the Red River waterfront and conceiving a Parkway named for the mayor, Clyde Fant. Fant was my father’s Sunday School teacher. He gave me an inside look at the makings of a public project. I look back now and I realize my early exposure of existing, in fact, historic environments as a part of my early development.

I finished football and I didn’t have any experience working in an architect’s office. I thought I needed to find out what that was like and I went to work for Herb Johnson Associates in Miami who I met him at a barbershop. I told him I was looking for a job and he said, “Come on over.” His design director was Mark Hampton, who was a part of the Sarasota School and who had moved from Sarasota to Miami. Herb’s firm primarily did shopping center work. They designed the Bal Harbour Shops and Dadeland shopping center. It was a terrific opportunity to work with Mark Hampton, early in my career..

I worked for Herb for a year and then I thought I needed a different kind of experience so I went to what’s called a big E, little A, an engineering dominated firm with supporting architectural firm, Connell, Pierce, Garland and Friedman. CPGF had done a lot of work at Cape Kennedy. I found myself there in a strange but very interesting professional environment.

We had an amazing group of Cuban architects that had immigrated to Miami. We had Vincent Scully’s son, was a part of the firm. He was a young guy my age who they had hired, and a guy named Richard Lyons, whose father, Eric Lyons, was head of the RBIA, the Royal British Institute of Architects. We did things like enter the L’oeil competition in Paris. I mean, this was in this sort of nondescript engineering firm that these folks came together. I mean, it was just a fun time.

Then I knew I needed to go back to school. I mean, I had left a lot on the table in both football and architecture. I applied to Columbia, I applied to Washington University in St. Louis. It was, the Columbia program, Preservation program was brand new. I really had no exposure to preservation as such at that time, but Columbia had a good architectural program nonetheless. Probably would have found it if I had ended up going there.

I ended up going to Washington University, primarily for financial reasons, because they gave me support that I needed. I was married with a child by that time. I went to Washington, I got a degree in Urban Design. I actually practiced for a decade as a planner. Fortunately, I got registered. In Florida, you could get registered the year of experience, so I started taking the exam in Florida. Most states were three years at the time. I started taking the exam and got registered.

I was away from architecture for a decade doing community and preservation planning with an exceptional group of folks who had graduated from the Washington University Urban Design program ahead of me. The firm, Team Four, was multi-disciplinary with a focus on urban and community planning. I discovered preservation during that time. We did some very interesting work.

I then moved to Atlanta. Team Four was going to merge with the international planning and landscape firm, EDAW, now part of AECOM.EDAW, Eckbow, Dean, Austin, Williams was a modernist landscape firm from California. They had developed a strong national practice, and started to develop an international practice. They became very much an international force over time.

Team Four was going to merge with EDAW. Team Four was a top heavy (too many senior people for the size of the firm) small practice . Under the merger scheme, I was going to come to Atlanta to manage an office for EDAW. The merger fell through but my wife and I decided to come on to Atlanta. We came and I worked for EDAW for four years. After four years, I was ready to get back to architecture. Existing buildings and preservation was something I felt comfortable with, both structurally and architecturally

I evolved my preservation capability over time, starting small and building the knowledge and capability to do credible preservation work. I had my own practice for 25 years focused on preservation. In 2007 I was invited to to bring my practice into Lord, Aeck, Sargent’s preservation studio. LAS had a preservation practice, was a competitor and a group I respected for their preservation values.

Susan Turner and I shared the same values. She was the principal at LAS. We have about 15 people just focused on preservation work now.

Jason Church: I met you through a mutual friend, Tony Rajer and you had gotten involved with Pasaquan. Tell me a little bit, how did you get involved with Pasaquan, and your role there?

Painted concrete building at Pasaquan.

Jack Pyburn:

Pasaquan was struggling, and it had a small Board. One of my acquaintances through the AIA in Atlanta was on the Board. The board knew they had stewardship of an important resource and needed to understand what was important about it. The site leadership was a doctor from Columbus, Georgia.Pasaquan was a folk art site developed by Eddie Owens Martin who went by the name of St. EOM.

He developed his family homesite in rural central Georgia into a mystical and surreal environment out of Sacrete, chicken wire and house paint. The figures he We developed a preservation plan thatset the foundation for treatment of the site. Ultimately the Kohler Foundation restored the site using the preservation plan and the property was transferred to Columbus (GA) State University for long term care and operation. This was a success story. I wish all resources of this quality could have a similar outcome.

Jason Church: Then did you ever do work with any of the other folk art sites?

Jack Pyburn: Yes. Paradise Garden.

Jason Church: Today, a little later today, we’re doing a webinar all about the preservation of African American historic sites. How did you get into that as sort of, I don’t want to say a focus, but you’ve definitely done a significant amount of work in that area.

A.G. Gaston Motel Birmingham, AL.

Jack Pyburn: Yes.The experience working on African American sites is personally the most rewarding preservation experience I have had or will have. I am thrilled that in my lifetime the breadth of African American history is starting to be give a central place in American history and the preservation of important African American resources is becoming a major focus of preservation investment. There is a ways to go in fully honoring the contribution of African Americans to our history but the movement is underway and there is momentum.

My involvement with the preservation of Africian American resources started with the Historic Structure Report here at Oakland Plantation for the Slave Cabins. In the analysis of the structures, one can physically come in contact with the humanity, courage, determination and intelligence of the African Americans who lived there. It was a very moving experience.

Then I had the opportunity to work on the Vulcan in Birmingham. Very quickly the place of African Americans in the history of the Vulcan became clear, both in terms of the role of African Americans in the steel industry in the late 19th, early first of half of the 20th century. As well as the position of African Americans in Birmingham relative to the Vulcan. They could only go up in the tower one day a week.

That got me involved in Birmingham, and so the opportunity to work on 16th Street Baptist Church came from that, recently the Civil Rights monument and the Gaston Motel, which is being restored. There’s a joint venture between the Park Service and the City of Birmingham, so we’re working on that, working on that right now.

Along the way, I had an opportunity to work on the Modjeska Simkins house in Columbia, South Carolina. A little vernacular structure, very central to Brown vs. Board of Education and the evolution of the legal foundation for that ruling. A variety of other sites like that. That part’s been …

Jason Church: Well, thank you for talking to us today, Jack.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah, you’re very welcome.

Jason Church: We look forward to having you at new conferences in the future and hearing about new projects you’re doing.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah, good, good. That’s great.

Jason Church: Really appreciate it.

Jack Pyburn: Yeah. Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you to listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.NCPTT.NPS.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> 3D Documentation in Ladakh, India (Episode 83) ]]> Mon, 18 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CE06F26F-080B-5351-1F216D4F3414B384.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CE076771-BC6D-8CA2-63F7B4884B10F276 3D Documentation in Ladakh, India (Episode 83) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India. 748 no full 83

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Mary Striegel as she speaks with former NCPTT intern Satish Pandey. Satish is currently a professor in the department of conservation at the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, India.

Mary Striegel: So, Satish, tell us, when were you at NCPTT?

Satish loading samples in NCPTT’s recirculating wind tunnel.

Satish Pandey: It was way back in 2007. It’s been nearly nine years.

Mary Striegel: What were you working on when you were back there?

Satish Pandey: When I was there on a six week internship, I was working on a project which was dealing with looking at deposition of pollution gasses on limestone, treated limestone, so looking at the efficacy of consolidants and the impact pollution gasses in the atmosphere can have on it.

Mary Striegel: What was the best thing that you learned when you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: The best thing that I learned, a couple of things. The best thing is that before being to NCPTT, I have never worked with custom-built equipment like the environmental exposure chamber that I worked on being in NCPTT. It had its own challenges to operate and get some good results on that machine, but it was one of the fantastic machine that I have ever seen. By the end of my internship, it started to give really nice data.

Mary Striegel: Well, you know, that was one of the things that people who’ve worked with that environmental chamber have always said, that after they’ve had some time working with it-

Satish Pandey: Absolutely.

Mary Striegel: … they see the beauty of the design of that instrument.

Satish Pandey: Yes.

Mary Striegel: Tell us, what have you been doing since you were at NCPTT?

Satish Pandey: When I was at NCPTT, I was doing my PhD at University of Oxford. I finished my PhD in 2010, then after that I have been a post-doctoral researcher for nearly two years with the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. I returned to India in 2011, towards the end of 2011 an of History of Art, Conservation, and Museology. It’s a small institution with three departments dealing with the history of art, conservation, and museology. I teach in the Department of Museology as a faculty member.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to talk to you earlier this week about how you were using three-dimensional imaging. You might want to tell us a little bit about that.

Patish preforming 3D documentation of deterioration in wall paintings in Nagaur Fort, India.

Satish Pandey: Yes. 3D imaging, when I started working in my post-doctoral research, 3D imaging was used by a number of people to record and document cultural heritage. Most of those work were dealing with documenting the entire monument, the entire building, looking at the fancy, three-dimensional data. Now, when I started working on it, we tried to use 3D imaging to image small changes on timescale that happens in surface like wall paintings. Most of the wall paintings that I’ve been working on, they’re encrusted with plenty of salts and the problem of surface coating that people have put on the surface in previous conservation attempts. The problem is, most of those coatings and salts are sensitive to moisture and changing humidity conditions. All those changes that take place during changing moisture, they have kind of temporal impact on that. Every deterioration problem connected to salts and surface coatings can be monitored using 3D in real time. That is what I have been trying to, although we had some success dealing with 3D imaging of salts and surface coating, trying to monitor the changes that happen in salt crystallization over a short period of time.

Mary Striegel: That sounds like it was a really good project. Was that part of your thesis work?

Satish Pandey: No, that was part of my post-doctoral research.

Mary Striegel: I had a chance to hear a wonderful presentation you gave here at the AIC. I’d like you to tell us more about your most recent work, working with the monasteries. Tell us a little bit more about that project.

Satish Pandey: After getting back to India in 2011, I was trying to work with community to develop sustainable conservation attempts. One of the projects that I have been working on is in the northernmost part of the country, the region of Ladakh, which is a cold, arid landscape with almost nil rainfall. That was the kind of atmosphere until recently, but now we see a lot of climatic changes in Ladakh as well.

The real problem in Ladakh is, for the last ten years, the region has been open for tourism and there is plenty of tourist influx happening these days to see the cultural heritage that is part of that region. Most of the local people, who were not exposed to tourism and economic growth that has been happening across the country, are now suddenly kind of focused towards making more money coming from tourism. There are lots of other avenues opening, you know, and the uncontrolled development to sustain tourism and the uncontrolled way of exploiting the natural resources are creating disastrous situation for cultural heritage in Ladakh.

I have tried to work with community, trying to convince them to understand the historical value of the cultural heritage they have, rather than just the aesthetic and economical value. The economical value is the way that it is being exploited at the moment, given another ten years or so, the cultural heritage will be completely destroyed. Then there will be nothing for tourism to depend on.

Mary Striegel: We’ve talked about that there’s the economic pressures, but there’s also, with the tourists, there’s many visitors in short periods of time. You’ve mentioned that there’s also the lack of understanding of the traditional materials.

Awareness workshop for Buddhist Monks in monasteries in Ladakh, India

Satish Pandey: Yes. Most of the vernacular architecture in Ladakh is made with local materials: stone rubble, most of these are clay based houses. Even monasteries are made in clay, clay rendering. Nowadays, with changing pressure from tourism, people are shifting to modern and quicker materials, like cement concrete. Use of cement concrete, in many cases, has very different kinds of requirements. The reason is, in winter season, temperature really goes down to say about minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius. In a concrete housing, energy requirements are very high. The heating requirements are naturally very high, which has not been there with all these mud renderings. Mud being the natural heat insulating material, the energy requirements of that kind of housing was not too high. Nowadays, with changing emphasis on tourism linking all these monasteries with transport system, with proper roads, has created a lot of problem in the local environment.

Mary Striegel: You also mention that there now are many groups trying to work there.

Satish Pandey: Yes. In the last ten, fifteen years, with the kind of attention the cultural heritage in Ladakh has got, there are a number of organizations, NGOs and people, working in Ladakh, trying to preserve the cultural heritage. All those attempts are sporadic. They all work in isolation, and there is no real information sharing that which group is doing what. There is a lot of funding coming from other countries, and people are very scared to share their information, and they are worried that their funding and their project may be jeopardized if they share information to other people.

That is a big problem. These conservation attempts, working really on objects, on paintings, on monastic objects, is not sustainable unless the custodians of the place, of the cultural heritage, know how to maintain and upkeep it. The problem is, you know, the monks and the local people around, they do not know what work is being done on the artifact. They do not know how to maintain it in future, after the conservation work is done. What happens in next few years, with the current practices that are happening in monastery, the cultural, traditional practices, the state of artifact that was either conserved or somebody has done some work on it, goes back to the condition it was before conservation. That kind of conservation intervention has really no long-term effect on it.

Mary Striegel: There are some short-term fixes going on, but no long-term strategy.

Satish Pandey: Absolutely. There is no long-term strategy trying to look at the holistic approach on sustainable conservation so that all these people who are custodians of the cultural heritage are aware about dealing with different conservation attempts and also the pressure that cultural heritage is having from the increasing tourism in the region.

Mary Striegel: Do you think that this type of problem is going on in other parts of the world as well?

Satish Pandey: Probably, probably, because tourism is a new industry these days. It is not that tourism has not been an industry in the past, but it is increasing these days, and materialistic view of exploiting cultural heritage might have adverse impact on cultural heritage in other parts of the world as well.

Mary Striegel: I want to thank you for taking time to talk to us today. Are there other things that you would like us to know?

Awareness workshop for Buddhist Monks in monasteries in Ladakh, India.

Satish Pandey: The other things that I would like to say, that most of the places where we think of conservation, instead of looking at the conservation as a long-term solution, we also need to incorporate number of other things, like, for example, when I teach my students. There is an artwork. If I ask them, “Look at the artwork and tell me what you see,” the first thing, being a student of conservation, the first thing they notice is what is wrong with the artifact. During the course of noticing what is wrong with the artifact, what deterioration is going on in the artifact, they forget that, after all, it is an artifact. The historical value, the aesthetic value, naturally, they do not notice that. They think that, since I am teaching them conservation, I am expecting them to see conservation. Conservation is not without looking at the historic and aesthetic value of the artifact. The first thing that we have to notice is the historic and aesthetic value of the artifact, and then we have to see, in the context of its values, how the conservation attempts are going to influence the entire concept.

Mary Striegel: That’s very good. Tell me again where you’re teaching and how many students do you usually have?

Satish Pandey: I teach at the National Museum Institute in New Delhi. Each year, we take about 15 students. On any given time, I have nearly 30 students who are studying art conservation.

Mary Striegel: They’re very fortunate to have you, Satish.

Satish Pandey: Thank you so much.

Mary Striegel: Thank you, again.

Satish Pandey: Thanks a lot. Thank you so much.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye, everybody.

]]> Talking Red Masonry and the Rebirth of Lime with Jimmy Price (Episode 82) ]]> Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CE3C19D3-FB23-57ED-9DED8A2128637ECA.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CE3CB97E-F08F-43D3-15F555C64DBCB169 Talking Red Masonry and the Rebirth of Lime with Jimmy Price (Episode 82) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Jimmy Price, historic Red Mason and founder of Virginia Lime Works. In this podcast they talk about how Price helped bring Lime back to masonry in America. 1663 no full 82

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Red mason Jimmy Price demonstrating joint tooling techniques at a NCPTT workshop.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jimmy Price, historic Red Mason and founder of Virginia Lime Works. In this podcast they talk about how Price helped bring Lime back to masonry in America.

Jason Church: Today I’m here talking with Jimmy Price, former owner and founder of Virginia Lime Works, owner of Price Masonry Contractors and Jimmy, in the world of historic preservation, you’re really known as the guy who brought lime back. Tell us a little bit about that. What is your background in masonry and how did you get into lime?

Jimmy Price: I started in (19)72 and I started out laboring, pushing a wheelbarrow, worked at a foundry for a while but didn’t mind working because I always worked hard all my life but had a 19 year old wife at home and set working seven days a week third shift just didn’t seem natural to me and I grew up on a farm, my dad had a grocery store so I was used to being kind of independent working outside so I came back and took another job and ended up going to work for my uncles that were masonry contractors and I started an apprenticeship with them. Funny thing about coming full circle in a way, the black guy who taught me how to make mortar, he was one of the biggest strongest guys that I ever worked with and his name was Quentin Parnell and he taught me how to make mortar and just good old soul that ever was. He served with Patton during World War II so he had been all over to be a laborer but he was a really good man.

Later on, I’ll get back to him in a little bit but as we went on, after my apprenticeship, I went in business for myself and doing schools and shop and summers and things like that but always been a history buff and military history has always been a big thing that I’ve been interested in so finally I got to thinking, so I’m going to start doing what I wanted to do and some of the recession years of the early years, so I decided to downsize some and start picking up and getting into some historic work. And one of the first major projects was Greenhill Plantation, which was a slave breeding plantation in Virginia and it ran about twelve hundred slaves on that plantation and 5,000 acres, but that was the crop was the slave trade there. And we had a grant to do all this work for the state and that kind of got us started … We had some other smaller things, but then this was a major breakthrough.

Photograph of Poplar Forest from the Library of Congress. Frances Benjamin Johnston Photographer.

So, as we got into it, found out that the owner in 1790, who in the heyday of this plantation, was John Pannell and it’s kind of funny that Quentin was from Gladys from this area so all the Pannells, right then, that was the Pannell blood line and they were noted for their big males and that was Quentin, the nicest fellow you ever met, and that’s who taught me how to make mortar, ended up being back restoring their roots and where the whole family came from. I always thought that was a pretty good twist to it. After that, we got into some other different things and then Thomas Jefferson’s home at Poplar Forest. We got in there and ended up being in there for off and on 14 years with Travis McDonald there at Poplar Forest, but the more we got into it, it’s like … And I really enjoyed … It’s like how can specialize in historic masonry when the right mortars haven’t been made in 100 years and everything that’s been done or going on has failed.

That’s kind of what was driving force, like, okay, well, if we can do this, it’s got to be a good thing. I guess I’ve never been afraid of anything so I’ll give it a try and do it, so that’s what we did. Through Poplar Forest, I worked with the architects, Mesick, Cohen, Wilson and Baker out of Albany, New York. They were fantastic because they believed in tradespeople and to learn from tradespeople and what they have to offer and what their insight is, what their opinion is and not just what the architects say. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for those guys because they encouraged and wanted you to learn and grow and help them figure it out. And that’s exactly what we did.

We found a stone source for Poplar Forest and built a wood fired lime kiln to start off with. I guess the bad thing was we were successful because we kept going. So, there’s lots of trial and error and failure and failure and you don’t do this and you don’t do that and after several years and tons of firewood of burning and burning and you learn all your mistakes and all of that and tweaking. I built another bigger kiln and went from there. So, it’s kind of like bootlegging lime with what it was because how could you get a permit. How could you do it when you didn’t know if you was going to succeed or work. It was just burning a wood chimney, so I just did it. And that’s kind of how it went with.

By doing so, you just reinvented that wheel and then that started into the techniques. We were already working with lime at Poplar Forest and that’s what we ended up doing was producing all the lime mortar for the wing of offices at Poplar Forest and all the interior plaster work. We ended up doing all the brick work and then as it was coming along and we was finishing up the brick work, out of necessity and we already had a good crew at Poplar Forest, and in following at Chisholm Irish Masons who did the brick work at Poplar Forest. When he finished up, the plaster didn’t show up and Chisholm ended up plastering that at Poplar Forest. We had to try our skills and pretty close, but it was a lot we needed to learn too. My travels in Scotland in England that I met Alex Hollins, a Scottish plasterer over there and he ended up becoming my mentor and got him involved coming over with us to cross train us and work with us at different phases at Poplar Forest, like first coat and second coat and finish coat. He was more of a gypsum plasterer, but did some historic stuff. He had done Sterling Castle there in Scotland. One of the bigger restorations for historic Scotland.

James Madison’s Montpelier. Photograph by Carole J. Buckwalter.

We became close friends and worked together a lot over the years and kept growing from there and learned a tremendous amount from him. It’s like reaching back into antiquity and pulling a lot of this forward and what have you. It was a great experience there. Then you end up having two really good crews of top line plasterers. Today all these skills have been lost. After Poplar Forest and the main part and the plaster work was done there, just as Chisholm ended up leaving there and going to President Madison’s home at Montpelier. Funny thing was, the same architects that were doing Poplar Forest was doing Montpelier and here we followed Chisholm’s footsteps again from Poplar Forest to Montpelier and we did, I guess it ended up being $25 million dollar restoration in Montpelier and supplied, I think it was 240 tons of lime plasters and mortars to do the work at Montpelier.

One of the unique things about Montpelier and the learning curve and moving forward at the same time and understanding of all these historic mortars, that archeology has letter of ownership where Madison owned a particular quarry in Gordonsville and it matched up to a period of time of construction and then it was sold, but then he bought it back. And it was during another period of construction that Mont P was all brick. It was no stone so why would you need a quarry. So, a good choice would be he’s using this to make the lime mortars for Montpelier. So, we took mortar and plaster samples from those eras of construction and from this quarry site and sent them to a material scientist in Scotland, Bill Reavy, and he did an XRD and Petrographic analysis and what have you and came back it was the forensic side and that was the exact stone that we used and was a dolomitic argillaceous limestone that was moderately hydraulic.

So, by having this information and the skills that we had developed over the time, we knew on cooking that stone and we actually got the stone that was a real odd slatey stone, I probably wouldn’t have thought it was a limestone if I saw it. It ended up that’s what it was and it was kind of slatey so you had to split it just like slate and when you loaded the kiln, it was like loading a dishwasher almost. You couldn’t just throw it into a pile. You had to … Just like loading a dishwasher with plates and then the opposite way because you have to maintain the airflow through a kiln and that’s how we burned the limestone for Montpelier and took the same sands and clay content from the boarding house to replicate that mix.

It wasn’t a replica mix. It was the like for like mortar that Madison did use. Well, you don’t get to do that every day, so it makes it interesting there. And then another one at the same time we had going on was the Chapel at St. Mary’s, Maryland. That was the first English speaking Jesuit chapel in the colonies at the time. Fourth colony there be in Maryland. We were very unique to work with the same architects. Just kind of having that team put together and following along, plus, like I said, I enjoy the history side of it, like the present and we actually did the Jesuit chapel, which had been lost for 300 years.

St. Mary’s City Historic District Catholic Church. Photograph by Pubdog.

It was built in 1667 and they worshiped there for about 40 years till King William came in to power in 1704 and basically outlawed the Catholic religion or the sheriff locked the doors on the New Jesuit chapel and after seven, eight years they came back and torn it down and use the materials elsewhere because they wanted to worship there. That’s what they did because they were living on the West frontier in wood clambered buildings and dirt floors and you have a big mass of ornamental brick church on the western frontier, so they tore it down to use materials elsewhere in the colony and had been lost and went back to the plow for 300 years. Then back 30, 40 years ago, a couple walked the fields behind the plow while he was planting trying to find bricks or chunks or anything that … It was referred to as the Chapel Field and uncovered a chunk of brick right when they almost gave up.

That started 30 years of archeological uncovering the crucifix wall in the foundation and all the 70 graves buried inside the chapel under the floors and 650 graves were on the exterior and we approached it as a world class project and we wanted to present it that way, so we burned all the oyster shell mortar for all the exterior mortar and lime mortars for the interior mortars and then we … Actually another guy made the brick that was doing the same sort of thing with brick as I was with lime. He took the clay source from St. Mary’s and took them to his place and made a slot molded wood fired brick. Same ones just like they had and we used those and then we actually used a modern Cushwa brick, mortar brick for the interior and backup work and the face work. We hand carved just like the traditional masons back then, which we would have been referred to in the 16 hundreds as Red Mason, because we were the hero of brick, whereas the White Mason was the hero of stone.

That’s the way St. Mary’s was done. We hand carved over 7,000 brick shapes to do all the moldings and then was plastered and rendered to look like cut stone with a more formal finish. Then a little added twist to it. Like I said, I like to have fun with what we’re doing, so I ended up using traditional putlog scaffolding 42 feet in the air, so two pine poles and lashed together like Boy Scouts and over $14,000 worth of rope in the job and we saved probably $100,000 worth of scaffolding rental cost and fees with that and a lot of people came to see the scaffolding. They enjoyed what we were doing. That story went and pretty much been doing consulting here and there and different training from time to time.

I had a structural engineer involved, so once the structural engineer put his stamp on it, it kind of takes it someone out of the hands of OSHA, but both the present governor and the past governor there laying brick with me and had all the support of all the local judges and that sort of thing and some district judges and on up, so I had those guys laying brick that one day too, showing them around.

So, all the little incidental things that I needed extra help, because we worked for the Foundation, so if I needed help with skinning of all these poles, I have work release guys start picking trash up on the side of the highway to keep the parents from having a higher speeding ticket. Speeding tickets and insurance costs, they came to me and everything we do and nice and all the poles skinned and what I needed to be doing and brick being toted, so we just collaborated to save money for the Foundation and make it work and it was quite the demonstration and then at the end of the job, it was a traditional color wash and penciling throughout … The only color wash and pencil job in the United States. We ended up having mostly, I think probably about 10 girls that the college hired to help, because they had a real delicate hand to it, and they penciled most all the joints. It took them several months for the girls to work on the scaffolding and pencil everything. It really turned out pretty nice.

We finished in 2007. It was a very nice job and that’s where we were at when we finished up there. I guess the worst timing in the world. We finished up in October basically Montpelier and St. Mary’s. Lehman Brothers collapsed in October and that slammed the brakes on everything. We had 15, 20 of the top guys in the country and ended up having to lay them off. So, that was living part of the recession here, so being in the private sector, we were affected. The rest is kind of history from there, but we’re still alive.

Logo for Virginia Lime Works.

Jason Church: So, how did you go from doing your own work and burning your own lime, to starting Virginia Lime Works?

Jimmy Price: Well, just by demand because nobody had it and we were the first in the United States actually to do it. In the preservation community, when you hear something going on at Poplar Forest because that’s when we got connected with the National Park Service because Tom McGrath and Chris Robinson brought because of some of the stuff that they’d heard and what we were doing a Poplar Forest brought two van loads of the HPTC staff down and when they saw … We were pretty advanced at that time with what we were doing and basically the only thing survived at Poplar Forest was Jefferson’s brick work, so we were living archeology is what we were doing to save Jefferson’s brick work, so there was a little bit more to it than just laying a brick and chunks of mortar in a hole. That sort of thing.

We did a lot of reconstructive surgery with brick patch making our own brick dust from brick from Poplar Forest and reconstituting and dental work as you would call it and different things and crack repairs and basically growing brick and that sort of thing to go back and do the restoration work, so when Tom and Chris came down with the crews and they saw that, they wouldn’t make me feel good, kind of put them and said whoa, we have a lot to learn to catch up. In the meantime, started collaborations, so I end up working backs and forth with the guys down in Frederick for years and still collaborating so I’m here today so it’s been great and a lot of fun. A lot of good friends and that sort of thing, comradery and the whole thing, so it’s like a family reunion seeing everybody again.

That’s kind of where that started at and once that information starts circling out and it’s the same need, everything that everybody was doing was failing with cement mortars and hybrid blends of kind of like the park service mix with that little bit of cement. Just enough to cause it to retain moisture and still failed, but it was sympathetic, you were trying to make it work and that’s what drove it further. Fortunate to spend a lot of time in Scotland and collaborating on plasters and lime washes and things like that over there because we had the mortars and we were way underway for mortars and the learning curve and then we found out more about natural hydraulic limes in France that just were coming into the UK a little bit then, so next thing we started bringing the hydraulic lines in to the United States and took a chance, I said, okay, we’ll see what we can do.

Nobody has it, so we just kind of were the leader and bringing it in and making it work and then we’re still working with the training and stuff like that too to help them out because we wanted everybody to be successful because it’s a pretty big learning curve because of geographic location and what somebody’s doing in Charleston you’re not going to be doing it in Boston or Michigan and that sort of thing.

It’s kind of trying to keep everybody safe as you can to make sure they’re successful with their projects and things so, that’s kind of developed that part of it and I figured, well, I have my whole family involved. My daughters were in the office. One of the daughter’s is doing the color matching. My son-in-law was running the plant part making all the stuff and then my son is doing all the technical stuff. He is a computer whiz. So, everybody had a very distinct role in the company. It wasn’t just using your kids. Well, they were used, but everybody had a special talent that I couldn’t have done it without them. Just with those specific talents, because I can build I’m a good builder, but I’m not the best mechanic in keeping a machine that I don’t know anything about and keeping it running and that’s what my son-in-law, they can keep the mixes running the baggers and the airpackers and all the electrical and I say, no way. I’d be lost as could be and the same thing with the computer stuff. I’m still computer illiterate right now.

Jimmy Price demonstrating finishing techniques over lime stucco at a NCPTT workshop.

If I go give a talk and the button doesn’t come on, I’m in a panic. I’ve had that happen plenty of times just like the other night here. You’re always relying on somebody else. That’s kind of the evolution of it there. After that part, then after being on Quinque like Chris Robison was over there at the same time. We actually shared apartments a couple times during the training and the Quinque experience. I was over there for 10 weeks and on that stint and getting to do different things I like to do, but when you’re submersed in that culture and seeing from medieval buildings to Georgian buildings to everything in between and it’s just stone, lime mortar, lime plaster, lime paint and these buildings are performing fantastic right now, that’s what pushed me.

I said, we’ve got to do something better because all the buildings are making everybody sick right now. Just like historical buildings that if you’re not repaired properly, mold and damp issues and unhealthy building syndrome, that sort of thing is so bad and modern buildings doing the same thing. If you’ve got the best brick, the best block, the hardest cement and flashings and everything that you can do, how come these buildings are so sick and you can’t get the dampness out of the walls and out of the building. It’s kind of blending the technologies of old and new from what worked historically, but doing it in an easier way and that’s when I ended up developing environment building system that we came up with.

Right when we came with that, so, we had that going with a lot of testing and things like that and right when we had the big opening house in August 2007, so we had the cottage that we had built and brand new building and try to set it on fire. I had diesel fuel and gasoline on a couple sides and lit it up and had the fire department there and a big media event and tried to burn it down and that didn’t work. Just soot up my lime plaster up a little bit. It didn’t hurt a thing, so we blocked the doors up with plywood and caulking and rubber and pumped 32,000 gallons into a brand new building and we all jumped in and went swimming and had a big time. Today, no mold, no mildew and no paint peeling and you kind of wonder what is going on that we can’t grasp this technology, but it’s the difference of myself living in two worlds of seeing the old ways and how they work and the new ways at the same time and trying to make it work and the timing. I said, “Lord’s willing and he’ll come back around when he’s ready.”

Have the building system like that. Then like next month Lehman Brothers collapsed and everybody slammed the brakes on with, to me, the best building system that ever came up with and it can only be improved upon from this point moving forward. Yes, it’s been quite a ride I guess you could say.

Jason Church: So, what’s next?

Jimmy Price: I have no clue. Every day’s an adventure. Like I say, we’ve had a rough few years here when it takes $10 and you only get $6 and you just keep on. I’ve been in construction and ups and downs for 46 years, I guess, now and it’s been challenging and I get it. It’s just what it is and especially if you’re in the private sector. You’re on your own. If something don’t work, you don’t get paid and you do without and then you recover and go again. That’s kind of where we at, but everybody used to say, with everything we did, and so proud of the family of what we did and all that. I laugh, but I don’t know that I’ll put a family through that.

It’s life and it’s what it is, but the knowledge and information is still there. Things can still be done. I’m just kind of waiting for the next step to see how things unfold and develop. Still training. This is kind of the first one for a while. I did do a historic church back in the Fall. Kind of neat. And really first class brick work and I think that some of Jefferson’s masons from Charlottesville and UVA. I was on my toes when I said that I had that much respect. These guys were good and I had to really … Took me a little while to get their style down, but most of the time if you’ve done enough of it, it takes a little bit to see with their eyes and pick up their style as we did. That was a fun job to do that last Fall there.

I’ve just been working on some of my own work. I get pulled in some different consultancy things from time to time. Thinking about getting back into, you know, because there’s such a need. So many people ask and I step back into it a little bit and set up at the office to do some, maybe, week long training sessions once a month or something like that and see what happens there.

Jimmy Price mixing quick lime at a NCPTT workshop.

Jason Church: We’ll keep our eye out for new Jimmy Price trainings.

Jimmy Price: We’ll do that and the lime paint that we had. I really loved that out of all the different paints. You can do a simple lime wash that is pretty straight forward, but the lime paint, I just love that to death. And with the girls and all, I think I got a couple of grandkids getting ready to go to college, so they’re kind of thinking, I could use the extra income. Let’s get the paint back out there again, so there’s another little step, so you might see something there. We’re just taking baby steps to … Like say after having a rough few years and kind of see where it goes from here.

Jason Church: Any projects that you remember fondly?

Jimmy Price: We had a lot of neat ones, but once in a lifetime … You kind of say that and then all of a sudden you get pulled into something else, but St. Mary’s was a very unique project. I’m a history buff anyway and to get to apply history in a modern situation and, like I say, with the scaffolding that we did, we had people come and just to see the scaffolding and really not the church sometimes because it was over the top. It was a hoot and the people of St. Mary’s that I worked with you couldn’t have had any better. Dr. Henry Miller and Roger Hill that we worked with up there. They were fantastic, so it was good to be a part of living archeology, which is what it was. And that’s what we got to do. And then when you’re doing it, okay, it’s one more thing that nobody else has experienced and it just opens you up that much more and understanding. It’s a little harder at first and then, hey, there’s nothing to this. I can build that scaffolding just as fast as you can do conventional scaffolding, pretty much. Once you get into the groove and get your initial setup.

So, it’s things like that, that … And to do the brick carving and things that we did like that and is very unique at the same time and you had control of the job site and not waiting on shapes from the brick companies. We had so many different shapes and things I think it would have drove the architects completely crazy to do all the shop drawings and then if you ever got them approved and got them done, you would have never got to do them, by the time it would have taken years and it was easier for them because they had Montpelier going on and they just had your basic drawing. I knew I had my pieces worked and cuts and everything like that, so all I needed was a profile. They gave me a profile and I went from there and we’d do the carving and stuff during the winter months when we’re not on site. We were working a traditional season again, so it kind of started in April and finishing up in September and that sort of thing.

Jimmy Price talks to conference participants at Trinity Episcopal Church in Galveston after he completed masonry repair at the church.

It was a very unique one, but Poplar Forest was very unique too, to get started and do that whole thing there, too. It’s been a very interesting thing because when you find out and you go somewhere and you’re looking at something and you’re up in the attic in one of these historic buildings or down in the basement and nobody sees the stuff and you get to check out and you learn from it and see and then you go to the UK to be on top of Hampton Court Palace with all these hundreds of hand carved chimneys and things like that on top of Stirling Castle, Canterbury Cathedral and Fonte De Gaume.

I’m glad you said that because one of the neatest things I’ve ever saw when we were bringing over materials from France, we got to go to Fonte De Gaume and see the 40,000 year old cave paintings. That was cool. You go inside and see these bison and then all the animals that there holding a torch in there and chiseling around the outline of these bison with a little stone tool. Like a stone chisel, then painting, and using the stone features for the shape of the stones to form and define the legs and bellies and things like that. And then they can walk right outside and get eaten by a Saber Tooth Tiger. I thought that was really cool. It’s been pretty cool to be in some of these places and things have been quite the adventure I guess. I don’t think it’s quite over with yet.

Jason Church: Definitely not.

Jimmy Price: It’s been pretty cool. And then on top of Rosslyn Chapel that nobody would be in the top of Rosslyn Chapel on top of the roof and all, up in the scaffolding doing restoration there. Yeah, its been quite a hoot.

Jason Church: Our listeners will have to stay tuned to your next adventures.

Jimmy Price: Well, we’ll see what happens. Hope so.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you’d like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Getting Dirty With HACE (Episode 81) ]]> Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CEB63A26-CDB6-9856-E2F9BCD1403B3D1E.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CEB70780-C62F-9B8C-769060BB25785A86 Getting Dirty With HACE (Episode 81) National Park Service Alex Beard speaks with two objects conservators and a historic preservationist for the National Park Service in Lowell, Massachusetts. 1011 no full 81

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today, we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with two objects conservators and a historic preservationist for the National Park Service in Lowell, Massachusetts. In this podcast, they talk about their recent treatments of large scale objects for different historic sites in the Northeast Region.

Bunker Hill Hoisting Apparatus Before Treatment.

Alex Beard: Hi, my name is Alex Beard. I’m here in the Northeastern Branch of the National Park Service in Lowell, Massachusetts with objects conservator Margaret Breuker. Today I wanted to ask her about an object that is currently undergoing treatment in the lab. It is an artifact that is historic to Boston and I wanted to know if she could shed some light on its rich history and the treatment it’s currently under in the lab.

Margaret Breuker: Sure Alex. This is a piece of the hoisting apparatus from the Bunker Hill Monument in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It is two pieces of timber that are connected with iron pins and it was excavated in the 1980’s from the basement of the Bunker Hill Monument along with some other archeological objects, but this is the only engineering object that was excavated. And as far as we know, the only piece of engineering ever located that was used to build the Bunker Hill Monument. So it’s a very important piece.

It was waterlogged when it was excavated, which means that it was found completely submerged underwater. Now that makes it a challenging piece to conserve because when wood is waterlogged, the wood cells become filled with water and it overtime degrades the cellulose in the wood cell replacing it with water so that all of the cells of the wood become filled with water and that provides the structure for the wood. So that when you excavate it and take it out of that water it has no structure if you remove it from the water environment. So when you excavate waterlogged wood or any material made of cellulose, you have to keep it waterlogged until you can treat it. And this has an interesting treatment history where it was kept actually in a tank of water for many, many years and it wasn’t until the 90’s where it was left to slowly dry out in dark storage. And it was brought to me this year, 2016, to conserve only after it had dried out over a long period of time.

Alex Beard: Would you say that the wood is stable now?

Bunker Hill Hoisting Apparatus After Treatment

Margaret Breuker: It’s stable in that it is no longer filled with water, but it’s very, very fragile, and very, very dry, and the iron elements are very, very unstable as well as the iron when it is buried starts to revert back into its elemental state. It’s now probably closer to an iron(III) which is a very unstable state. It’s very friable, so that also needs to be consolidated. What we need to do now-

Alex Beard: It’s essentially rust now. It’s not even-

Margaret Breuker: Yeah, it’s very orange looking and it is very weak, has no real strength anymore. Same with the wood, it’s also very weak. So what we’re going to do is we have to consolidate, it’s called, both the iron and the wood with a consolidant. It’s going to be different consolidants for the iron and the wood because they’re very different materials. So we’re going to replace the voids that is in the plant fiber with a material called methylcellulose that we’re going to spray onto the timbers and we also are going to consolidate the iron with a material called B-48, which is an acrylic used a lot on metals.

Alex Beard: So you’re mainly looking just to stabilize and preserve this interesting history of this object without trying to make it look brand new.

Margaret Breuker: Yeah. We couldn’t make it look brand new even if we tried, Alex, but we’re going to just keep it as stable as we can so that no more pieces of either the wood crumble or fall off or the iron. So that people can view it and see it for all of its interesting little notches and holes and pieces.

Alex Beard: How will the piece be displayed and where will it be displayed?

Margaret Breuker: It will be displayed in the Boston Navy Yard Museum and we’re going to create a mount for it that will be specially created just for it to support it underneath in locations that are the most stable for it and it will have an enclosure so that no one can touch it, but they can view it safely.

Alex Beard: If you’re ever in the Boston area you might be able to come and see this hoisting apparatus after it’s been treated. I will upload pictures onto the website so that you can view some before and after pictures of this piece. Thank you so much for your time Margaret. I appreciate it.

I’m here with another HACE object conservator, Carol Warner and she’s going to talk about a current project that she’s working on from Weir Farms in Connecticut and discuss the treatment and historical significance of the piece.

Johnny filling areas of loss with B-72 and micro-balloons.

Carol Warner: Okay, well this is a plaster relief and it’s seven feet high by eleven feet and it’s a working model, was never a piece that was intended for exhibit. It’s one of the steps in the process of making a bronze. This particular piece is one of three pieces that would go end to end and it represents the trip of the Mormons across the country to establish their settlement in Salt Lake City, Utah. The bronze that we’re talking about that this plaster would have facilitated the fabrication of is on the side of this very large monument called This Is The Place Monument and it’s tall granite obelisk and it has figurative groups, oversized figurative groups in bronze in these relief panels along the sides. And this would be the model that would be sent to the foundry where they would make another mold and then they would make the bronze.

So the relationship of this piece to the park, this comes from Weir Farm National Historic Park. Mahonri Young was the son-in-law of J. Alden Weir, who the park is named after, the American Impressionist painter. Mahonri Young was the grandson of Brigham Young, the head of the Mormon movement. That’s why this piece is a part of the Weir Farm Collection. This piece was stored in a barn. It had it’s useful life but the artist chose to save this, actually most of these panels, there’s six all together that fit together to form two long reliefs.

Alex Beard: Could you tell us a little bit about the condition of the plaster relief and what the treatment will involve?

Carol Warner: Yes, the condition is the effect of it being stored by the artist in a barn with no protection for many years. He chose to retain these working pieces. Three of them are in fairly good condition in that they’re mostly complete. Some of them are missing major figurative pieces. But the result of being stored in the barn, the main damage to it was water continually ran over the plaster surface and water erodes plaster. So there were lots of streaks and pits and losses of the surface on this particular piece. And then at a certain point when the park service took over, this piece was crated and then it was kept from any further deterioration for many years and was surveyed by our conservation group in 1995. So we did see the condition of it and then it finally has been funded for treatment and we’re treating it now. As we open the crate the condition is similar to what it was when it was crated by the park service.

It basically needs to be totally surface cleaned because it has a lot of surface dirt. We use white vinyl erasers to clean it because the plaster is extremely porous and if you would use any kind of liquid it would force the dirt in instead of take it off. Part of the work will consist of replacing some lost pieces in the erosion areas and we’re working with a fill material. It’s a variation on B-72 acetone microballoons. In this case we’re using 40% B-72 acetone and bulking it really thickly with microballoons and then tinting as needed. So with that material we are reconstructing the loss and we are filling the areas of erosion. We have to reconstruct ox horns, horse ears, some of the landscape.

Alex Beard: I hear that the previous two plaster reliefs that you worked on for the This Is The Place Monument will be on display at Weir Farms, but this one will not?

Alex Beard filling areas of loss on the plaster relief.

Carol Warner: Yes, the other two are currently on display in the Young studio and one of those two actually has Brigham Young in a coach. This is a part of one relief, those two are part of another relief. But anyway, they’re on exhibit and then will be stored until the park is ready to exhibit it and this one will be exhibited in the barn because they don’t have room to exhibit another large one in the Young studio.

Alex Beard: Thanks Carol for discussing the project with us. We appreciate it.

Now I’m speaking with Johnny Holdsworth who is also assisting Carol Warner with the Weir Farms project. He’s had a really interesting past with the National Park Service and has been in multiple geographic locations and worked on many different projects and I’d like to see if you could talk to us a little bit about your past and some previous projects you’ve worked on.

Johnny Holdsworth: Sure, I started with the National park Service in 2009. I started out in New Mexico as an archeological technician at Bandelier National Monument and out there we would do restoration and preservation work on Native American ruin sites. Some of them are in cliffs or just in the main canyon there. So a lot of masonry restoration work there but also some graffiti mitigation on ancestral Puebloan art that’s inside the spaces that are still surviving. So I did that for a number of years. A short stint after the Deep Water Horizon oil spill as an archeological resource advisor down at the gulf.

And not too long after that I had an offer to work for HACE up in New York City. Up until about 2013 I worked for Bandelier and then I moved to New York City working for HACE. With HACE I work as a preservationist and that job puts me anywhere potentially in the northeast doing restoration work. Some of it’s down to the nitty gritty doing reroofing projects or tuck pointing. It kind of varies but I also do a bit of construction management or contractor management as a contracting officers representative. I oversee some of the contract work that the government hires for different restoration work. So some of that work has taken me anywhere from upstate New York to here in Massachusetts right now, some work in Pennsylvania. It could be really anywhere but the projects are all varied, anything from fixing up somebody’s roof, or doing masonry restoration, or in this case doing preservation work to a sculpture.

Alex Beard: So where is Bandelier National Park located?

Johnny Holdsworth: Bandelier National monument is in Los Alamos, New Mexico. So it’s right next to the national lab and it was established for the resources there related to Native American occupations. Some of the sites there date, some of their earliest stuff is right around 1100 up to around 1450. A number of the sites are actually excavated out of the sides of canyon walls. So they’re these spaces called cavates where Native Americans carved them out and made them into living working spaces. So those are some of the primary resources at that park. And there’s also a number of CCC buildings in the historic district that all date to the 1930’s just prior to the Manhattan Project taking over the Los Alamos area. Some of those buildings were occupied during Manhattan Project for scientists working at the lab doing atomic testing.

Alex Beard: How many National Park sites have you been to would you estimate? Because it seems like you’ve traveled a lot for your job and that’s super rewarding and you’ve gotten to see so many different parts of the United States.

This plaster relief at Weir Farms show the Mormon migration westward.

Johnny Holdsworth: Yeah, I have to recount. I’m somewhere around 120 park service sites now and there’s as of yesterday I think there’s 411 or 412. So I’ve been to at least a quarter of them now. A lot of those I just visited as a casual visitor but probably about two dozen of them now I’ve actually worked at or had projects at. I’ve had a project at Yosemite one time, I’ve done a number of projects in the Southwest, a couple of random projects that I got to do with HPTC, the Historic Preservation Training Center out of Frederick, Maryland. I did their preservation skills training a few years ago. I finished up last year. It’s a two year training program. So that gave me the opportunity to go and train at other parks and see how they do preservation work. Those projects range anywhere from, again, Yosemite to Harper’s Ferry in Cape Cod, we were in the D.C. area for a little bit, back down actually into Southern California for one of those projects. That was a great opportunity to see preservation around the country with the park service and meet a lot of other people that do similar work.

Alex Beard: Can you tell us about a couple future projects that you have in store?

Johnny Holdsworth: Yeah, I’ve got a project lined up for later on this summer up at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller, that’s in Woodstock, Vermont and one of the resources there is there’s an underground fallout shelter dating to the early 60’s that was installed by the Rockefeller family. Overall it’s in really good shape but some of the bottom of one of the, or two of the shelters that are underground is starting to rust out. So we’re going to do some metal conservation work on those spaces, but even though it’s kind of straightforward in the sense that it’s going to be stabilizing the surface and coating them to prevent further rust, the location underground and limited air kind of makes it a more technical project for working in a small space and with limited oxygen. It will be a matter of going over with a conservator what we want to use and then figuring out how that might impact the limited environment we have in coming up with a good safety plan for myself working in that space. So that’s one of the big upcoming projects I’ve got.

I’ve got another ongoing project in New York City working on Hamilton Grange, which is Alexander Hamilton’s house. There’s some restoration on his outdoor portico porches. So there’s a little bit of work there and wrapping up some work at Castle Clinton in Battery Park in New York City. We’ve got a contractor finishing up work on some of the stone magazine, powder magazine roofs there. Lots of work, always varied, and in different places but that’s what makes it interesting is that every project’s a little different and in a different place.

Alex Beard: Well thank you Johnny. I look forward to hearing about the work you’re going to continue to do for the National Park Service.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.NCPTT.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Rapid Digital Documentation of Endangered Cultural Sites: CyArk (Episode 80) ]]> Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CEDB0249-B6C2-96DA-24398E0AC8B8C549.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CEDB85F1-F809-CDBF-CCB76556E9214C3A Rapid Digital Documentation of Endangered Cultural Sites: CyArk (Episode 80) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Kacey Hadick, Heritage and Conservation Program Manager at CyArk. In this podcast they talk about CyArkâ€,s Digital Documentation Kits for rapid documentation of endangered cultural sites. 602 no full 80

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Training Syrian heritage professionals with photogrammetry software.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kacey Hadick, Heritage and Conservation Program Manager at CyArk. In this podcast they talk about CyArk’s Digital Documentation Kits for rapid documentation of endangered cultural sites.

Jason Church: Today I’m here at the Old Mint Museum in New Orleans, talking with Kacey Hadick the Manager of Heritage and Conservation Products with CyArk. So Kacey, tell us a little bit about who CyArk is?

Kacey Hadick: So CyArk is a 501C nonprofit based in Oakland, California. And our mission is to archive and share the world’s cultural heritage. So we’ve been around since 2003, documenting over 200 sites on all seven continents. I’m here talking about a kit that we created through a grant from NCPTT, how to rapidly document cultural heritage sites using photogrammetry.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about the kit? Why was it developed?

Kacey Hadick: Right now, as many people know, the Middle East is experiencing heritage loss, whether it’s in Iraq or Yemen or Syria. And so recognizing this need in these areas, it’s kind of difficult to use a laser scanner, which is one of CyArk’s traditional technologies. We wanted to create a kit that could be easily deployed and sent to these areas so locals on the ground could document their heritage using photogrammetry.

Jason Church: Now these locals on the ground, have they already been trained, or do they have knowledge of this, or is this something new for them?

Kacey Hadick: So we’ve deployed three kits, the kit that’s currently being utilized in the Middle East was given to the UNESCO offices in Beirut, Lebanon. And in Lebanon we had teams from Lebanon as well as teams from Syria come and receive training on how to complete photogrammetry of heritage sites, so they do have some training.

Jason Church: So tell us a little bit, what is in this kit? What do they get?

CyArk’s Rapid Digital Documentation Field Kit.

Kacey Hadick: The heritage documentation kit includes a digital camera, laser distance meter, a table computer, a GPS receiver and a compact tripod, as well as video tutorials, actually printed materials on best practices for how to document a heritage site. The kit is in English, the groups that we work with had some working knowledge of English, but it could be easily translated into Arabic or the language of the region. All of the materials that are within the kit are posted publicly online on the cyark.org website and you can select a checkbox and it will actually fill up your Amazon cart with all of the items within the kit. So the idea is that the materials in the kit, there’s nothing special that you have to special order, anything, this is all equipment that anyone can purchase and most people have some familiarity with digital cameras so that they can just begin documenting.

Jason Church: Once a kit’s been deployed, a team’s been trained, and they’ve gone out and they do the documentation, where does that documentation go?

Kacey Hadick: These are heritage organizations that we have deployed the kit to. And so it’s going back to their main offices where they can process the data. But there’s also an aspect where they store all of the data that they capture in the cloud and so associated with each kit is a Dropbox account so that the participants can upload their files that way, so that if the site is damaged and maybe their digital copies are lost, there’s still a copy in the cloud that’s safe.

Jason Church: And what if they don’t have access to wireless or the cloud?

Kacey Hadick: They can move it to a different country. So in Syria, the internet is slow or spotty at times, and so what the participants have done is they’ve shipped actual hard drives containing the data that they captured to adjacent countries, in this case Lebanon, where we have a relationship with the UNESCO offices. And so in Lebanon at the UNESCO office, they upload the data to the cloud for us. The kit is currently being used in Damascus, Syria and in Aleppo. These are two regions that have experienced heavy fighting and both of the sites are UNESCO World Heritage properties and the UNESCO listing covers the whole entire old city, so there’s lots of historic buildings, from the 15th, 14th centuries. And so they’re documenting these structures with photogrammetry and uploading it to the cloud.

Using the Camera in Lebanon.

So the initial project planned on six structures within Syria, but the idea is that they can take ownership and being documenting their own, and so that’s actually what they’ve done. So while Aleppo was not part of our initial project region, that area was recently recaptured by the government and so they have begun documenting the heritage there. So they have actually already gone beyond the scope of our initial project and are documenting heritage in the northern city of Aleppo.

Jason Church: Now we talked a lot about war torn areas, do you see this as a need in other areas as well?

Kacey Hadick: Definitely. The other two kits that CyArk produced were sent to the Center for Environmental Management of Military Lands, CEMML, as well as University of Colorado at Denver. And so we see a shift towards photogrammetry and the power that photogrammetric models have in heritage conservation programs as something really exciting, and we want to equip as many people as possible to use this technology. CyArk is a small organization and the more people that are able to utilize these technologies, I think is better.

Jason Church: A small organization with a far reach.

Kacey Hadick: Yeah, it’s exciting. And again, like I said everything is online for people to purchase their own kits or learn about our documentation methods.

Jason Church: When they go out to document a site, are the groups then doing the 3D modeling and the photogrammetry or are they just capturing the data and sending it to someone else who will process it?

Kacey Hadick: So in the case of the Syrian heritage professionals, they are documenting it themselves, and then since we are getting the data back, we also create the models from the point clouds and so we can compare them to make sure that the quality’s as high as possible. So this kit, if you could click through your Amazon cart today, it would cost less than $1500. Pretty exciting, what’s possible. As we learned today at the Mint, you can do photogrammetry with your phone. And so the quality is not going to be as great as you’re going to get with a digital SLR camera but for creating a model for interpretation uses that are maybe not for conservation but for posing on the web, you can use your simple cell phone camera.

Jason Church: Tell us about what CyArk ‘s got coming down the line?

Laser scanning at the temples.

Kacey Hadick: So, CyArk is currently in Bagan, Myanmar, which is an archeological area located within the center of the country, and it’s called the land of 1,000 temples, and there’s actually over 3,000 Buddhist monuments within this valley. The majority of them were built in the 11th and 12th centuries and they’re built of un-reinforced brick masonry. And unfortunately, last year, the region experienced a pretty dramatic earthquake and over 300 of buildings were severely damaged. And so CyArk, this will be the third project that we do in Bagan. One expedition we completed before the earthquake and this will be the second following the earthquake, and so using our documentation strategies, which are laser scanning and terrestrial photogrammetry and drone photogrammetry, we’re creating conservation products for the government of Myanmar and the UNESCO regional office, so they can complete conservation work and restore the temples.

Currently, the government of Myanmar is proposing the site as a UNESCO World Heritage List and so all this documentation is going into their proposal. We got lucky this time that we had gone before the earthquake and so we could actually mesh the models before, and then mesh them following the earthquake and compare the two models to see where the building has been affected by the earthquake. So maybe where arches are collapsed, or even many of the temples have detailed frescoes inside and so where they’re exfoliating off, we can compare orthographic images that were created from the model before and after the quake to see where areas were damaged.

Jason Church: So CyArk ‘s website, do you have any of the data archived?

Kacey Hadick: Yeah, so cyark.org is a great resource. There’s some data available online. So CyArk welcomes academic institutions and other organizations in requesting data that we may have captured in the past. Projects that we have completed and are available online can be downloaded in some limited degree. You can download completed models, or CyArk also has a sketch web channel where you can download OBJ’s of our models that we’ve produced for sites. We are currently working on opening up our archive even better, so we’re currently working with Yale on best practices on how to do this better. We’re looking to improve in this.

Jason Church: Well, it’s got to be a daunting task, I know that’s a lot of data.

Kacey Hadick: Yeah, since our founding in 2003, we’ve documented a lot of heritage sites and getting these files online in the most usable way has been a challenge, and we’re working on the best ways to do this.

Jason Church: Well, we look forward to hearing more about the projects CyArk are doing.

Kacey Hadick: Great. Yeah, we’re extremely grateful and we know that Middle Eastern heritage professionals were grateful for receiving the kit and other groups, and it’s been a great project. Great collaboration.

Jason Church: Well, good. Maybe then at next podcast that we do with you can be from another grant.

Kacey Hadick: Sounds great, sounds wonderful. Hopefully.

Jason Church: Thanks for talking to us today Kacey.

Kacey Hadick: Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> What the HACE?! (Episode 79) ]]> Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF078E5B-B8B4-D2AE-00349D7694147D6F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CF08F556-03B5-D2F9-48CF2F51838BBA27 What the HACE?! (Episode 79) National Park Service Alex Beard on HHACE and how they are preserving American history Alex Beard as she speaks with several architects, conservators, and historians at the Collections Conservation Branch for the Park Service in the Northeast Region known as HACE. 956 no full 79

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with several architects, conservators, and historians at the Collections Conservation Branch for the Park Service in the Northeast Region known as HACE, in this podcast they will discuss their jobs at HACE and how they are preserving American history.

Alex Beard: Hi this is Alex Beard, I’m in Lowell, Massachusetts at the National Park Service Regional office known as HACE. I’m here with the director of HACE, Stephen Spaulding. Could you tell us what HACE stands for?

Stephen Spaulding: Sure. It stands for Historic Architecture Conservation and Engineering Center. It’s a multi-discipline mixture of staff that have in one form or another been together since probably about the 1970’s. When it started off as the North Atlantic Historic Preservation Center for the North Atlantic Region which is now combined with the Mid-Atlantic and so that’s why it’s the Northeast Region.

Alex Beard: And where is HACE located?

Stephen Spaulding: Our main office is in Lowell, and that’s where we have our conservation labs, and paint lab, and mortar lab and the sort. But we also have offices in Philadelphia and New York City and Hampton, Virginia, Auburn, NY, Hyde Park, NY.

Alex Beard: And for those of you who don’t know, Lowell, Massachusetts is about 30 minutes north or so of the city of Boston. And why Lowell, Massachusetts?

Stephen Spaulding: We started off we were in Charlestown Navy yard down in a great building on the pier right next to the Constitution Museum and the workshop for the Constitution that the Navy ran and in about 1986 or so congressman Tip O’Neill got us a million dollars to move out, because they wanted our building for the Constitution Museum. And so we were actually able to become part of the development project for Boott Mills and ended up with, at that point, state-of-the-art conservation labs because of that funding.

Alex Beard: Who does HACE serve?

HACE conservation lab photo documentation set-up.

Stephen Spaulding: We primarily serve the Northeast Region and probably 80% of our work load is for the small and medium sized parts. They’re the parts that really do not have the necessary technical expertise to undertake certain specialized work so we have historic architects, architectural conservators, historians, engineers, landscape architects and preservation crews. And those are the type of disciplines it’s very hard for small and medium-sized parks to keep on staff.

Alex Beard: Can someone outside the Parks Service every contact HACE for work or opinions?

Stephen Spaulding: Opinions fine, that’s pretty much how the profession works all the way across the board is you’re always reaching out to people that have expertise in some areas that you might not have yourself as far as our providing services to outside organizations, we do that with parks in other regions and sometimes we also work for organizations outside of the Parks Service but we have to be able to justify that it’s in the service of a nationally significant resource or something that has an association to a park service theme.

Alex Beard: What are some of the larger, more important parks in the Northeast Region for HACE?

Stephen Spaulding: There’s emphasis’ that occur at certain times on park resources, so for example, the final anniversary for the Civil War was the surrender at Appomattox and we basically spent five years there going through all the parks historic structures with preservation crews, contracts, working with other parks service organizations like Historic Preservation Training Center. Trying to get all the buildings into appropriate condition for the anniversary, but now we won’t be there for a while and so we’re working at other parks. Some of them that are new, some which just have a large work load backlog of preservation, reevaluation or architectural study needs.

Alex Beard: Could you shed a little bit more light on HACE and what the branches are?

Stephen Spaulding: Sure, we’re made up of four branches: Construction, Conservation, and Training which is primarily the preservation crews and hands on architectural conservators, Design and Preservation Planning which is the architects and engineers and landscape architects and the Historic Structures, Research, and Documentation Branch which oversees the list of classified structures and also is primary authors for historic structures reports in the Northeast and the Object Conservation Branch which is made up of object conservators who provide both collection condition assessments for parks and hands-on treatments.

Alex Beard: Do you know if any of the other branches of HACE have collaborated with NCPTT before and do you know how their experience was?

Stephen Spaulding: Yeah we actually, I think the first year there was an NCPTT, we did the historic structures report for the building that they’re in and so there was a relationship early on that one of the first directors used to work for what was the North Atlantic Historic Preservation Center before he went down there, John Robins we served with them in a couple of different capacities over the years. Reviewers for grant applications and for publications and the sort.

Alex Beard: Hopefully you guys work with them in the future and use some of their lab equipment and their scientific instruments that they have there.

Before Treatment George Washington Statue NYC.

Stephen Spaulding: Yes, we’re very familiar with the staff and their capabilities and so I was asked the question earlier about people contacting us for assistance, there are people on their staff that we often contact to talk over issues with technologies and techniques and so it is a collaborative relationship we just aren’t on the same path as far as working projects together.

David Bitterman: Hi I’m David Bitterman, I’m chief of the Design and Preservation Planning Branch here at HACE.

Alex Beard: Hi! Could you tell us a little bit about what the Architectural Preservation department does here?

David Bitterman: Well, we have about a dozen professionals from various disciplines we have historical architects, we have landscape architects we have also various types of engineers on our staff and primarily we serve the client parks within the Northeast Region on a number of different sorts of things. First of all, we do a lot of condition assessments on historic structures, we do a lot of project formulations- or help, again client parks, with project formulations and cost estimates. We in many cases will prepare a formal design documents or projects which will be contracted out to various construction entities. We will also help procure and administer task quarters for outside architectural and engineering firms to provide design documents as well. We get involved in a number of special projects, we do materials research. We do building diagnostics, we help out with historic structures reports or other special preservation studies and we also assist the preservation crews often in their direct work on historic structures.

Alex Beard: Thank you for that information, do you collaborate with the other branches of HACE?

David Bitterman: Yeah, that would be particularly in the realm of helping out with historic structures reports and on crew based projects where we don’t put formal designs into a contracting, the work being self-performed by others within HACE, and we work a lot with conservators in terms of particularly buildings and system diagnostics.

Alex Beard: Well thank you for your time, I appreciate it.

David Bitterman: You’re welcome.

Richard Chilcoat: My name is Richard Chilcoat and I’m the branch chief for Construction, Conservation, and Training within the Historic Architecture Conservation and Engineering Center.

Alex Beard: Can you tell us a little bit about what your branch does for HACE?

Richard Chilcoat: Sure, my branch is primarily responsible for hands-on historical preservation work in national parks in the Northeast Region. There are approximately 30 people in the branch with different hands on disciplines in historic preservation: masonry, carpentry, plaster, et cetera. And we’re currently in five different locations within the Northeast Region.

Alex Beard: And how do you collaborate with the other departments within HACE?

Richard Chilcoat: We actually collaborate very closely with both the Conservators in Objects Conservation and the Historical Architects in HACE on just about every project that we do.

Alex Beard: Hi, my name is Alex Beard, I’m here in Lowell, Massachusetts in the conservation labs of the National Park Services’ Northeast Region. I’m here with objects conservators Margaret Breuker and Joannie Bottkol. Today I wanted to start off by asking what does the Objects Conservation Department do for the National Park Service?

Margaret Breuker: Hi, this is Margaret Breuker. What we do is what objects conservators do in a museum, but we do it on a large scale for the Northeast Region and for the federal government. We repair and conserve objects for the department of the interior in historic house museums throughout the Northeast Region. We also consult on climate monitoring, integrated pest management, collections, care, anything that would have to do with objects within the historic houses that the National Park Service owns. We also work on outdoor monuments, trail markers, things of that nature.

Alex Beard: What are some of the most interesting objects and artifacts you’ve worked on before?

Margaret Breuker: Well that’s a tough question actually, because we get to work on a lot of really interesting things here at the National Park Service. I would have to say, one of the most iconic things that we get to work on is the George Washington Monument right outside on Wall Street. We got to work on that on a maintenance schedule and one of the times that we worked on it was right after 911 happened, it was very dirty with debris and that was a really meaningful time to clean the statue. I’ve also got to work on George Washington’s belt buckle, which was a really pretty silver buckle. Things like Thomas Edison’s funerary wreath, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s collection of fine art, like his Japanese art that few people know that he collected. And fun things like Mamie Eisenhower’s plastic Christmas ornaments.

Alex Beard: Do you work with objects that are made of lots of different medias and materials and everything?

Mamie Eisenhower Christmas Ornament.

Margaret Breuker: Yeah, lots of different things, everything from, as I mentioned, plastic to paper and different cloth and leather.

Alex Beard: So do you get to travel for the National Park Service, and if you do where do you travel?

Margaret Breuker: Well that’s one of the best things about our job, is we get to travel all throughout the national parks. One summer my job was to survey all the plaques in Acadia National Park so I actually had to hike the trails and take photographs of all the plaques, it was beautiful.

Alex Beard: How was it working with curators and staff at National Parks Service Historic Homes and Sites?

Joannie Bottkol: This is Joannie Bottkol, I’m the other objects conservator here and I can say very whole heartedly that it’s great working with National Parks Service staff and curators. The rangers, the museum techs, the seasonal employees, the educators, the curators, everybody is just very, very invested in the parks and in education and outreach.

Alex Beard: Are there any exceptionally awesome, all-star curators you want to give a shout to that you’ve worked with before?

Joannie Bottkal: It’d be hard to choose one because really across the board the curators are amazing advocators for the park service collections, but we’ve worked really closely with Kelly Cobble over the years. She is the curator for John Quincy Adams’ house here in Massachusetts and she’s done a lot of work to help educate other curators abut conservation and collections care. She’s arranged a lot of training for other curators and museum staff, brought us in to teach them how to best safeguard their collections and she’s a champion, for sure.

Alex Beard: Now the question I want to know is have you ever collaborated with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, or NCPTT, before and how was the experience?

Joannie Bottkol: Well we’re actually just building a relationship with NCPTT, and last year we sent a few representatives from the HACE department that our group works under, which is the Historic Architecture, Conservation, and Engineering Center for the Northeast Region. We sent someone from each of those divisions down to NCPTT to meet with the folks there and talk about how we can begin a collaboration and how we can get that rolling for the future. What kinds of projects we would want to work on together, it was actually a very exciting and fruitful meeting and we’ve got some plans for the future we’re going to put into place as soon as we can.

Alex Beard: Joannie, could you tell some of the listeners what your educational background is and what your career path has been like?

Jordan Pond plaque in situ Acadia National Park.

Joannie Bottkol: Sure, it’s actually been a really specific field of study that conservators follow. Most conservators nowadays have a background as an undergraduate in art history and studio arts in chemistry, and then after they’ve graduated with all of those requirements fulfilled they work in the field as an intern or apprentice for two to three years as before they are ready to apply for a graduate program in conservation. There are four graduate programs in conservation that are sort of the main heavy-hitters in this country there’s one in Suny Buffalo, one at New York University, and one at Winterthur, Delaware, and then there’s a newer one at the Getty out in California and all those programs are three to four year programs, and the last year of your education, your graduate school education, is actually as an intern in a museum lab, you’re sort of embedded in the way a reporter would be embedded while doing a long-term story. And you perform all of the jobs that a full conservator would do, but you’re still in training. When you graduate with that degree in conservation science you usually apply for a fellowship, some fellowships are one year, some are two or three. Some people do a number of years of fellowships before they feel ready to apply for full conservator positions in museums.

A lot of people also start private practices and pursue that, the same kind of work, but in a different atmosphere. It’s a really long road but it’s worth it because it’s very specific work and if you love it and you’re willing to commit all those years to preparation you have a nice long career ahead of you doing something that’s really exciting and fun.

Alex Beard: Well thank you so much, you guys, for talking to me, this has been great, and I’m sure our listeners will love hearing about what the Objects Conservators for the National Park Service do.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out or podcast show notes at www.NCPTT.nps.gov, until next time, good bye everybody.

]]> On the Couch with Historic New England (Episode 78) ]]> Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF45C35F-EF92-3C5C-01B543F4E11E4CD6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CF46A049-D5FE-9080-5CE5C1E22D0CAF49 On the Couch with Historic New England (Episode 78) National Park Service Alex Beard speaks with staff on Historic New England 834 no full 78

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today, we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with several staff from Historic New England located in Haverhill, Massachusetts. In this podcast, they talk about the recent acquisition of the 19th century Gilded Age Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, and the daily treatments and prep work involved for the opening of the property to the public.

Liz Peirce and Alex Beard removing studs from Wightman Couch.

Alex Beard: Hi. My name is Alex Beard and I’m here at Historic New England in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Here with me today is Liz Peirce. She is the current Mellon Fellow at Historic New England. Hi, Liz. Can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been doing at Historic New England, some of the projects you’ve been working on?

Liz Peirce: Hi. Absolutely. I’ve had a couple of major projects that I’ve been working on. Right now, we’re really in the push to open a house in Milton, Massachusetts, so there’s been a lot of furniture coming into the lab.

A little bit about me, I’m trained as an objects conservator with a furniture specialty. I was a woodworker for a while, so I’m really interested in furniture conservation. A lot of what I’ve been working on has been furniture in the collection, either going into Milton or my major research project, which is a 1820s couch from our Otis property in Boston.

Liz Peirce Gilding the Wightman Couch.

The major project for that has been identifying the original layers, finding out the history of the piece, and trying to bring it back closer to the appearance in the 1820s for an upcoming exhibition in 2018. What’s been really interesting is that the layer structure, when you first look at the piece it sort of looks like a brown couch with some nice carving that’s either a dark brown or a black, but when you look really closely in the cracks on the paint, you can see gilding coming through. (More information about this can be found on Historic New England’s blog.)

We started looking into that more closely, took cross-sections, tried to identify what areas actually had gilding and what areas didn’t have gilding, and have been working to devise a system to do a reversible gilding treatment. There’s also grain painting on the piece, so there are areas that have been severely damaged. I’ve been doing a lot of research into grain painting and then trying to devise a layer structure to most closely mimic the original grain painting that is now gone, particularly on the back of the couch.

It’s been a lot of testing. A lot of looking at different colors of gold, looking at different applications for graining, making combs, testing pre-made combs, and different combinations and glazes.

I’ve also been looking at the upholstery. We took off the current upholstery, which was a sort of purple color, and completely inappropriate for the time period. We found underneath the original little circles underneath the nails of the original fabric. That has helped inform curatorial decisions. It was original a red velvet that had been calendered with sort of a five petaled flower. We found a piece of that in one of the curatorial files, as well.

Alex Beard flagging original studs on the back of the Wightman Couch.

Being able to do fiber ID and make sure that that was the original upholstery has been really interesting to be able to identify that. When we did the de-upholstery, we discovered that the original 1820s under-upholstery was still intact, which is really rare. That’s completely and totally changed what we were planning on doing for part of the treatment, as well.

We had been originally planning on doing an ethafoam based under-upholstery to make it sort of unappetizing to insects and to make it more stable long-term, but because the under upholstery is still present and it’s from that time period and that is really a rare find because of hygiene laws that were put in place. Normally, when you went and reupholstered in the late 19th century you would strip all the way back to the bare wood, so you would lose all of that information and all of that history, and because we still have that intact, we decided that we want to keep it.

We’re instead doing a non-intrusive, minimally interventive upholstery technique, which has linen-wrapped Nomex strips that the show cover is then stitched to, rather than doing a full reupholstery where you would have to use all the tacks and the nails for every bit.

That also means that there’s less damage to the wood frame and it makes it easier and less damaging to change the appearance later on if anyone feels that that’s more appropriate.

Alex Beard: Thank you so much for that in-depth description about the treatment and the history of the piece. When and where will this be on display?

Liz Peirce: It’s an exhibition that’s going to be on Vose (Isaac). It’s going to be at the Massachusetts Historical Society in 2018. There are some really interesting tidbits about the history of the piece that I can’t quite share, but you should definitely look for the catalog coming out by Robert Mussey and Clark Pierce where they will go into more depth on the history of the piece and the making of it.

Liz Peirce cleaning the Wightman Couch.

Alex Beard: Yeah, because it kind of sounds like a hidden gem in the collection.

Liz Peirce: It’s is. It is. It was a very forgotten piece that has now been allowed to shine a little bit more. It’s pretty special.

Alex Beard: When was the last time, I’m just curious, this piece was treated?

Liz Peirce: It was treated at some point in time in the probably the 1960s. The last record that we actually have on file is from the 1930s when they described having damaged the original upholstery. Someone had gone and washed it and that removed all of the pattern. They kept some of the original upholstery and then reupholstered it at some point, but with a similar fabric. We think there’s only three campaigns, tops, of upholstery.

Alex Beard: That’s so interesting. I’m sure our viewers would love to see it when it’s finished. Liz has done a great job, so far.

Liz Peirce: Thank you.

Alex Beard: Thank you so much for speaking with us today. Appreciate it.

Liz Peirce: All right. Thanks very much.

Alex Beard: Hi, this is Alex Beard, here. We are in Milton, Massachusetts, with Historic New England, and I’m speaking with Michaela Neiro, an objects conservator, and Melanie Weston, a preservation manager. We are at the Eustis property, Eustis Estate. Melanie, you’ve been mainly tackling this project. Would you care to talk about what it’s taken to open up this property and acquiring process as well?

Melanie Weston: Sure. I can speak a little about that.

We acquired this property in 2012 and we began planning for the Eustis Estate Museum conversion, I think, around that same time, but we actively started the project in 2014. I came on board last October and my job, so far, has been to be the eyes and ears on site for Historic New England, while this project has taken place. This house was a privately owned residence for three generations when it was built in 1878 and we have since probably last February been actively working on site projects and infrastructure and different upgrades to make it usable as a house museum.

Alex Beard: And Michaela, you have been traveling on site here and trying to prep all of the rooms and get them looking nice for gallery space and period rooms. Could you just talk a little bit about that process and what you’ve been doing?

Alex Beard inpainting glazed fireplace tiles at the Eustis Estate.

Michaela Neiro: Sure. Yeah. So, after Melanie had her crew of contractors working on roads and walls and electricity and big picture items like that, I’ve come in with other conservators and we’re working on the fine finish work interior.

The fireplaces, there’s 11 fireplaces, well, there’s more than 11 fireplaces, but we’re treating 11 fireplaces in the house. These fireplaces have elaborate glazed tiles and terra cotta tiles and also wood surrounds. Some of these tiles are loose or cracked or chipped and we’ve repaired them. We’ve conserved lost glaze areas on some of these tiles where they’ve been damaged, repaired the tiles, re-adhered the tiles, and then cleaned them. Reinstalled them in situ and exactly the location they came from and cleaned and, in some cases, waxed them where they’ve become more matte and lost some of their protective glaze.

Another thing we’ve been working on are some of the brass elements in the house, some decorative hardware, and fireplace tools. Also, fireplace surrounds and chandeliers that have accumulated dust and some minor corrosion over the years. So, we’ve been cleaning, and polishing, and coating in some areas these brass elements. Really just in preparation so everything can look it’s best for opening day and to set the standard for this house as a museum, as opposed to a private residence. As a private residence, the products that were used to, say, clean the brass over the years aren’t necessarily what we as conservators would use, so we’ve been removing some polish residue and then cleaning and coating so that they don’t have to be polished again.

Alex Beard: So, you’re stabilizing this property for hundreds of years to come. Could you tell us a little bit about the house and how many acres of land it sits on? I’ve been to the house, it is covered in lots of beautiful woodworking. You guys are just trying to keep intact the character of the house because it has been lived in. Could you talk about some of the challenges of that? Not trying to get everything sparkling new, by any means.

Michaela Neiro: Yeah. Sure. I mean, it was a very well-cared for house, but certainly was lived in and used for three generations. There’s accretions, we call them, build up of floor wax in some areas. Like Alex said, we’re not trying to make everything look pristine, but just clean and presentable for this opening, plus there have been a variety of contractors here over the last four months or more than that and it created a lot of dust, so getting that surface dust off along with the long embedded accretions.

Also, there’s some light damage. There’s so much woodwork and there’s so many beautiful windows that the varnish and the finish of some of the wood is deteriorated over time. We’re using shellac and other wax products to re-saturate and protect these areas that have damaged finish.

Alex and Michaela cleaning fireplaces at the Eustis Estate.

Melanie Weston: This estate was built in the 1870s to 1880s, we’re not really sure how long it took to build, but by looking at the house it didn’t take a year. Right, as of now, we have 80 to 90 acres of property. The original estate was quite a bit more than that. Some was taken for the Blue Hills Reservation. The house itself is an Aesthetic style house, which really the entire point of that movement in architecture was beauty for beauty’s sake and there’s a lot of characteristics about that in the house when you see it and it really makes it a very unique.

The landscape was designed by Bowditch, Ernest Bowditch. He was a famous landscape architect in this area and his daughter actually married the second Mr. Eustis. It’s an interesting place both inside and out.

What’s really unique about the interiors of this building is the fact that there was only one layer of modern latex paint over all the historic finishes in the house. As one painter who came into this house described them, they are pretty wacky. They have some really interesting textures and some different colors and the color palette is very interesting.

The painting we found, we actually found a painter’s mark in the attic this summer during construction, was done by Haberstroh and Sons, which was a decorative finishing company out of Boston. When we did our first look for evidence of the paint, we did a bunch of exposures and we actually found that in the parlor we could remove the latex paint and expose the original finishes with duct tape. So that is now the original finish, but it’s been conserved.

The rest of the house that is open to the public, we have actually restored the finishes and created new ones to look like the old and that was done by IFACS, International Fine Arts Conservation Studio out of Atlanta with the help of a local painting company called Master Work.

Alex Beard: This place is incredible. If you guys ever get a chance to see it, you can visit Milton, Massachusetts. It’s opening, when is the exact opening day?

Melanie Weston: We will be opening to the public on May 17th.

Alex Beard: May 17th and it’s open during the summer season?

Melanie Weston: Yes. We’ll be open year round.

Alex Beard: You can visit Historic New England’s website to see their other properties, as well, to visit any of those in the northeast area.

Michaela Neiro: HistoricNewEngland.org

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at https://www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye, everybody.

]]> Porches of North America; A New Look At An Old Friend (Episode 76) ]]> Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D03B5569-BF96-D719-78FC029A244DACC1.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D03CF545-A3D9-5785-7B92614227394B15 Porches of North America; A New Look At An Old Friend (Episode 76) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Thomas Visser about Thomas' new book "Porches of North America." 812 no full 76

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Thomas Visser, Director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Vermont. In this podcast they talk about Thomas’ new book “Porches of North America.”

Jason Church: I’m here at the National Trust Conference talking to Thomas Visser, the director of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Vermont. Tom, tell is a little bit about the program that you guys do in Vermont.

Thomas Visser: We have a graduate program in historic preservation that was founded in the mid-1970s and our real goal is to provide our students with a generalist broad-based background for developing careers in historic preservation. The students are coming from all over the country and they’re going out to fill career opportunities also across the country. It’s a three semester program. Everyone starts in the fall and ends up the following fall. We also focus quite a bit on a range of preservation related topics, everything from the conservation of materials to preservation law, to planning and policy and again, it’s really intended to provide a preparation for what we might call a general practitioner type professional approach to historic preservation.

Jason Church: Now most of your students coming in, what are their backgrounds?

Thomas Visser working with University of Vermont Masters students. Thomas Visser working with University of Vermont Masters students.

Thomas Visser:The majority of our students have a background in history. However, we certainly get students with other backgrounds, everywhere from engineering and architecture to political science, and English. It really is multidisciplinary in that aspect. We have alumni who are working for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. We have alumni who are working for statewide nonprofit organizations. We also have alumni who are working in government service at the federal level. Quite a few of our alumni are working in state historic preservation offices. The state historic preservation officer for the state of Texas is one of our alumni Mark Wolfe.

The other area where we’re certainly seeing a fair amount of career opportunity in recent years is in the cultural resource management area. Of course, for that aspect of regulatory review, much of the consulting work is being done by companies that are specializing in this. There are really three main areas: it’s the government service, it’s working with nonprofits, local, state, and federal level, as well as working in the private sector, either as a consultant in the CRM context or also in historic preservation redevelopment of properties. That’s another area where a number of our graduates are working. Either the physical aspects of it on a contracting basis or working in the development and real estate field.

Jason Church: Just had a book come out and you’ve got it here on your table. I was pretty intrigued by it, so the porches of North America. Why porches?porchbookvisser_fig06_22

Thomas Visser: Well you know Jason it was one of these projects that started a number of years ago when I was doing surveys looking at the historic areas and evaluating their significance. What I realized during that process was that often when other researchers had looked at the historic significance of properties, especially in older villages, there seemed to be a certain number of cases where older homes that had porches on them, where the porches had been replaced, and the style of the current porch did not match the style of the rest of the historic house, there was a certain tendency to downgrade the significance of the property and quite literally in a few cases I found that wonderful old homes were not being included as being considered eligible for a listing in the national register because of the alterations.

As I looked into this more it became clear that on one hand because porches are open to the weather, they certainly may have a shorter lifespan, shall we say, then the rest of the house and so it’s not unusual for them to have been rebuilt or replaced, but on the other hand with further research it became clear that particularly during the mid to second half of the 1800s it was not all that unusual for the style of the porch to be a bit different from the style of the rest of the house. Anyway, one thing led to another and it really sort of prompted an interest in doing more research on porches as an entity unto themselves, rather than sort of as an attachment to a historic building with the expectation that that attachment is going to match the style and character of the rest of the building. I really tried to look at porches as something separate and then look at them in a very broad context.

Jason Church: As your book looks at all of North America, are porches interpreted differently in different regions of the country?

porchbookvisser_fig04_51Thomas Visser: One thing that really came out of the review, looking at porches in the United States and Canada, was that I think there’s a certain anticipation that porches in the American South, especially in the American Southeast would be somehow different or special than those that we would find in other parts of the country. While it certainly is true when we’re looking at the comparison between the Southeast and the Southwest, what came out of the research was that the Northeast and in the Midwest areas where summers are shorter, they still, there is an amazing legacy of porch design that is not all that dissimilar to the porch designs that we see in the American Southeast.

One of the key factors here that came out of the research was that air-conditioning, of course, has had a major impact on how people live during the summer months. As soon as air-conditioning became economically viable for many, many people in those areas where the summer weather was most challenging, put it that way, it was certainly more common to have air-conditioning installed and to move a lot of the day-to-day social life off of the porch and inside of the home.

Obviously, if that’s happening, there was a tendency to not maintain part of a building like a porch much as perhaps it had been in the past. Almost ironically when doing the survey across North America it became apparent that many of the best surviving examples of 19th-century porches and early 20th century porches are in the cooler areas because they continue to be used and in many areas, either thinking about coastal Maine or Prince Edward Island or other areas in Minnesota, Ontario, even there, there are many homes that still do not have air-conditioning and yet the porches become a vital part of summer life.

Jason Church: How do you think our driving culture now, how do you think that has affected porch design on newer construction and the way we use them now?

Thomas Visser: Looking at the history of porches through the 20th century has revealed a few things on that and certainly with the advent of the automobile and by the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in suburban areas where a generation before that, of course, everyone would be out on the front porch in the evenings, communicating with their neighbors, and it really was the social network hub in many, many ways. By the 1930s with the automobiles and truck traffic zooming by many, many homes, there was also a tendency to not use the porch, especially the front porch as much as before. That trend continued in the 1950s and during that area there was almost a complete abandonment in many areas of the use of the front porch.porchbookvisser_fig01_62

Family social life tended to move to the backyard, to the barbecue, the deck, the privacy area and the front yard tended to be much more formal, almost sterile when you’re looking at some of the landscaping and so on. The neatly mowed lawn, maybe a clipped hedge, and as you say, a big garage door so that there was very little interaction between the home and the street at that point. What we have seen, however, it really started a trend in the 70s and it has certainly continued, is the rediscovery of the joys of the porch and this has been widely celebrated across the country. I know of some wonderful examples in the southeast where the American porch culture is certainly undergoing somewhat of a revival, so anyway it’s this dimension between the social spheres. I think that’s one way to look at it. It all sort of surrounds what’s happening on the porch, is something else that also came out of the research.

We can think of porches as what are sometimes referred to liminal spaces and what I mean by that is these are spaces that are in between. They are betwixt and between in a certain sense. They’re not completely indoors, they’re not completely outdoors, they’re not completely private, they’re not completely public, but they form this extended threshold, a space that acts as a connecting realm, if you will, between the private home and the public space. When we start to look at porches in that sense from a historical point of view we can see the incredible importance that they have played on encouraging social dynamics within communities.

In the eras before the telephone, before the Internet and so on, we really have to think about how did people connect with each other, especially socially? Not only the formal connections, but also those many informal connections that form part of day-to-day social life. When we look at the 19th century and even continuing into the 20th century and up to the present in some areas, where the porches have been a common feature, we do see that they are being used as this threshold space where people can be available for connecting with other people in typically an informal setting.

porchbookvisser_fig05_45I think overall one of the main goals of this project was to provide perhaps somewhat of a clearer definition of some of the various types of porches that are surviving across the U.S. and Canada and in particular to try to address for historic preservationists, for homeowners, for anyone in general who’s interested in this topic to provide them with a better understanding, not only how these various types of porches have evolved, but also looking specifically at the various uses associated with various types.

One area, of course, is to look at porches broadly so that were also including portico, colonnade, porte-cochère, and so on, these very similar kind of liminal spaces that might not be the typical veranda or the old piazza but they have also provided that in-between semi-sheltered space that acts very much in the same way that the old porch has for many generations.

Jason Church: Where is your book available at?

Thomas Visser: My book is available online, of course. The publisher is University Press of New England and that’s probably the easiest way to find it.

"Porches of North America" book cover. “Porches of North America” book cover.

Jason Church: Well, I look forward to reading it and thank you so much for talking to us today, Tom, about not only the program there at the University of Vermont but also your new project with the porches of North America. We appreciate it.

Thomas Visser: Well thank you Jason it’s been my pleasure.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Student Conservation Internships; Who, How, Why? (Episode 75) ]]> Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D0547753-996F-51F4-9C8529FAD9074A31.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D056DE0F-B819-4ECB-46C87874E7E75CB0 Student Conservation Internships; Who, How, Why? (Episode 75) National Park Service Jason Church with Kim Samaniego and Lauralee Buchanan NCPTTâ€,s Jason Church as speaks with SCA interns Kim Samaniego and Lauralee Buchanan about their experiences with the Student Conservation Association. 819 no full 75

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with SCA interns Kim Samaniego and Lauralee Buchanan about their experiences with the Student Conservation Association.

Kim Samaniego works with a HOPE Crew volunteer to reset a veteran's grave marker at Chalmette National Cemetery. Kim Samaniego works with a HOPE Crew volunteer to reset a veteran’s grave marker at Chalmette National Cemetery.

Jason Church: Kim, we’re here at Chalmette National Cemetery. We worked together on the HOPE project down here. I’ve noticed that your uniform is different than everyone else’s and your’s is labeled SCA. Tell me a little bit, what is SCA?

Kim Samaniego: SCA stands for Student Conservation Association. It’s basically a partnership that helps preservation through the National Park Service and Wildlife and Fishery and those types of agencies and provides youth employment mainly.

Jason Church: How did you get involved with the SCA?

Kim Samaniego: I got involved, there was an opening position at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve for the Centennial Year. The National Park Service, they have these great positions through SCA. They are centennial volunteer ambassadors. Through that, it just kind of broadens up the outreach for different park sites that have CVAs. One of my colleagues told me about the opening and I jumped on and applied for the position. They had me come in, started running and doing some projects with them. It’s pretty fantastic.

Jason Church: What sort of student coming out do you need to be? Coming out of college? High school? How does it work?

Kim Samaniego: There are positions form high school students to college students as well. I think the cutoff is probably around 26.

Jason Church: You’re paid through SCA. Are there other benefits besides salary?

Kim Samaniego: Yes, there are benefits. As far as payment, you get paid through SCA and also through your partnering agency that you work for. Also you can sign up for medical insurance through SCA and also sign up as an Americorps partner as well through SCA. SCA works with Americorps as well heavily. At the end of my internship as a CBA, I’ll be getting around $5,000 school bonus for Americorps.

Jason Church: What is considered a school bonus?

Kim Samaniego: The bonus at the end through Americorps, I can only use it for educational purposes, not leisurely money, just everything educational.

Jason Church: What sort of background does someone need to come in and get a job with the SCA?

HOPE Crew volunteer Quentin and SCA interns Kim Samaniego and Cam Amabile. HOPE Crew volunteer Quentin and SCA interns Kim Samaniego and Cam Amabile.

Kim Samaniego: To get a job through the SCA, I did a lot of volunteer work coming into the system. It kind of depends on the person themselves where they would like to be at. Getting into SCA, you would have to apply online. Complex I want to say to try to get into the position, kind of like federal jobs. It’s a lot of getting into the backgrounds and getting into a lot of details of your experience before getting into the work position.

Jason Church: What kind of background would you recommend if someone was trying to get a job with SCA?

Kim Samaniego: With SCA, definitely doing volunteer work in your local area as far as historical preservation, cultural preservation, physical monument restoration, those kinds of works. And definitely working with the public. Anything as far as knowing how to communicate with your audience.

Jason Church: What was in your background that made you qualified for SCA?

Kim Samaniego: For the previous four years before I started working as an SCA employee, I volunteered as a living historian for the Jean Lafitte Park at Chalmette Battle Field. We had a recognizing our roots program which is a youth living history program. I got to work heavily, hands on with the interpretive rangers here. I’ve had years of interpretive training and also leadership.

Kim Samaniego during a living history event at Chalmette Battlefield. Kim Samaniego during a living history event at Chalmette Battlefield.

Jason Church: How old were you when you started doing that?

Kim Samaniego: When I started living history volunteering for the parks service, that was my sophomore year of high school. Now I graduated the past May of 2015 and now I’m interning.

Jason Church: Lauralee you’re also here at Chalmette as an SCA intern.

Lauralee Buchanan: Yeah.

Jason Church: Tell us a little about how you got involved in the SCA and what your job entails here at the Jean Lafitte.

Lauralee Buchanan: I found out about SCA after applying for other internships at the Park Service, specifically at Jean Lafitte in New Orleans. Some of the positions I applied for were already filled up and the SCA called me and asked me if I was interested in the centennial volunteer ambassador position. I had to ask what that was. Since there’s a brand new position being created, they kind of gave me an idea of what it would look like and that it’s supporting the centennial and engaging the next generation and working with volunteers primarily. I’ve done volunteer coordination work in the past at my university. I like being outside and I like working with people, so I said that I was game. I also liked that it wasn’t this very rigid structure work plan either because one thing that I love most of my position is that it is really flexible. I get a lot of opportunity for creativity and working on my own schedule and creating new programs.

Jason Church: What is it that you do now as an SCA intern?

Lauralee Buchanan leading a session on Islenos history education. Lauralee Buchanan leading a session on Islenos history education.

Lauralee Buchanan: I have the same position as Kim. We both work directly under the volunteer coordinator. We assist her with organizing volunteers for events at the park to help mainly with maintenance projects, but also to work in our visitor centers, youth programs, you name it. We try and get all the divisions of our park to engage with volunteers and to use them to boost the programming and to make the park more efficient in what we do.

We also get to work with partners in the community. We partner with a lot of different community organizations, youth centers, schools, military groups, senior centers, all kinds of stuff and try and bring our volunteers to help build on their efforts and help them with special projects. We can all learn together.

Jason Church: What was it in your background that gave you to get into the SCA?

Lauralee Buchanan: I did a lot of volunteering when I was in college. I feel like I’ve always volunteered and helped in a lot of different ways. My degree is in geography and environmental studies. Like I said, I love being outside and I helped lead youth groups. In college, I worked at a summer camp. I helped run a non-profit as the volunteer coordinate for my university. I worked with people. I worked as a tour guide before in the Virgin Islands before this job and I also worked for a while in a middle school. I think they were interested in me mainly because my passions are to help people and help the environment and that I already had some leadership skills under my belt and had been in those positions before and I enjoyed doing it.

Jason Church: Now, Kim was saying that in addition to her salary, she’s also getting a bonus at the end that can go toward tuition. You’ve already graduated college. Is there any sort of benefit like that through the SCA for you?

Lauralee Buchanan: Yeah, definitely. In our position, it’s an option. It’s not required to do the Americorps portion, but it is a great option to take advantage of. Just like Kim, we get a bonus. Since I’ve served one full year already, I get to put that bonus toward any education. I have some school loans left, so they’ve almost paid off the rest of my loans with one year. I only have $1,500 left in loans which is amazing for a lot of people my generation to not have that anymore. It’s nice that it’s going straight towards that, because if I’d had that chunk of money, I would not have spent it on my loans. I would have traveled or bought a new car or something. That’s really nice.

We’re in our second year now, so I think if I stay, I think two years is the max that you can do to get an Americorps bonus, but if I complete a second year of this position or any Americorps position, the I qualify for that same bonus the second time around. Then I won’t have any loans, so I can put it toward grad school or any sort of education.

Lauralee leads youth volunteers during a HOPE Crew project at Chalmette Battlefield. Lauralee leads youth volunteers during a HOPE Crew project at Chalmette Battlefield.

Jason Church:Do either of you have any sort of tips for our listeners? If you’re a high school kid coming out or a college kid graduating and you’re looking at jobs in either historic preservation, that side of conservation or the national history side of conservation, any tips that you would have for them, things they should do to make themselves more job ready or to be more approachable like SCA?

Lauralee Buchanan: I’d say just get involved. If there’s something that interests you even in the slightest bit that you think you’d like to do one day, don’t wait to find an opening online to apply for that position. Go directly to the source. Ask them how they got there. Find a mentor that’s been in your position before. Ask them to guide you and help you build your resume. Ask to volunteer and ask if they can develop an internship for you. Often times, places, all sorts of different places do need help even if it’s volunteer help. That’s a good way to get your foot in the door.

I’ve talked to a lot of people with the national park service that started off as volunteers in the visitor center just because they love the parks. Show that you’re interested, learn as much as you can, then hopefully a space will open up or be created for you.

As far as the SCA goes, I would also say that there’s a huge list of options. It’s continuously growing from what I can see on their website. Don’t limit yourself to applying for just one particular things that you want. Your resume will get put into a pool. Once you have to complete a resume through their website which can be a little daunting, but once you start the process, it doesn’t take that long. It’s worth doing, even if you don’t get the one job that you think you have your mind set on, or the internship, then your resume is still in that pool. It will continue to be available as they create new positions. They could call on you in a month, a week, or years down the road. That’s how I got into this position because I would have never known about it, but their resume was already in their pool so they called me and it worked out perfectly because I was already in New Orleans and I wanted to stay. Put your resume on there and then see. You never know. They might just call you.

Making stew during a volunteer living history event. Making stew during a volunteer living history event.

Kim Samaniego: Definitely piggy backing on what Lauralee just said, definitely volunteer in any kind of project that you can get out into, especially in your community. That networking basis as far as you know starting it as early as you can will help you out down the line. Don’t be afraid to try new things that you haven’t necessarily experienced or necessarily thought that you wouldn’t like. I’ve tried some things along the lines that I never thought I would do as far as restoration in a cemetery. I never thought I would come out to the Chalmette cemetery and clean the headstones and realign them, but it’s pretty fascinating once you start volunteering for things and broaden up your experience.

Lauralee Buchanan: On that, add it to your resume. Every time you do something, which I forget to do and then I go back and try to get it all in there. Any experience that you have could be applicable in some sense, even if it’s just under your volunteer experience.

Jason Church: Thank you Kim. Thank you Lauralee for talking to us today. Good luck in your SCA endeavors. Especially here at Jean Lafitte and Chalmette. Hopefully we’ll talk to you both in the future at other positions maybe.

Lauralee Buchanan: Yeah, thanks Jason.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.ncp.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Job Hunting Tips for Historic Preservation (Episode 74) ]]> Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D07FE1E2-C3FE-BF4E-5894A3C707D48039.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D0807495-CAA2-9869-F89CB1EA8BA8DD3D Job Hunting Tips for Historic Preservation (Episode 74) National Park Service NCPTT's Maggie O'Neill speaks with Chrissy Terry, the Assistant Director of Career and Alumni Success at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In the podcast, they talk about successful strategies for job hunting in the field of Historic Preservation. 883 no full 74

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Maggie O’Neill, as she speaks with Chrissy Terry, the Assistant Director of Career and Alumni Success at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In the podcast, they talk about successful strategies for job hunting in the field of Historic Preservation.

Chrissy and Mariah with Todd Heiser, SCAD alum and Design Principal at Gensler (second from left), taking photo near Poetter Hall at SCAD, April 2016 Chrissy and Mariah Goforth (Career Advisor at SCAD) with Todd Heiser, SCAD alum and Design Principal at Gensler (second from left), taking photo near Poetter Hall at SCAD, April 2016

Maggie O’Neill: Hi, and welcome to the preservation technology podcast. I’m Maggie O’Neill O’Neal, and today I’m at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia, with Chrissy Terry Terry. Chrissy Terry is the assistant director of Career and Alumni Success (CAS) here at SCAD. Chrissy Terry, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about what you do at SCAD?

Chrissy Terry: I’ve been here at SCAD for over 8 and a half years. I love what I do. In our office, we basically assist students and alumni with their career preparation. It can be anything from resume writing, cover letter writing, to, “I have 2 offers, I just need a little assistance with trying to figure out which position would be the best fit for me, and everything in between.” I’m one of maybe about 4 or 5 team leaders, is what we’re called, and I supervise a team of 3 including myself. We work with students and alumni whose majors fall within the school of building, arts, and liberal arts.

Maggie O’Neill: Finding a job in preservation can sometimes be difficult, especially when you’re just getting your foot in the door. In your opinion, what makes job hunting for historic preservation a little bit more different, or perhaps a little more difficult, than a normal job?

Chrissy Terry: Of course, as you know, at SCAD, there are some majors. I’ve just used graphic design, for example, where there are plethora of positions out there. People always looking for graphic designers to do different things. Preservation’s a lot different. When I’m working with students and alumni, I always tell them that one, you’re going to be working with really unique employers, potential employers, organizations. It’s not the typical where you may find this massive list, even though there is preserving that and there is some other great lists out there that you can use. Just the job search is different, so because some of these offices are small, I tend to say it’s a little bit more personable. That’s a benefit in that it’s a small town. It may mean that there may be less than 5 or it could be a office of 10 people that work in the organization. You just have to look at all the different options that are out there, in terms of looking for work, so beyond just looking for and applying for things online, you have the option of being able to physically go to offices. A lot of networking, and of course, it’s definitely key when you are looking for a job opportunities too. I tell students to use all the different avenues of job search that are available.

Maggie O’Neill: I know in my past experience, networking has been how I’ve gotten most of my jobs in preservation. Obviously that’s important, but how important is it for preservation?

Chrissy Terry: I would say it’s 110% important for all jobs. It’s really going to be important for individuals that are in careers like preservation, because it is such a unique market and there aren’t a lot of opportunities out there that you may know about, and these organizations are small, and they may not post things on the web. You really have to get to know professionals that are in the industry. I always tell students and alumni, “Reach out to other students and alumni.”

Layout of the Etiquette Dinner, a collaborative event planned by CAS, United Student Forum, and Student Involvement at SCAD, January 2016 Layout of the Etiquette Dinner, a collaborative event planned by CAS, United Student Forum, and Student Involvement at SCAD, January 2016

We just did a panel of some awesome alumnus from SCAD who have had several internships that were jobs as well. Really just looking on their LinkedIn profile, reaching out to them, seeing if they can schedule a informational interview. Just to sit down and chit-chat a little bit over coffee or tea. All of that is going to be important.

Networking, it’s not a 1-way street. It definitely has to be a 2-way street, so it’s building that relationship. It’s building your network. People don’t realize that their network is all around them. It could be your doctor who may know somebody that works in a preservation office, or a planning office for the city, or what have you. There’s always somebody that’s connected to somebody else that could be a benefit to expand on your network.

Maggie O’Neill: When you’re teaching students or young professionals how to network, I know that’s something that a lot of my peers have felt uncomfortable with. Getting their foot in the door, beginning to network. What are some of your suggestions when you start networking, and the most effective ways to network?

Chrissy Terry: Most of the time, when people hear the word network, they automatically are thinking about, “Oh, I have to talk to strangers, people I don’t know.” I always tell students to practice in class, in terms of speaking up and talking and getting comfortable with really just being able to communicate. It comes down to that. Whenever there are opportunities in the local area, or at SCAD, and they’re able to being practice some of their networking skills, I think that’s always a great place to start, because it’s a little less intimidating. As you would going to National Trust Conference. Even though I had enjoyed my time there, I thought everybody was really nice and personable.

Some people may be intimidated and scared by entering a large room and really just not knowing where to go. The best places to get the conversation started, though, are usually at the food table. Whenever you’re at an event, and there’s like hor d’oeuvres or some type of food, buffet, that’s the strategy that I’ve used. I still consider myself a young professional, but when I was getting going. Really just saying, “Hello, hi, where are you from? I’m from so-and-so.” The conversation will just start there. It’s really just about talking in general, using the environment that’s around and taking advantage of those situations.

Chrissy, Mariah, and Hsu Jen with Todd Heiser, SCAD alum and Design Principal at Gensler (second from left), taking photo near Poetter Hall at SCAD, April 2016 Chrissy, Mariah, and Hsu Jen with Todd Heiser, SCAD alum and Design Principal at Gensler (second from left), taking photo near Poetter Hall at SCAD, April 2016

Maggie O’Neill: At smaller events where you can practice where you can practice networking, that’s often where you can get your foot in the door in preservation, because they’re going out and socializing with people and getting involved in local communities or any organizations that you want to, are some of the easiest ways to make some connections or even potentially land some internships or some informational interviews.

Chrissy Terry: Exactly. Preservation, because of what preservation is advocating for, the community, that I’m sure that they would have events where could come, that will be less intimidating than going to a conference the first time and really not knowing who to talk to. Really just seeing what local events are going on, and really just putting yourself out there. Sometimes people, when they’re going to networking events, in their mind they have a number. “Oh, I need to interact with this many people,” but that may not be the case. Just meeting 1 new person, that’s an addition to your network. People just have to get those things out of their mind with, “Oh, I got to meet with so many people! I got to introduce myself to so many people! I got to talk, have all these long conversations with so many people.” That’s not the case at all.

Maggie O’Neill: Depends a little bit. Now, in theory, we’ve made some connections. We’ve seen some job postings. Now we want to apply for things. What are some of the things that you should have ready when you want to start to apply for things?

Chrissy Terry: Traditionally, the resume, cover letter, and having references on the side would probably suffice, but now, here at SCAD, a lot of our students have some type of design aesthetic. It’s always good to potentially have some work samples that you can show the employer. I think a lot of them that what really just set those applicants above the rest, because most people are thinking, “Well I don’t have anything to show,” but you do. You just have to. You’re out there in the field, you’re taking pictures of properties that you’re working on. You’re documenting. You are doing research, and a lot of these things, they aren’t just stuck in the head, so there are some type of physical components to it.

Really just putting it together, nice and neat, and really just being able to bring those and share those materials with the employer. Resume, cover letter, of course, which you would definitely make sure you differentiate your cover letter so it speaks to the position and the company that you’re applying for. You never want to send out a generic cover letter that doesn’t look good. Make adjustments to your resume. You may not have one resume. You may have multiple.

Maggie O’Neill: Personally I have about 4.

Chrissy Terry: You should have different versions of your resume. Every resume is not going to fit each position. You also want to have business cards because when you’re at those networking events, you’re not going to take resumes and cover letters to a networking event. I’ve saw those things before, but it doesn’t look good. You really want to be exchanging your business cards, and then like I said, portfolio, tangible, and digital portfolio. You want to have a variety of different ways. I’ve saw some preservation students, and architectural history students who have had blogs and they’re documenting things. Think outside of the box. Really think about the times and where the job search, where that whole area is going now.

Maggie O’Neill: In your line of work you must come across a lot of job postings for preservation, or you see a lot of these things. Is there anything you come across on job postings frequently that you think is a good skill for students to have?

Chrissy Terry: I’ve started seeing various software programs. Whether it’s Photoshop, End Design, Illustrator, some of the other more architectural type of programs, I’m starting to see those. Of course, in addition, the research and the key preservation related skills on there as well. Really just being able to have strong communication skills is going to be key as well. I’m trying to think if there are, besides those, I’m really seeing more software. Software.

CAS staff and School of Building Arts professors at the Fall 2015 School of Building Arts Internship Night event, October 2015 CAS staff and School of Building Arts professors at the Fall 2015 School of Building Arts Internship Night event, October 2015

Maggie O’Neill: Do you have any final words of advice for students who are looking for jobs? For students or young professionals who are looking for jobs, or looking to enter the field of historic preservation?

Chrissy Terry: I do. I definitely would say, stay on top of what’s going on in the industry. There are a lot of free resources and what I mean by that is, and I keep going back to LinkedIn because of this really vital component to job search today. In terms of staying abreast of what’s going on in the industry, and making connections, joining those groups, you never know who you may connect with through that platform. There are several different ways that you can connect with people without having to send a personal message, per se, but it’s always good to send a personal message, but it’s certain parts of LinkedIn that you can send a request without having to feel uncomfortable about, “Oh, I don’t know this person really, but I’m stating that.”

Also, be open minded. Really be open minded and be patient, because while you may have peers that landed opportunities right away, immediately, that may not be the case. I’ve been working with a SCAD alumna, she graduated in 2014, and when she first graduated, she may have applied to a few, a handful of positions, and so she had a job but it wasn’t in preservation. She reached out to me, probably some months ago, and we’ve been connecting and we revised her resume. Lately, she’s been getting a lot of interviews from that just by the materials. Really make sure that your materials are a great representation of you, because we made some really great changes to her resume, and she’s been having huge success since then. Stay connected with your professors, as well, and definitely let them know if you’re interested. People don’t know that you are interested in a position that you see if you don’t let them know. Stay connected.

Chrissy and Mariah facilitated a workshop on portfolio development at the AIAS Convention in Savannah, organized by the SCAD student chapter, South Quad, April 2016 Chrissy and Mariah facilitated a workshop on portfolio development at the AIAS Convention in Savannah, organized by the SCAD student chapter, South Quad, April 2016

Maggie O’Neill: Thank you so much for talking with us, Chrissy Terry, and I’m sure the advice that you’ve handed out today will be so helpful to so many people.

Chrissy Terry: Thank you so much, Maggie O’Neill. I enjoyed it.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time goodbye everybody.

]]> Museum Studies at Midland State University in Zimbabwe (Episode 73)

]]> Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D0A3ACF8-D75E-3CDA-C0F69D9BAAA4091D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D0A4AF8D-EA9E-919D-97C086D540BE23CE Museum Studies at Midland State University in Zimbabwe (Episode 73) National Park Service Students Rebuild Baboon Damaged Walls Davison Chiwara, lecturer at Midland State University in Zimbabwe, Africa. 779 no full 73

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Davison during the AIC Angel's Project At the Miami Dade History Museum. Davison during the AIC Angel’s Project At the Miami Dade History Museum.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Davison Chiwara, lecturer at Midland State University in Zimbabwe, Africa.

Davison Chiwara: I work in the department of Archeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies. I mostly specialize on collections management, looking at conservation as a general upkeep of collections in heritage institutions.

The whole group from level one, one up to the fourth level, approximately I can say we have around two hundred students. We have four main disciplines that they’re studying, which are all related, they’re interrelated that is archaeology, cultural heritage management, museum studies, as well as archives and records management.

Jason Church: Now when students leave your university where do they go to work?

Davison Chiwara: Mostly they’re employed in heritage institutions like museums, especially in museums this is the major market that employ our students. They’re also employed in galleries, archival institution, libraries, and even in national parks where there is heritage which is found in most national parks.

Picture6Jason Church: Now Davison, you and I met at the Annual AIC Conference-

Davison Chiwara: Yes.

Jason Church: At that conference you were presenting on a project where you and your students were saving dry-stone stacked walls, can you tell us a little bit about that project?

Davison Chiwara: Okay, this project was originally a brain child of the Midland State University, working in collaboration with the Zimbabwe Military Museum which is a museum which falls under the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe.

We came together to restore this monument which was deteriorating. We sort funding from the United States Embassy here in Zimbabwe, and fortunately they came on board and they supported us by funding the restoration exercise, so that’s how we got to work together that is the National Museum and Monuments of Zimbabwe, The Department of Archeology, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Midland State University as well as United States Embassy.

That whole project involved lecturers, students, and museum staff working together. Initially, what we did is we documented the extent of deterioration of the walls and the site, by looking at previous photographs that were taken as well as maps and sketch diagrams. We managed to establish the extent of dilapidation or deterioration of the walls by looking at the collapsed rabbles against what was initially documented on the photographs and sketch maps.

After this documentation exercise then we started the restoration project by restoring the walls following what was captured on the photographs as well as on the maps. These walls were built in the thirteenth century AD. They mostly face problems of wall collapse, which emanates from environmental factors as well as human induced problems.

They have been restored from the years 1937, that is what we got from archival research, whereby the collapsed walls had been restored by previous restorers who were in charge of the monuments then. Then from there on wards there have been ongoing restorations which have been done, but in some cases we have discovered that some of the restorations which were being done were not following the, were not respecting the principles of originality and authenticity of material.

Basically this is what was done before in terms of restoration of the monument. We’re actually taking over from what has been done before.Picture3

Jason Church: When you mentioned they did not keep with the original intent of the monument, so what was done to them?

Davison Chiwara: Basically the dry-stone walls structures or the stone walled monuments, they are built using stone without any mortar which is, without any binding mortar between the stone blocks, so that’s why they’re called the dry stone structures.

What was done when restorations were made in 1937, is that they restorers then they introduced cement which is not part and parcel of the original material that were used in the construction of the structures. This addition of cement was against the principles of originality and authenticity.

Jason Church: What sort of factors led to the deterioration of the walls, just age or what other factors?

Davison Chiwara: Yes, yes, we cannot rule out aging as a contributing factor. Then there’s also the issues of biological factors. For instance, termites building mounds on the walls, and those mounds were destabilizing the walls.

We are also talking about any animal, if you still remember my presentation in Miami whereby we’ve got baboons, monkeys causing toppling on some of the walls. As well as the issue of, we do experience tremors, but occasionally maybe once in five or ten years. This shaking of the ground also contributes to destabilization of the walls.

Jason Church: What were the walls originally constructed for?

Picture5Davison Chiwara: These walls, the homesteads of the elite, the wealth during the thirteenth century AD. They were enclosures from the houses of the elite who were the ruling class during that period. In most cases, some people argue that they were used as defense, they provided security to the people who lived in these homesteads.

We don’t have the original houses, but there are some floors which are found within the walls. Floors, there were also some poles which we discovered, which attest to the point that they were some houses which were build within these wall enclosures.

There are also some artifacts which were found like pottery, beads, and some other artifacts, which were found which show that these walls were actually places of residence from especially the wealth and the ruling class the thirteenth century AD.

Jason Church: Davison, how did you get interested in conservation and preservation?

Davison Chiwara: I think I just got interested when I was a student. We learned about conservation theory, looking at collections management that is particularly looking at environmental control, looking at security to collections. Then after learning that I went for my work related learning period that’s when my interest really developed.

Because during that period I discovered that the issues of conservation were not actually given due consideration in our museum particularly the National Museum of Transport and Antiquities where I went. I discovered that this issue of conservation was given to students who were on work related learning.

In the actual organogram of the organization that is the museum there was no post for a conservator. It was an after thought, I mean the issue of conservation, was just an after thought there was no seriousness in terms of conservation of collections and in terms of the budget that is allocated to the museums very little is given towards the conservation of collections.

Then I just got concerned and inspired about the situation which is currently prevailing in most of the museums in Zimbabwe that’s how I got interested in conservation because in most cases an after thought in our museums and I think something is to be done to ensure that we conserve the collections in our museum.

Currently the situation that is prevailing is not good at all. Our collections are in a sorry stage in most of the museums that I have toured so far.Picture1

Jason Church: Do you currently have any former students in those museums?

Davison Chiwara: Yes, yes, we do. We have employed some of our former students. We have some colleagues whom I learned with at my university we have been employed by the museum. We’re trying to create networks on conserving collections in museums and galleries with these students who have been employed by these heritage institutions.

Jason Church: What project do you have coming up for your students now that you’ve done the work on the walls what’s next?

Davison Chiwara: Currently I’ve been in touch with one of our former students who is working at the National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe and we would like to embark on a project to conserve photographic documents which found at the gallery. I think this is a project which is yet to commence but it’s in the pipeline that’s the project that I’m thinking about.

In future, if resources permit, I’m sure we’d like to start some conservation projects from collections that are undergoing deterioration particularly here in Gweru at the Zimbabwe Military Museum. I think it’s a project worth doing, because if nothing is done to these collections in the near future we may lose them.

Jason Church: Sounds like you have a very important task ahead of you and your students?

Davison Chiwara: Yes, yes, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Its just that we have problems in harnessing the required resources, harnessing the required conservation technologies which we can use to conserve these collections. In most cases, I think what we’re imparting to our students is theory but we’re linking with the resources that are needed to do hence on conservation work on collections.

Jason Church: We wish you all the luck for you and your students, we hope to hear more from you in the future about about different projects that you’re doing.

Davison Chiwara: Yes, Jason, thank you very much.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time goodbye everybody.

]]> The Diverse Stories at the Coastal Heritage Society (Episode 72) ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D12BB36B-ED66-4085-0F11DCA4B809C77A.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D12D49BA-AE96-BCA6-9002677C16801BE5 The Diverse Stories at the Coastal Heritage Society (Episode 72) National Park Service Maggie O'Neill speaks with Emily Beck, the manager of interpretation for the Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, Georgia, as they talk about how to interpret a history spanning three centuries across five different historical sites. 845 no full 72

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Georgia State Railroad Musuem Roundhouse Photo by Rich Burkhart Georgia State Railroad Museum Roundhouse Photo by Rich Burkhart

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons, with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. In this podcast, we hear NCPTT’s Maggie O’Neill as she speaks with Emily Beck, the manager of interpretation for the Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, Georgia, as they talk about how to interpret a history spanning three centuries across five different historical sites.

Maggie O’Neill: Hey everyone – welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I’m Maggie O’Neill, and I’m sitting down with Emily Beck, who is the Manager of Interpretation at the Coastal Heritage Society in Savannah, Georgia. Thanks so much for sitting down with me today, Emily.

Emily Beck: You’re welcome – I’m so excited to be here.

Maggie O’Neill: Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself?

Emily Beck: Well, um, I think I kind of have museums in the blood. Both of my parents were in the National Park Service, so I was always interested in history. When I came back here, to Savannah, to do graduate studies in history, I got this job. It started as a part time job while I was in graduate school, and then it turned into something much more permanent (laughs). I’m very happy for that.

The Coastal Heritage Society is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that was founded in 1975. We operate five museums in the Savannah area, including the Savannah History Museum, Savannah Children’s Museum, Georgia State Railroad Museum, Old Fort Jackson, and, most recently, Pin Point Heritage Museum, which is out on the south side of Savannah.

Maggie O’Neill: Emily and I are currently at the Georgia State Railroad Museum, in the Columbus Executive Car right now, recording this podcast. Coastal Heritage Society, specifically Tri-Centennial Park, which is where we are now, has a really interesting history. The site itself spans three centuries, so I wanted to talk to you today a little bit about the cultural landscape of the site and how you guys interpret that history at once.

Emily Beck: It can be difficult and challenging at times, but I think we are really fortunate at this site to have a lot of physical resources – a lot of structures from different time periods – that can help us get across to visitors that we have different time periods of history here. The land that the Railroad Museum is now on was a Revolutionary War battlefield in 1779, and the railroad began construction on their repair facility here around 1851 and completed it around 1855. We have half of a roundhouse left, a lot of the shops buildings in the back, and a working turn table, so we are lucky in that we have a lot of the resources to be able to illustrate to the visitors a lot of the different parts of the history of the site.

The History Museum – we very recently started having interpretation of the battlefield. We have costumed interpreters do a presentation about the battle of Savannah, and we also have a replica redoubt that his built out by the Savannah History Museum. That also helps us to illustrate that it was a battlefield, because it can be very hard for people to picture that this space is a battlefield, or anything other than a railroad facility.

Coastal Museum Association Awards - Coastal Heritage Society received awards for Pinpoint Heritage Museum and Savannah History Museum "Loyalists and Liberty). Coastal Museum Association Awards – Coastal Heritage Society received awards for Pinpoint Heritage Museum and Savannah History Museum “Loyalists and Liberty). CHS Staff Ray Christie, Emily Beck, and Aaron Bradford (3 center) are pictured.

Maggie O’Neill: Do you see any problems with your audience connecting all of this history at once? And how do you solve that if you do?

Emily Beck: Sometimes, yes. Sometimes it is very hard to get people to understand that this was a battlefield because the section that we have sort of sectioned off from the battle field is a very small portion of it. So, we really have to emphasize – especially when we’re on the train ride – to say that this whole area was a battlefield and was not always a railroad facility. And, I think for us, it really helps that our History Museum interpreters are in costumed. That gives them sort of a visual clue that it’s an 18th century battle.

And um, as far as the Railroad Museum, we even have two different time periods for railroad interpretation. We have sort of steam day, in the early days of railroading in the 19th century and early 20th century, and we also have diesel engines that we use here, and that’s a little bit later as well. So even that, we try to indicate that using, not costuming but uniforms for our railroad operations guys. They can wear overalls and a shirt for steam days, and then they wear something that is much more mid-century for the diesel interpretation that we do.

Maggie O’Neill: And you guys were talking about the redoubt – Have you guys done any archaeological work to place where the redoubt is?

Emily Beck: There were several extensive archaeological surveys done before the redoubt was reconstructed and we actually had um, a couple of archaeologists on staff. Dan and Rita Elliot; they did a lot of work here to determine where everything was positioned. They found quite a few artifacts that we now have on exhibit in the History Museum. This was good for us because we can incorporate that into interpretation, and people are usually pretty interested in archaeological finds on site.

Maggie O’Neill: What are some of the challenges you face when interpreting all of this history at once?

Emily Beck: Um, one challenge we have specifically at the railroad museum is that we have a period of time – a significant period of time, after the Civil War and before the site was shut down, that the site was actually segregated. And so, we talk to visitors about this. Also, I mentioned we have a lot of physical resources – this is another thing that we actually have, an um, what was historically termed “the Colored Workman’s Washroom – we have on site. We have plans to go in and put an exhibit in there, about the African American experience with railroads. This is something that not a lot of other railroad museums actually talk about. Sometimes it can be a little bit awkward talking to visitors about that, but most visitors really show a really strong interest in that sort of social history of the site, here at the railroad museum.

Maggie O’Neill: How are you guys branching out through interpretation?

Emily Beck: Um, we, for a long time, I think we had not a very diverse audience that were coming to see the artifacts and the site of the railroad museum. And a lot of the history we have here, that used to be in the history museum, a lot of it was military themed – so it was a very – we were kind of afraid that we were missing out on getting a lot of families, perhaps women, to come and visit us. And so, we started to expand our interpretation to include um, stories that may not have been heard in the past. A lot of our revolutionary war interpretation deals with the battlefield, but we have just recently – the past couple months – we have been working on a program that deals with perspectives of African Americans and women who were here in the city during the siege of Savannah and leading up to the battle that happened.

The railroad museum – we make an effort to talk about social history, in terms of segregation on the site. We also talk about women who worked for railroads – especially with school groups. I think a lot of kids are kind of interested in that as well. When they can see someone who was like them worked on the site, it makes it more real to them, I think.

And, we also have a lot of girl scouts groups that come out here. William Washington Gordon was Juliette [Gordon Lowe]’s grandfather and he was one of the founding fathers of The Central of Georgia Railway, who owned this repair facility. So we have them come out a lot, quite a bit, and we’re actually getting into our “Juliette Family Tree Season” where we’re going to have kids come out here – lots and lots of scout troops – and we’ll take them through the History Museum and the Railroad Museum and talk about the Battle of Savannah and different elements of the history here.

Girl Scouts on the site tour by train during the Juliette's Family Tree program. Girl Scouts on the site tour by train during the Juliette’s Family Tree program.

Maggie O’Neill: So you guys have been – there has been interpretation on the Railroad Museum since 1990 – how did that progression go?

Emily Beck: Well in the early days of the Railroad Museum being open there was interpretation here, but it was mostly print interpretation. You might get a little guide and there were signs on site, but we really, really have expanded in the last maybe, um five or seven years. We started to get more of an emphasis on actual interpreters out in the field, talking to visitors about the site. I think that has really helped us, in terms of the popularity of our sites and sort of the reaction that people have about what is here. I think it is important to have a human connection with people who are speaking to you and who can converse with you and go back and forth and talk about different elements of the history of all the sites that we have.

Maggie O’Neill: So the history – it’s a very large site, especially this and Old Fort Jackson is a very large site, and so is Pinpoint [Heritage Museum]. How do you maintain them?

Emily Beck: Um, it’s very difficult. Sometimes, it depends. We have um different ownership here at Coastal Heritage Society. So some of this land is city land, some of it is not city land – some of it is privately owned. So sometimes it’s difficult to determine what maintenance facility or maintenance process you might need. The Fort – Fort Jackson – a lot of the interpretive staff actually does a lot of the maintenance out there. Like weed killing, cutting the grass, going out and cleaning the site, so it just depends. Here, at Tricentennial Park, because of the volume of visitors that we have, we actually have a maintenance staff our here. And our railroad operations – a lot of them double as maintenance or preservation staff. That’s another thing I think, for Coastal Heritage Society, everybody here has to have quite a few different jobs in order to make everything run smoothly.

Maggie O’Neill: You just mentioned preservation – how did you guys go about preserving all of sites?

Emily Beck: Well, in terms of preserving this site here, we did have … The site itself, most of the buildings were here. A lot of the people, in terms of preservation, will ask us “When are you going to close in the round house?” or “When are you going to complete the round house?” And this is a ruin – this site that we have here at the Georgia State Railroad Museum, and we will probably leave it as a ruin. In the future, there may be a possibility that we would enclose it, but I think that sort of helps us to give people a more authentic feels for the site by leaving it the way that it is. We preserve the site, we make sure it doesn’t deteriorate any further, but we really haven’t done a lot of reconstruction of all of the buildings, necessarily.

Ruins of Machine Shop at the Georgia State Railroad Museum (Photo by Rich Burkhart) Ruins of Machine Shop at the Georgia State Railroad Museum (Photo by Rich Burkhart)

Maggie O’Neill: So you’ve done all of this preservation on the site – how do you interpret that to visitors? Preservation can be kind of a difficult concept for people to grasp sometimes if you’re not familiar with it.

Emily Beck: That’s very true and we have a lot of staff members who are preservationists or who have some sort of background in um, historic preservation. We actually do hard hat tours of the site, where we have classes come. They do tours through the coach and the paint shops, some of our historic buildings. We talk about preservation and one very popular tour that we had was … We had a [train] car here from another museum that we were restoring. One of our staff members took people through it to talk about the changes that had taken place within the car. I think that there’s really a lot of interest in preservation as well, because people want to know what this looked like when you first got it and what does it look like right now and how did you come about doing that.

Maggie O’Neill: So you guys have also done restoration of not just buildings, but also of trains.

Emily Beck: Yes! Yes, we also restore railroad cars and locomotives. In fact, one of our biggest projects was the restoration of the #30, which is a 1913 coal powered steam locomotive that we actually use. That’s wonderfully – that’s a wonderful resource for us to have, because to talk about a steam locomotive is very different from actually seeing one moving and actually operating in front of your face.

Maggie O’Neill: One of the main draws of Savannah is the historical tourism – how do you think that affects your site, with the fact that you guys operate so many different museums in the area?

Emily Beck: Well, I think affects our um, tours that we have because we have to compete with a lot of other sites in order to bring people to our sites. We have a little bit of an advantage, especially at Tercentennial Park, because of the Revolutionary War element. I think many people who come to Savannah are looking for a Civil War sort of experience, or they’re kind of thinking of it as a Victorian city. But then they see, when they come here, that there’s a lot of 18th century history here as well. And, of course, that affects other sort of more practical things like how long your tours are or how many tours you offer in a day, because like we said, we’re competing with, you know, the whole of Savannah is trying to get people to come here and be able to work the tours that we have into their schedules when they come here.

Maggie O’Neill: So what is your interpretation like on site? How many tours do you guys have, what do you do?

Emily Beck: Well, if definitely depends on which site. The railroad museum here is probably our most structured, in terms of interpretation, where we have back to back tours from 10:30 in the morning until 4 o’clock. We have a little bit of break in the middle of the day for lunch, but especially if we have a lot of visitors, we may sort of forge the break and have extra people here to do extra tours. So, we do walking tours, of different sites, and we also do site tours with our train. We don’t go very far – we have a locomotive and one passenger car and we go a short distance but we go into some other buildings on the site, which is a new development for us and this is kind of exciting for visitors.

A ride on a handcar is one of the activities offered at the Georgia State Railroad Museum (Photo by Rich Burkhart) A ride on a handcar is one of the activities offered at the Georgia State Railroad Museum (Photo by Rich Burkhart)

Maggie O’Neill: Do you guys do any special events?

Emily Beck: Um, We do special events on site – we have a Santa train, and that’s probably our most popular event out of all of our sites. That’s the most popular thing that we do, which is an all-day affair. It’s kind of like a Christmas festival that we have here. And then we have Santa here and we have the steam locomotive going, so that’s very popular. And one thing that we do as an organization, that we’ve done for many, many years, is this Siege of Savannah memorial march. Since most of Savannah – I think many people here are not really aware of Savannah’s Revolutionary War history; we have a march that commemorates the battle of 1779. October 9, 1779, when the French and the Americans and their allies were attempting to take Savannah back from the British. And it’s a sad story for the Americans and French – they lose the battle – a lot of causalities for that battle. It’s nice to sort of remember them. We take the same route – or approximately the same route – as they did. We march up Louisville Road and we have people lay wreaths. We’ve had some representatives from the Haitian government come, since the Haitians were a big part of the story as well.

Maggie O’Neill: Well thank you so much for sitting down with me today, Emily.

Emily Beck: Thank you! I’m so excited to always talk about the Coastal Heritage Society and what we do here in Savannah.

Maggie O’Neill: You guys can find more information about the Coastal Heritage Society at chsgeorgia.org.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our Podcast show nights at www.ncptt.nps.gov until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Disaster Planning with Susan Duhl (Episode 71) ]]> Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D4BE2C05-C514-0CF8-593AA6C983BC845F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D4BF1E6B-DFFE-C3AB-97FB5666027113FC Disaster Planning with Susan Duhl (Episode 71) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Susan Duhl, an art conservator and collections management consultant. In this podcast, Susan talks about disaster response and preparedness. 882 no full 71

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Susan Duhl moving a water damaged painting during recovery work after Hurricane Sandy.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services national center for preservation technology and training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Susan Duhl, an art conservator and collections management consultant. In this podcast, Susan talks about disaster response and preparedness.

Jason Church: Susan, we’re here today to talk about disaster response. I know you do an immense amount of work with disaster response up and down the East coast. Tell us a little bit about, why is it important for anyone, an institution, a home owner, a museum, a library, to have something in place for disaster preparedness?

Susan Duhl: I am a conservator in private practice and I am a collections consultant, so my job is split into two. I still do studio work on paper based material, but most of my time is spent consulting with small to mid sized institutions, private and corporate clients on collections maintenance and disaster prevention.

I think I’ve found over the years the most important thing is that simple preparedness steps will save you from major disaster. Having supplies on hand, reviewing and assessing your current conditions whether it’s the condition of your building, your geography or your weather are very simple things to help you predict what might come your way and you can supply yourself including training, so that you know how to respond.

Jason Church: Give us an example, what kind of training would an institution need?

Susan Duhl: I think there’s a lot of excellent training opportunities available. Any training is better than no training at all and there are a number of resources both online and classes that you can take. Basic classes are taught through Red Cross and FEMA and local, regional, and state agencies and more specific classes on cultural collection recovery are taught through connecting to collections care, which is part of heritage preservation and the American Institute for Conservation.

Professional disaster responders are trained often on their own now. I think there’s 175 AIC CERT responders that were trained though the Institute of Museum and Library Service and most of those people have gone on to continue training the community.

Jason Church: You mentioned AIC CERT,[author’s note: the name was recently changed to National Heritage Responders (NHR)] tell us a little bit about that? What is that?

Susan Duhl: Sure. The American Institute for Conservation has a group called the collections emergency response team and it’s a group of trained conservators and museum colleagues, registrars, curators and art handlers who went through intensive training programs specifically to address disaster salvage and recovery for cultural institutions. It’s an all volunteer service, they respond 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to phone requests for information and support and in the case of disaster, the responders will go to the site and help with the physical recovery of collections.

Jason Church: You yourself, you’ve responded to quite a few of those, correct?

Exterior of Ringwood Manor. Exterior of Ringwood Manor.

Susan Duhl: Yes, I am a cert responder now. My first response was Hurricane Katrina, I was there a week after Katrina struck. I was along the Mississippi coast and the thing that became very clear was that we didn’t have any training. Since that time, I have trained myself, then I was fortunate to be part of the cert training and for AIC CERT, I’ve gone out on several volunteer responses for hurricanes and furnace puff backs, which are mechanical failures with furnaces. In my private practice, I also do fires and floods of all sizes. Could be as small as a pipe leak or again as large as a weather event.

Jason Church: Now, of course, we all know about Hurricane Katrina, and Rita, and Sandy and mentally we think about those as being the epicenter for disaster response. These huge natural disasters, but that’s not always the case and you mentioned the furnace puff back? Tell us about that.

Susan Duhl: Sure, well first let me say, I probably respond to small disasters more often of course than large weather events. Home mechanical failure is very common and museums and libraries often have mechanical failure. Something as simple as small leaking pipe or a full mechanical failure like a furnace breakdown are very common. I worked on two furnace puff backs and briefly the fuel is not fully combusted in the furnace and creates a sooty deposit which is blasted through air handling systems leaving a deposit of soot throughout the building.

Jason Church: You had a particular case where you worked on one of those recently, correct?

Susan Duhl: Right, well funny, I worked on two within the same year, both responding initially as an AIC CERT responder, but the big project I worked on was Ringwood Manor in Ringwood, New Jersey, and that is a state owned property. It’s a very interesting building made from 4 or perhaps 5 buildings that were built on consecutively and it had 4 furnaces. One of the furnaces malfunctioned and blew soot through 54 rooms.

Jason Church: Wow, what sort of collections were in those 54 rooms?

Ringwood Manor Music Room Ringwood Manor Music Room

Susan Duhl: Ringwood Manor is an especially interesting collection of decorative objects. The home was owned by the Cooper Hewitt family, which are famous for the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York City. This was their summer home and it was filled with art and antiques and decorative arts from around the world two of the daughters or sister collected over the years. There was just about everything you would find in a home including firearms, taxidermy, furnishings, textiles, clothing and wallpaper.

Jason Church: If you have a large institution like the one you are speaking of and you have such an immense collection, you’ve got ceramics and you’ve got taxidermy, it’s going to require different training to know how to deal with each of those different materials.

Susan Duhl: Right, that’s probably true, however, disaster prevention is pretty systematic and I think this institution was very successful in their response because they were prepared in advanced. Not necessarily for a furnace puff back, but they were sensitized to disaster response and knew the first basic steps to take to facilitate recovery.

Jason Church: So, because they had prior training in sort of prepared for the disaster, things went better than they could have?

Susan Duhl: I think so. It was still a very large project, but the curator was very diligent and aware. She made initial phone calls to get the support she needed from her state of New Jersey, and from the conservators, and her insurance adjuster, which insurance companies are a big part of disaster response. She was able to start the project very rapidly and called in the right expertise, which I think is imperative and AIC CERT generously donated my time and another colleague and we were able to help them identify priority steps to take. Within a few months, we wrote and request for quote for the state and it went out to bid and work started within a year.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about what it takes to remove soot from this collection?

Ringwood Manor Breakfast Room Iron Bust. Ringwood Manor Breakfast Room Iron Bust.

Susan Duhl: First, I think it starts with really good strategic planning. Soot is a very invasive and damaging material. It’s very bad, regardless of whether it’s a furnace puff back or a fire, the soot will leave a greasy residue that can cause long term permanent damage and it’s very important to systematically clean a house where you’re not causing additional damage. In every salvage operation, it’s possible that you can cause more damage by not being thoughtful. In fire recovery, figuring out the pattern that you clean the house is very important. You don’t want to track soot though the house and you don’t want to push soot into surfaces as you walk on them or touch them. They started work from the top down cleaning room by room from the ceiling down. Once things were cleaned, they were boxed and temporarily moved into storage area. Rooms were sealed and they continued down until they finally finished going out the front door. This project was very interesting. Initially, the insurance adjuster had thought individual items would be sent to specialist conservators, instead we were able to locate a number of conservators who had groups of conservators working together and they were called in with their various specialties and did all the work in situ. Each room was work on by that specialist group together, so that they could clean room by room.

Jason Church: I understand how you take out and clean from the top down, what do you have to do to get the H VAC system and the house controls, the environmental controls back during a disaster like this?

Susan Duhl: That’s a very big question and unfortunately this disaster happened in January and they felt it was a greater risk to turn the furnaces back on right away, so of course they had secondary problems without high heat. The curator and the site manager in charge of the property live on the same campus, so they were able to monitor the building. That was probably the longest delay was getting in mechanical engineers who could handle the problem and repair the existing furnace and get the four furnaces up and running. They explored every option including replacement of the furnaces, but the cost was prohibitive, so during that time, they maintained minimum standards of environmental control, I think monitored the house as best as they could to make sure additional damage didn’t occur. Unfortunately, in one room, condensation occurred and paint peeled. Thankfully, it wasn’t historic paint and no further damage occurred to the contents of the building, just the wall paint.

Jason Church: That story at Ringwood Manor ended up being a positive one and the house was able to reopen. How long did it take from start to finish?

Ringwood Manor South Ryerson Parlor. Ringwood Manor South Ryerson Parlor.

Susan Duhl: The project was slightly over a year and I would say this was a very successful project. It would provide an opportunity, I think the curator and the state representatives used this as an opportunity to review policies and procedures. They used the conservators and the staff to do a really good job cleaning and replacing items. The curator was very diligent in identifying unidentified objects and completing her inventory and the house just looks beautiful.

Jason Church: Is there anything else you’d like to add about that particular project or about things they could have done better that being prepared would help with? Anything like that?

Susan Duhl: I would say, in this project, as in all of my salvage projects, teamwork is the most important thing. It’s impossible for one person to know everything and everybody brings their expertise to the table. It’s important that it’s a team effort. In this case, the emergency wasn’t radical, so we had some time to think things through. The other thing I would say about any disaster is, every disaster is different and you can have a lot of training, but you may not be prepared for the specific details, which might be the type of disaster or magnitude of the disaster and it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll never have quite the right supplies on hand.

Jason Church: Susan, thanks for talking with us today and I’m glad to hear about the positive turn around when you’re talking about Ringwood Manor and we all don’t want to prepare for disasters and we don’t want to think that they’re going to happen to our institution and you mentioned earlier that training is a really important thing, both for the individual and the institution as a whole. Can you give us any examples of places we should look?

Susan Duhl: There’s a lot of excellent resources available, especially for cultural communities. For basic training, I would start by looking at the Red Cross site and FEMA online, which has classes that are free, as well as credited course work on disaster response. There’s also statewide EMA, and an EMA is Emergency Management Agency, so Pennsylvania is PEMA, Massachusetts is MEMA. They have education programs. There’s also regional organizations like the Alliance for Response. You can look online for that Alliance for Response in your community. There’s other resources for material that you can read online, most major institutions like the National Archives, Library of Congress and the Getty Institute have excellent online resources. Regional centers like the North East Document Conservation Center have a template disaster assessment and recovery plan, it’s called the D Plan as in disaster plan. You can look at that online for free. Heritage preservation has excellent materials and that’s been recently moved to the American Institute for Conservation website and finally, there’s excellent webinars on Connecting to Collections Care, which is also part of AIC. Those are video webinars and if you look back on them, there are webinars on prevention, preparedness, salvage and recovery. Last, I guess I would suggest that people look at the American Institute for Conservation collections emergency response team page. There’s more resources listed there as well.

Susan Duhl sorting damaged objects from a trunk. Susan Duhl sorting damaged objects from a trunk.

Jason Church: That’s a lot of places. You can complain that we couldn’t find good resources online. That’s quite a list of institutions to go and look at. Thank you very much Susan for talking to us today and I’m sure our listeners would be interested in catching up with you in the future and seeing what other projects you’re working on.

Susan Duhl: Thank you, Jason.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our Podcast show nights at www.ncptt.nps.gov until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Going Exploring with Museum Hack (Episode 70) ]]> Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D4F8DE88-94E4-2085-7A291398AAC1FC54.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D50C6E35-CD20-1388-9A8DC5ECAEC84B5A Going Exploring with Museum Hack (Episode 70) National Park Service Ethan Angelica and Diana Montano talk about how Museum Hack is changing the way we view museums. 1297 no full 70

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Parks Service’s National Center for Preservation technology and training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Ethan Angelica, tour guide and VIP Partnerships Coordinator, and Diana Montano, Tour Operations and Project Coordinator. Both are with the New York-based Museum Hack. In this podcast, the pair are going to talk about how Museum Hack is changing the way we view museums.

Jason Church: We are here talking about the company you’re both with, Museum Hack. Ethan, you’re a tourguide and also in charge of VIP partnerships?

Ethan Angelica: That’s correct. Yep I work directly with museums who want our help reimagining adult museum experience.

Jason Church: And Diana you’re with tour operations and also a project coordinator, is that correct?

Diana Montano Project Coordinator with Museum Hack. Diana Montano Project Coordinator with Museum Hack.

Diana Montano: That’s right, I just make sure the tours are running smoothly and behind the scenes with a lot of the projects I just make sure that all of the things are going well and all of the scheduling stuff is happening.

Jason Church: Tell our listeners a little bit about Museum Hack. Our listeners are used to sort of a whole range of technology and high-end things but you guys are doing something very different. Not necessarily technology, but you’re doing something very different with the museum experience. Tell us about what that is and what Museum Hack is.

Ethan Angelica: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. With a name like Hack a lot of people think that we’re tech folks and I get calls from app developers every single day, but actually we are far more low-tech than that. Museum Hack is trying to reimagine what adult museum experience looks like sort of on the ground level. It was founded by a man named Nick Gray, who is our fearless leader, who was not a museum regular himself, was not really going to cultural institutions or had a strong relationship with them. He came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is sort of our first location, on a romantic date and fell in love with the place and wanted to start creating tours specifically for his friend group, for people who are between the ages of 21 and 35, who may not have a relationship with these cultural institutions. Maybe they’re something that they go to visit when their parents are in town, but they’re not regularly, actively a part of it.

He created all of these tours. He created a tour on his own, and his friends started signing up and then their friends told their friends and it became this sort of underground thing to do in New York City. A blog wrote about him and over 1,000 people signed up for the tour, at which point he realized maybe this is a real thing.

So, that was when the first group of guides were brought on, that’s when I joined the company, and since then we’ve been trying to create non-traditional, reverently irreverent museum adventures in some of our favorite museums. We’ve taken an entertainment first approach to education. We move fast, we make people feel like they’re being a little bit sneaky, and we try to give them an experience that makes them fall in love with the space, learn a little bit more about it, and then really, really want to come back.

About two and a half years ago was when I joined up. You joined 8 months ago?

Diana Montano: About, yeah.

Friends on a Scavenger Hunt. Friends on a Scavenger Hunt.

Ethan Angelica: Yeah, 8 months ago. In that brief time we’ve moved just from one museum in New York to two museums where we run public tours and almost 4 or 5 more where we do private tours and then two additional cities. We’re in DC, at the National Gallery of Art, and San Francisco at the de Young Museum. Then we’ve worked with museums across the country and literally around the world on consulting and professional development projects.

Jason Church: You also teach classes for other people to learn, sort of this new style, correct?

Ethan Angelica: Oh, definitely. I just got back from a zoo in the state of Mississippi where I was teaching their zookeepers and some of the folks there about some of the story telling and activity design that we do. We also have started doing something we call Museum Hack Boot Camp here in New York City where we have museum professionals come to spend a long weekend with us designing and eventually presenting Museum Hack-style tours at the Met, which is really fun and really exhausting.

Jason Church: For you and the participants, right?

Ethan Angelica: For everybody. We all walk out feeling really good but also wanting to take a long nap.

Diana Montano: Yeah, absolutely.

Jason Church: What kind of training do your tour guides at Museum Hack get?

Diana: What kind of training, that is a really insane question with an even more insane answer. Our training takes a long time actually, from start to finish it usually takes about 2 to 3 months. That’s because what we do is not an exact science and everyone does it their own way. We usually bring people on as what we call a Co-host, and people will actually do a little bit each tour. They support their lead guides, who are leading tours for anyone from public tour people who are just visiting New York City or live in New York City and will sign up for a tour online, or our corporate clients who come in for a team building tour, or our private clients who want some sort of party or another event that they are looking to host with us as the runners of the event.

These Co-hosts watch what their tour guides do, they get feedback from their specific pieces that they present on the tours, and they’ll do a little bit of improvising themselves and that, like I said, that takes anywhere from 2 to 3 months depending on the guide, depending on how quickly they work, depending on how many tours they can be on. It does take a long time, and everyone does it in their own, very different way because every tour guide, actually, at the end of those 2 months, will be able to present 2 hours worth of content and be able to pretty much talk and entertain for two hours, which is a really hard thing to do, especially in the Museum Hack style, as you said, of education, not second, but entertainment before education. It takes a long time to get really good at that.

Ethan Angelica: I think one thing that is why it takes so much time, like Diana is saying, is that guides are empowered to create their own route. We give them training in story telling, we give them training in tour structure, we give them training in what we call scaffolding, which is our techniques to create a museum tour as being a fully social experience, but then they are tasked with building it themselves. We give them the toolkit, they have to build the castle.

They’re having to spend hours and hours in the museums doing their own research, developing content that they are really excited and passionate about so that they maintain that sense of energy and joy and wonder and inspiration that they have throughout the entire museum experience.

Diana Montano: Exactly. You can always tell which pieces the tour guides have done themselves and been really inspired by because they’re eyes light up, they get really excited, they smile a lot more, they get people moving around, and those are the pieces that we really encourage our tour guides to focus on because when they’re having a good time, the people on the tour are having a good time too.

Jason Church: Even if you’ve been to the Met multiple times, even with Museum Hack, you’re going to get a different tour with every tour guide.

Diana Montano: You’re going to get a different tour, probably a month after, with the same tour guide as well because they’ll discover new things, be bored of the pieces they showed the last time, be like, “You know, we’re not going to that one painting that’s upstairs. We’re going to this one painting that’s around the corner instead because I’ve talked about that painting for the last month and I want to show you something new.” We encourage all of our guides to do that because, like I said, that’s when their excitement really shows through and it allows the guests to get excited about the museum too.

Jason Church: Now, seeing some of the reviews online, it seems like the customers have a very positive response. Tell me more about the response the museums have to Museum Hack.

Ethan Angelica: That’s a great question. You know, when we’re working with museums in the capacity that you’d see us with online, going to buy a ticket to a museum tour, we are working with these groups sort of as a third party provider, meaning that we are buying tickets through their group services department, doing all of our own advertising to bring in an audience.

What museums really respond to and get out of the experience is we essentially act as a revenue drive and an audience drive for them. We’re reaching out to an audience that may not necessarily be attracted to the current offering that the museum has and we’re offering an additional access point. We’re reaching out, saying, “If this seems interesting, why don’t you come and try this with us,” with the goal that we’re sort of hyping up the museums so much that they’re so excited that they want to come back on their own and bring their friends and start that relationship with the institution. We’re not poaching people who are already coming. Everybody who comes to a Museum Hack tour is coming as part of a pre-purchased experience, meaning they reached out and came with us. We didn’t grab them as they were walking into the museum.

In many ways, that is really positive, but also we do bring revenue for a lot of the museums that we work with, it’s a donation to get into the museums. Through their group services departments, we’re paying the full museum admission, which can be as much as a third of our ticket price. In many ways we’re not only bringing these groups, new audience and people who might have been dubious about the experience initially, but we’re also bringing them a decent source of income, which I know is very inspiring for me. Museums tend to like those two things, I tend to find. That’s when we get a lot of positive feedback from them.

Every Tour Starts With a Cheer. Every Tour Starts With a Cheer.

Jason Church: Now Ethan, what is your background? How did you get involved with Museum Hack?

Ethan Angelica: Oh goodness. I came at this sort of backward-wise. I went to school for the incredibly useful combination of theater and Middle Eastern Studies which basically, I say, qualifies me to talk to people and research stuff. I fell into museums in a backwards way. I spent the first ten years of my career out of college as a professional actor and I traveled all over the country in film and in touring theater and here in New York, but my day job was doing education work for the Central Park Zoo. I was part of an outreach program that they have. I noticed that as my interest in being an actor was waning, the number of hours and the amount of work I was doing at the zoo was increasing significantly.

I realized that this whole informal education-type thing, the idea of, “How do I engage an audience that might not be expecting me to be there telling them about things?” was something that really got me excited and was something I really loved doing.

Just as I was sort of deciding I didn’t know if I wanted to pursue acting as much anymore, I saw an application for Museum Hack and I said, “This looks too good to be true,” and I applied and did an audition for them and they liked it and did some more research and story telling for them and they seemed to like that and was brought on. As the company continued to grow I sort of grew with them and suddenly I was starting to work with ticketing partnerships and then I started working directly with museums and I started negotiating some of our first workshop opportunities and helped design those workshops. At some point it just turned out that I was working at this thing as though it was a full-time job and so I decided to make it formal and I’ve been full-time with Museum Hack for a little more than a year now.It’s not where I ever thought I would be, but I’m certainly loving it.

Jason Church: Diana, some of our listeners may recognize you, I know I did. You used to have a YouTube channel called Diana Does Museums.

Diana Montano: You can’t tell, but I just put my hand over my face when you said that.

Yeah. I started that as a personal project during grad school because I realized that what I loved doing was teaching in really different ways. I had gotten my degree as an art educator in my undergraduate degree and found that the public school system was just not where I wanted to be. I started pursuing a lot of other ways that I could teach that wasn’t that way and I fell upon a YouTube channel that I really liked watching called The Brain Scoop. It’s hosted by a woman named Emily Graslie and now she’s at the Field Museum. I was like, “You know what, I want to do that. I want to do it a little bit differently, but I want to do something like that. I think that’s a great way to get a lot of people interested in museums and I can use this as an excuse to travel and see museums and also teach other people about museums while I go to see them.”

I did that for a few months. One of my last videos that I did was about Museum Hack. I pretty much had heard about it and I emailed Nick just on a whim saying, “Hey, do you mind if I do a video? It’s free. I’ll just do it because I like you guys, want to just talk about how awesome you are.” I went on a tour with both Dustin and Zach, who are at the National History Museum and Kate, who was at the Met. They kept bothering me for months, saying, “You know, we love what you do. Come on, come join us, we’ll figure out a job for you, that sounds great.”

I was, at the time, finishing a grad degree in Museum Studies and I said, “You know, I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, call me back in three months.” “I need a few more months, call me back in a few months.”

He would not leave me alone and I’m very glad that he didn’t. I’ve been working for Museum Hack since June of last year and I started just picking up things that people didn’t want to do because we’re all very busy people and creative people who are so good at this job and make this job exactly what it’s supposed to be, which is just having fun in museums, and they’re so good at it. Being good at that means sometimes you’re maybe not good at the operational things. What I learned is that I am good at those things and that was where I just decided to keep piling more stuff onto my plate.

Now I help with project management as well, helping to make sure that when we get these big projects with other clients, either museums or some corporate clients we’ve been working with doing brand hacking or any other kind of event that they’d like us to help with, I help lay out the timelines for those things, make sure that expectations are clear from our team and from the team that is hiring us and make sure that it’s totally on the right path.

Not the job I expected either. I though I would be a low-level educator at a museum. I do miss being in museums sometimes, but I get a lot of opportunities to be in them still, doing this job, and I’m very happy doing it.

Jason Church: Some of the tours that Museum Hack does are thematic, correct?

Guests on a Tour. Guests on a Tour.

Diana Montano: That’s right. Right now we have a feminist tour called Bad ass Bitches and that’s been running for a few months now, so super successful. We love that so much. The idea is that we talk about the ladies that either are or are not on display at the Met, of which there are many, and why it’s important to see the Mt from this perspective as well as all of the other perspectives that we or the museum provides. Another one we sometimes run is Jews at the Met: the Chosen Tour, which is a super fun historical look at Judaism and Jewish history from that perspective. In the Met we have Big Game Met which is actually hosted by Ethan himself.

That’s been in the works for a long time and we love that tour, it’s fabulous. We’re also right now developing a tour about the intersections of art and science and how the Met has a lot of ways you can see science from the artworks that are on display.

Jason Church: Very good. You said you’ve reached out, not only to the Met, but you said you have tours in DC and the de Young in San Francisco as well.

Ethan Angelica: That’s right. Those are public tours where you could just buy a ticket like you would at the Met.

Jason Church: Is there anything else that I didn’t ask, or you wanted to talk about, that you’d like to add?

Ethan Angelica: I guess I’m interested to hear a little bit from Diana about how, because I know your audience is one that typically thinks about technology and ways that you can use technology. We’re very much interested in what a social interaction in a museum looks like. Everyone’s in their phones all day, and we’re all on our computers, or looking at iPads. For us, the idea is to get people out of that mode and get them interacting with each other, but we’ve still managed to work technology into the equation in a more informal way that allows us to use things like our phones or tools that we have with them

I’m wondering if Diana can talk a little bit about what that experience looks like on a Museum Hack tour.

Diana Montano: Sure, yeah. We use technology in a lot of different ways. One of the ways is that we encourage our guides to have smartphones or tablets. Pretty much everyone does. To use that in a way that’s really beneficial when they’re standing in front of an artwork so that they can refer to other things. A lot of ways that our guides have used that is by comparing an artwork in the museum to one that is not currently on display.

For instance a tour guide talks about an artwork by Artemisia Gentileschi, who is a female artist from the Renaissance era and she compares her artwork to one that is one display at the Met and both of them are showing a really gruesome scene, but she shows the difference between the two. You really can’t talk about it if you don’t have that artwork right in front of you and she is able to sort of zoom in on the iPad and sort of show people like, “Check out these blood spurts, aren’t they amazing?” That’s because she talked to Galileo about the science that would make this work. It really allows her to show people artwork without it having to be on display which is really useful.

We also get a lot of our images from the Met’s collection online, which they have been so amazing, they have a lot of artworks that are online, just the photos and everything, and that helps us a lot to do, not just our research, but in person on the tour to use those photos, and they’re super high-quality.

Ethan Angelica: I’m curious, can you talk a little bit about how, maybe, we get guests to use the technology that they have to interact with objects or to help personalize the experience for themselves?

Diana Montano: Yeah, so it’s not just that. That’s the way a lot of our guides use them, but we also play a lot of games with our phones. We’ll create these activities that have people using both the people who are in front of them as well as their technology to interact with each other.

We play a game called Matchmaker and Matchmaker is really fun because it asks people, “Go out into this gallery and I want you to find a face, a face that you really like. Take a photo of it, zoom in on just the face, come back here. Take 30 seconds to do that.” They’ll come back with those photos and be like, “Okay, the person that you’re standing next to here in the museum, you’re now their buddy. Turns out, the photos that you’ve taken of the photos on your phones, those two people just fell in love. Awe. So sweet. I want you to make up a story. I want you to tell me how these people fell in love and tell me, did it end well? Give us a little bit of the details. Did it end well or was it kind of a sad love story?”

They take a few minutes, they talk with each other, they create this whole love story between themselves, not even looking at the plaques, maybe using a little bit of the rest of the artwork, looking closely and seeing what details are in the artwork that they may have missed when they were taking the faces photo, and then they come back together, they tell their story together. They’ll say the person’s name, tell how they fell in love, and we’ll go around the circle doing that entire thing with these people in pairs who often don’t come together. We often pair people up who didn’t come together and that way they’re creating a story with someone they didn’t even know before the tour.

They create the story, they tell out the story, and then we talk to them about a woman named Tracy Chevalier who actually goes to museums and writes stories sort of in this way, where she loves learning about the art, but what she likes more is actually just creating her own story. We use that as an inspiration not just to allow people to listen to the facts that we tell them, but also it’s okay to make up a story if you want, but also this is a great way to meet new people in the museum, just on the tour, or in your life.

The Museum Hack Team Posing. The Museum Hack Team Posing.

Ethan Angelica: What I really like about this is I think it is an imaginative way that we have remixed some of the goals that many museums have. In this way we’re asked people to look closely, to make personal connections, to bring a part of themselves to an object, whether that be a piece of art of an historic object, specimen from science, but we did it in a way that subverted their expectations. I think that is where a lot of our approach comes from, is that we are attempting to get people to do these things that make them feel closeness and connection to objects, whether they be art objects, historic objects, or scientific objects, but doing it in a way that almost tricks them into doing it without knowing that that’s what we’re up to.

I think Matchmaker is a great way to do that and it allows them to use that tool in their pocket. Taking a photo or looking something up on their phone, which is an activity we do outside of cultural spaces, in those cultural spaces.

Jason Church: Sounds like a lot of fun. I hope to take one of your tours one day.

Ethan Angelica: Yeah, most certainly.

Jason Church: Well Ethan and Diana, thank you so much for talking to our listeners today, we really appreciate it and we hope everyone can come experience Museum Hacks.

Ethan Angelica: Yeah, definitely. If you want more information on us you can check out museumhack.com or we’re on twitter at @MuseumHack. Tweet us, we’ll tweet you back.

Jason Church: Fantastic, go out and tweet them.

Diana Montano: Thanks, Jason, so much. It was great talking to you.

Jason Church: You too, thank you.

Diana Montano: Thanks.

Ethan Angelica: Bye.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Bringing Cultural Landscapes into the 21st Century (Podcast 69) ]]> Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D52DFDD3-C8AC-AF43-9E794F1EA69C64B2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D52E9194-C3F0-0394-FE489B21C4DD12C3 Bringing Cultural Landscapes into the 21st Century (Podcast 69) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Maggie O'Neill as she speaks with Stephanie Nelson and Leah Edwards at the Olmstead Center for Landscape Preservation in Boston, MA. In this podcast, they will discuss Stephanie and Leah's work with the National Park Service's Cultural Landscapes program and their past internships at NCPTT. 788 no full 69

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Leah, Steph, and Gina Belknap, Southeast Region (SER) Facility Management Systems Specialist (Network), prepping for plane ride over Cape Hatteras National Seashore, June 2015

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

Today we join NCPTT’s Maggie O’Neill as she speaks with Stephanie Nelson and Leah Edwards at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation in Boston, MA. In this podcast they will discuss Stephanie and Leah’s work with the National Park Service’s Cultural Landscapes program and their past internships at NCPTT.

Maggie O’Neill: Hi, I’m Maggie O’Neill. I work in Historic Landscapes at NCPTT and today we’re sitting down with Stephanie and Leah at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. I was hoping you both could introduce yourself to begin, and what your role is at OCLP.

Stephanie Nelson: Well Maggie, my name is Stephanie Nelson and I am the Asset Preservation Coordinator for the National Park Service’s Washington Support Office Park Cultural Landscapes program. Leah and I actually work for Washington D.C. and the main headquarters for the National Park Service, but the Olmsted Center is kind enough to host us here and let us work out of their offices.

Leah Edwards: I am Leah Edwards, and my formal title is Asset Preservation Associate but technically I am a SCA working with Stephanie on the nationally significant cultural landscape inventories in FMSS (Facility Management Software System).

Maggie O’Neill: Can you clarify what SCA is?

Leah Edwards: SCA is the Student Conservation Association and it’s a national nonprofit organization that works to get people into conservation throughout. Whether its in the Park Service or any other nonprofits or anything like that.

Maggie O’Neill: So both of you work with cultural landscapes – I was hoping you both could talk about the role the Olmsted Center and you both play in relation to cultural landscapes and what your job is here.

Stephanie Nelson: Sure! Well, the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation started at Olmsted National Historic Site. It was a bunch of staff members who started to think about and act on how you make a landscape look and feel historic. Out of that, it has evolved to a center for landscape preservation planning, maintenance, and education. The Olmsted Center really is the Cultural Landscapes program of the Northeast Region of the National Park Service.

Maggie O’Neill: Your projects – they are part of the National Park Service as a whole – what specifically are you guys doing with them?

Leah Edwards: Our project is looking at all national parks, as a nationwide view. We look at all the cultural landscapes in all of the parks and their features. We can inventory them, in some cases, and we work to try and get them into the facility management database – FMSS, which is the database that the National Park Service uses to maintain all their facilities and organize them all. So whenever the times comes to get work orders or any funding needed for any projects in the park, they can use that organization and this database to work on the process. Our job is to basically include all cultural landscapes features out of 390 cultural landscape units and 190 parks.

with NAMA and National Capital Region (NCR) staff at the Washington Monument, August 2015 With NAMA and National Capital Region (NCR) staff at the Washington Monument, August 2015

Stephanie Nelson: 179.

Leah Edwards: 179 Parks throughout the entire country.

Maggie O’Neill: So even though you guys are located in Boston at OCLP, you work with all regions of the Park Service?

Leah Edwards: Correct.

Stephanie Nelson: Yes – I’ve been fortunate enough to work with all seven regions of the National Park Service. I got to go to Alaska to work with their regional cultural staff and do a site visit at Sitka National Historical Park. I was also able to work in the Pacific West Region at San Juan Island National Historic Site; in the Inter-mountain Region at San Antonio Missions National Historical Park. In the Midwest Region I’ve been to Keweenaw National Historical Park in the upper peninsula of Michigan, and Homestead National Monument of America in Nebraska. Let’s see- in the Southeast Region, we’ve been to Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and Wright Brothers National Memorial and Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, and Stone’s River National Battlefield in Tennessee. And then we’ve been in the National Capital Region, which is Washington DC, Maryland, and Virginia, at the National Mall and Memorial Parks, Washington Monument and Thomas Jefferson Memorial. And in the Northeast Region, specifically we’ve worked at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Parks and at Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site.

Pacific West Regional FMSS & Cultural Landscapes team with San Juan Island National Historical Park staff hiking through American Camp Cultural Landscape, December 2013 Pacific West Regional FMSS & Cultural Landscapes team with San Juan Island National Historical Park staff hiking through American Camp Cultural Landscape, December 2013

So our project is looking at a segment of cultural landscapes that are nationally significant, and that have completed inventories – completed inventories means that someone went out, looked at the park, looked at all the different things that make up a landscape, and determined whether or not they were significant or contributing. After that, the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) and the park superintendent signed off on them. So in the National Park Service, we estimate that we have about 2,000 – 2,100 cultural landscapes. Only about 1/3 of those sites, 700 or some, have completed documentation (completed cultural landscape inventories). And we’re only working with the nationally significant ones – the crown jewels, the best of the best. That’s why our project, in four years, is supposed to encompass 390 cultural landscape inventory units and 179 of the 408 national parks.

Leah Edwards: Just to add to that, being part of the WASO (Washington DC Support Office) group, being out of the Washington Office, you kind of have an advantage of traveling all over the country, like Stephanie just said. She mentioned all the places she has been to and a few I’ve been to. But I have also gotten to work with Susan Dolan and her team at Mount Rainier National Park, to do Culvert Inventories on one of the park main roads. It didn’t have anything to do strictly with our project, but it was a cool opportunity. It was my first month being here and I got to go out and actually be in the field, which was a really spectacular thing to do. So it has had its advantages to work nationally.

Culvert survey team At Mount Rainier NP, November 2014 (Leah is second from right) Culvert survey team At Mount Rainier NP, November 2014 (Leah is second from right)

Stephanie Nelson: My favorite part of the project is putting research into action. What we do, really, is we take that research that has been written about a landscape, and what’s important in it, and translate that into facilities language. So all these reports exist that are great and have a lot of information about the landscape, but that information has not been efficiently communicated to facilities [staff]. And we rely on the facilities staff to maintain our cultural landscapes. So I kind of look at it is if we don’t have our cultural landscape information in the facilities system, you can’t track it and you can’t work on it.

Maggie O’Neill: There is a huge disconnect there.

Stephanie Nelson: Huge disconnect! And we are all one National Park Service; we are all tasked with preserving our resources – cultural, natural, and visitor services. I really like being the translator between the different services.

Maggie O’Neill: The relationship of cultural landscapes to the National Park Service is something that is continually worked on and it’s great to see it going in a positive direction; towards a better preservation maintenance mentality overall.

Stephanie Nelson: Exactly, it’s really exciting.

Maggie O’Neill: One of the most interesting parts about the three of us being here today is that all three of us have interned at NCPTT. Leah, you were there in 2014, and you [Stephanie] were there in 2010. I was hoping you both could talk about the projects you worked on or what you learned at NCPTT that you’re apply to the project you do now.

Sitka, Alaska, September 2014: Alaska Region Facilties and Cultural Resources STaff, Sitka NHP staff, and WASO PCLP staff in front of Russian Bishop's House Sitka, Alaska, September 2014: Alaska Region Facilties and Cultural Resources STaff, Sitka NHP staff, and WASO OCLP staff in front of Russian Bishop’s House

Leah Edwards: Yeah, so I was there in the summer of 2014 and I got to work on a project with Carrie Goetcheus from the University of Georgia. The project was creating a chronological timeline of literature, mostly, of cultural landscapes from its beginning conception in the National Park Service around the 1970s. We gathered all this literature and researched that and organized it into a single spread sheet or database that could be easily searchable, so that later when Carrie continued this project she could easily search those topics and those authors and who was talking about what at during what year. Kind of just organizing all of that information. It was a very general project but it was something that helped me – I came out of school not knowing a lot about cultural landscapes but knew I wanted to get into them. It was a good learning project to learn about the field as a whole and to delve into it later on in my career. So that’s what I did for three months.

Stephanie Nelson: I worked for the Historic Landscapes program at NCPTT. One of my tasks was to create a landscape preservation maintenance video. I also worked through the summer and beyond on various landscape preservation maintenance tasks. A video came out of it –Preservation Maintenance of Turf Using Resource Sensitive Techniques in Historic Landscapes, available on the NCPTT website.

And I got a chance, with that, to work with Debbie Smith and Charlie Pepper, here at the Olmsted Center, on the landscape preservation maintenance curriculum for field workers. So we put together a workshop on the topoic and a group meeting led me to meet Charlie Pepper. Charlie had an internship available at the Olmsted Center, so I came to work with him on the landscape preservation maintenance curriculum. After I left NCPTT and came up here to Boston, I worked in education and preservation maintenance. I’ve gotten to meet different people in the cultural landscapes program across the country while working with Charlie and Celena Illuzzi, the education specialist here at the Olmsted Center – working with youth programs, and working with field worker programs. I had the opportunity to move into this landscapes FMSS role, working with Susan Dolan whom I met through all of my various experiences working here at the Olmsted Center. If it weren’t for my time at NCPTT, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be where I am now. Getting to work there, even though it’s in rural Louisiana, really was an entry into the National Park Service’s Cultural Landscape Program for me. It introduced me to people who I started to work with and who I still work with in following in the footsteps of and bringing the program along into the 21st century.

Maggie O’Neill: Alright guys, well thank you so much for talking with us today and I look forward to working with both of you in the future.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Modern Problems with Early Motoring: The Replica Ford Quadricycle (Podcast 68) ]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D55D879B-FF9A-A2FF-380394067214373B.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D57167F0-0651-DF1F-27D876B7358D768B Modern Problems with Early Motoring: The Replica Ford Quadricycle (Podcast 68) National Park Service Modern Problems with Early Motoring: The Replica Ford Quadricycle Alex Beard speaks with conservation technician Andrew Ganem and former performance engineer at Ford Racing Mose Nowland at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In this podcast, they will discuss the restoration of a reproduction of Henry Ford's first vehicle, the 1896 Quadricycle. 1379 no full 68

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

Today we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with conservation technician Andrew Ganem and former performance engineer at Ford Racing Mose Nowland at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In this podcast, they will discuss the restoration of a reproduction of Henry Ford’s first vehicle, the 1896 Quadricycle.

Mose Nowland working in the conservation laboratory Engineer Mose Nowland working in the conservation laboratory at The Henry Ford

Alex Beard: How are you guys doing today?

Mose Nowland: We’re doing fine, Alex. Thank you.

Andrew Ganem: I have no complaints.

Alex Beard: Oh great. I wanted to start by asking what you guys do at the museum and could you tell us a little bit about the projects you’ve been working on?

Mose Nowland: My name is Mose Nowland and I am a volunteer here at the Henry Ford Museum. I’ve only been here about three years now after a lengthy tour with Ford Motor Company. Retired in 2012 on a Friday and came to the museum on Monday because I knew it would be very interesting and diversified activities.

Andrew Ganem: My name’s Andrew Ganem. I’m a conservation technician. I go where I’m needed and then I do miscellaneous work. That’s working on cars to cleaning up someone’s office. I’ve been here for about five months, since the end of May, and I’ve enjoyed every day.

Alex Beard: Sounds great. I remember you guys had talked a little bit about a quadricycle project. Could you guys maybe tell me a little bit of the history of the quadricycle and let me know what you guys are doing right now, working on it?

Mose Nowland: Of course.

Andrew Ganem: Henry Ford had an experience in his youth and he saw a steam traction engine. That amazed him that something could move on its own power. Ever since then he always wanted to replicate that. As gasoline engines came to be in the 1890’s there was kind of a boom of inventors who were coming up with horseless carriages.

Henry Ford finished his in 1896 and that would be the quadricycle. It’s a two cylinder, about four horsepower horseless carriage. Finished it in late spring. At 2:00am he finished his project and he was about to roll it out of his workshop and he realized that the door to his workshop was too small for his creation to be rolled out. Very frustrated, he took an ax and he busted down the wall and he pushed his creation outside. Technically, the second horseless carriage in Detroit started its life and it’s made its journey all the way to here and it’s been replicated with the piece of equipment we have in the lab that we’ve been working on. It’s been here for 52 years?

Mose Nowland: Since 1963. We acquired it from a Ford engineer. He was actually an illustrator at Ford Motor Company. His passion was restoring Model A’s and Model T’s. Then he saw the quadricycle, its simplicity and the interest that people had towards the car and decided to replicate it. There were no plans available or anything like that, but being an illustrator, was quite gifted at design and methods of design.

Andrew Ganem working on the replica quadricycle Conservation Technician Andrew Ganem working on the replica quadricycle

The original quadricycle was on display in a museum in a glass cage. He was not allowed to approach the glass cage for measurements or even get inside of the glass cage. That did not deter him. He developed methods of estimating lengths, distances, diameters by standing out in the aisle and sometimes would adapt a little device that he could ratio the view of a part and make a drawing. He preceded that way.

He got about 50% of the parts made and the museum realized how serious he was with his project and the passion that he had for completing this thing. They did allow him to approach the original car and take some measurements, but that was towards the end of the program. He pretty much had his information he needed. From there he would buy ready shelf available material. When it came to special machine projects, he would rely on the Ford experimental machine shop to make a part. They cooperated, it was sort of an under the table project. They cooperated with him and finally after the museum got wind of it and some other areas of the company got wind of it, it became an above board project and everybody cooperated.

He finished his version of the first quadricycle in 1963. That is the piece that we have here now. We are maintaining it and operating it as required for special events in the village.

Alex Beard: Thank you so much for that history you guys. I had a couple questions about that. How close is it to the original?

Mose Nowland: Well, it would take a specialist to pick out the differences. There is a slight mystery about the ignition system that is a mechanical grounding system inside of the combustion chamber. We’ve never been able to look inside of his original for his design, shape, and material he used for those moving pieces. But, George had imagined what they would be. I’m sure that he’s replicated pretty darn close because there were certain geometries that had to be accomplished that could only probably end up looking alike whether it was replicated or the original.

Alex Beard: How would the original quadricycle- still currently at the Henry Ford Museum correct? How is that displayed now?

The original 1896 Quadricycle on display at The Henry Ford Museum The original 1896 Quadricycle on display at The Henry Ford Museum

Mose Nowland: Yeah. That is displayed in a time, what would you say? Evolution of the vehicles. It’s right at the head of the row of the progression in automotive technology and models that were built.

Alex Beard: Not in a glass case anymore.

Andrew Ganem: Not anymore.

Mose Nowland: You still can’t get close to it.

Alex Beard: How many reproductions are there actually?

Andrew Ganem: There are numerous reproductions around the world. I don’t know if we could count them. George made three. Two are here at the museum, one running, one is said to be in running condition, although I’ve never seen it running. The third one is non-runner made specifically for the Ford Motor Company and it’s in their world headquarters on display.

Alex Beard: The one that you guys have been working on, you guys have gotten it running. How is it running? Is it running smoothly? Can you just talk about the challenges of the project?

Mose Nowland: It’s quite a challenge to keep it running, Alex. The engine runs with a tremendous amount of vibration and it’s very hard on components and connections throughout the car. We have successfully, and we understand our predecessors had maintained the car and used it, has had the same problems. It’s been problematic from day one I’m sure.

Anyway, Andrew here had a nice experience this summer at the Old Car Festival. I was not part of that, but I understand that they got it to run 30 minutes at a time before something fell off of it or whatever. No disrespect for the vehicle. It’s designed to destroy itself.

Alex Beard: Andrew, can you tell us a little bit about your experience driving it around?

Andrew Ganem: I can. Our Old Car Festival is two days in September. All of our trial runs with the vehicle before that weekend were on very hot, humid days and it would only want to go for about 10, 11 minutes on a good run. The Old Car Festival weekend we were having very cool weather in the mid-sixties, which was absolutely perfect, and we were able to get around this factor of weather and humidity, which was actually freezing the gasoline as it was going into the engine, which is a whole ‘nother scientific thing that I won’t get into.

We were able to get around that factor and see what was actually- what the other problems were and then work them out. The biggest problem we found was that the way you set the timing is you have to remove the head of the engine and get inside of the cylinder and adjust a screw that’s on a hammer that ignites the spark plug. Those timing screws were either advancing themselves or more commonly retarding themselves and the engine wouldn’t run correctly and it would eventually peter out after about 20 minutes of run time.

We were extremely happy with being able to run it for longer than 10 minutes, but we were still very determined to get it running in a reliable way. After every 20 minute run, we’d have to take it apart and reset everything and then put it back together. Let it cool down first because the only thing slowing us down was how hot that engine gets.

Alex Beard: What type of fuel does it run on?

Mose Nowland: It runs on gasoline. And, a moment ago Andrew mentioned the gasoline freezing, which has been a terrible problem for us, because it’s actually a frosting of the carburetor and the air/fuel mixture goes wacky at the time. It’s not stoichiometric enough to support combustion. It appears down in the deep throat of the intake manifold. You never know what problem you’re up against whether it is the carburetor icing or if it’s one of the other things that commonly fails.

To get a lengthy run is, as Andrew pointed out, appears to be with the humidity and air temperature will either let you run for a continued period of time or maybe 30, 40 feet in travel.

Alex Beard: Yeah. That’s so cool too. I know that in the village they do the Model T rides so I bet it was interesting for people to see you actually driving around a quadricycle reproduction.

Andrew Ganem driving the replica quadricycle Conservation Technician Andrew Ganem driving the replica quadricycle

Andrew Ganem: It was a lot of fun because it wasn’t just the Model T’s going in the village as they do every day, it was everybody who brought their car was also driving around. It was a lot of fun being in traffic in a car that’s from 1896.

Mose Nowland: It’s probably, without a doubt, the oldest vehicle for the weekend event.

Alex Beard: Still going strong, kind-of.

Mose Nowland: Yes, sporadically.

Alex Beard: On a good day.

Andrew Ganem: Right now we’re currently- it’s partially disassembled right now because we’re going to make it very reliable over the winter.

Alex Beard: Is it still in the conservation lab? Do you guys have any plans on putting it on display on the floor possibly next to the original?

Mose Nowland: It is still in the conservation lab. We’re preparing and collecting material to make our modifications. We had a terrific learning period this last fall at the Old Car Festival because the boys were able to run the car at a greater consecutive amount of minutes than we’ve ever had. When you do that then you begin to sort out what the problems are.

The vehicle’s currently in our lab and we will be making some new pieces for the ignition system. I’ve never known of it to be displayed out on the floor in competition with the original, but we do use it as a utility vehicle for different film events and on display at the Old Car Festival.

Alex Beard: How are you guys going to make some new parts? Do you guys have molds that you guys are able to use?

Mose Nowland: Basically it’s just flat stock material that you mill into shape. I have the privilege of using a Bridgeport mill to make items like that and then round stock for shafts and so on. We purchase tungsten rod for our contact surface so it won’t erode under the high voltage discharge. It’s basically whittling it out of metal and they’re one of a kind parts.

Alex Beard: Thank you guys so much. I’m really glad that you guys are able to get that car running. It’s a great piece of history and a good learning tool. I hope you guys just continue to learn more about it and work on it a little bit more in the conservation lab.

Mose, could you just tell me a little bit about how you became a volunteer at the Henry Ford Museum after your long career at Ford Racing?

1967 Ford GT40 Mk IV that won Le Mans in 1966 & '67 1967 Ford GT40 Mk IV that won Le Mans in 1967 on display at The Henry Ford Museum

Mose Nowland: Certainly. My career at Ford was pretty intense for the most part because of being in the racing group and attending race season and fixing things promptly. In the Ford racing activity if something failed on Sunday, it better be fixed by next Sunday.

Anyway, I became acquainted with a lot of processes and suppliers and things like that through that program. Everything handled expeditiously. Then the museum started to acquire some of the cars that I was involved with on the track. Our automotive curator at the time, Mr. Bob Casey, was aware of my affiliation and experience with these vehicles. When he had a question or acquired a new car and wanted an evaluation of that car, he would call me to come over to the museum and spend half a day with him inspecting the vehicles and getting him acquainted with it.

About that time he kept leaning on me, what are you going to do when you retire. He knew that I liked to stay active, so I decided that when I did retire that there was two places that I was going to spend time effectively as a volunteer. That was at the Henry Ford or with the Yankee Air Museum. The Henry Ford being very close to home and easy to access and such a diversity of things to work on, I chose to come to the Henry Ford. That’s the path I took to get here and I’m enjoying every day of it. I don’t need to be here as much as I am, but I try and apply my skills wherever they fit.

Alex Beard: What are a couple of the automobiles that we have on display that you worked on?

Mose Nowland: There’s five vehicles out here on display that I have worked on, because I have such a variety of racing experience and fabrication machine shop activities. We have, of course, the 1967 Ford GT40, the Mark IV that won Le Mans in 1966 and ’67. I did work on that car and service it in France for the 24 hour race. I was also fortunate enough to work on a Jim Clark/Dan Gurney Indianapolis cars. That was in ’63, ‘4, and ‘5 and pitted the cars at the races in those years.

Then there’s a couple of NASCAR stock cars here that I worked with the owners and teams engine wise, engine design and development of the special parts. Then there’s one car, we have a presidential limousine that I was a shop supervisor when the Ford Motor Company was building that car for Washington DC and the Secret Service. That car is also here. There’s five cars that I’m acquainted with out on the floor.

"1972 Lincoln Continental Presidential Limousine Used by Ronald Reagan. President Ronald Reagan was getting into this car when he was shot by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. The car carried Reagan to the hospital. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush also used this car." - ref. http://collections.thehenryford.org/Collection.aspx?keywords=reagan “1972 Lincoln Continental Presidential Limousine Used by Ronald Reagan. President Ronald Reagan was getting into this car when he was shot by John Hinckley on March 30, 1981. The car carried Reagan to the hospital. Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and George H.W. Bush also used this car.” – ref. http://collections.thehenryford.org/Collection.aspx?keywords=reagan

Alex Beard: How do you feel about that Mose, walking to work every day and passing some of the things you’ve worked on?

Mose Nowland: I’m very proud of the fact and I’m very appreciative that I get to walk by them and work on them today if needed.

Alex Beard: Yeah. We’re actually going to put some images of some of those vehicles and put some images of the quadricycle running in the village and put a short video online too if any of the listeners would like to see some of these cars that we’re talking about. It’ll be online on NCPTT’s webpage along with the transcription of the podcast.

Mose, also from a preservation standpoint, are there any things that you would’ve changed or modifications you would’ve made to some of the things that you had worked on at Ford Racing now that you know about using archival materials or trying to prolong the life of some of these vehicles?

Mose Nowland: Without a doubt there’s some changes I would make. I have been constantly thinking about some of the activities I was involved with. I’ve also followed technology connected with those components and yes, we would get about four years more current in technology usage.

When I left the company we were in 3D design. That was a big leap forward from the early years of racing. Even since then, the technology’s advanced tremendously. Things can move faster and better and more accurately right now. Absolutely.

The 1965 Lotus-Ford Race Car with which Scotsman Jimmy Clark won the Indianapolis 500 The 1965 Lotus-Ford Race Car with which Scotsman Jimmy Clark won the Indianapolis 500

Alex Beard: An interesting mix of keeping the performance in mind for the vehicle, but trying to preserve and extend the life of the vehicle now being at a museum. Are there any projects that you did work on while you were at Ford Racing that you look forward to seeing conserved?

Mose Nowland: Oh yes. In fact, every one of those cars out on the floor I am very proud that I’ve left footprints on them somewhere. It’s very comforting to know that they’re being conserved and other people are enjoying them.

Alex Beard: Andrew, have you worked on any of the cars that Mose has worked on?

Andrew Ganem: Alex, I have. I’ve had the privilege to do that with you.

Alex Beard: Oh yes. The race car.

Andrew Ganem: Yes. Mose has worked on a NASCAR stock car that was driven by an underage driver and the driver won. Was it the Daytona 500?

Mose Nowland: Yes.

Andrew Ganem: Won the Daytona 500. Since he was underage, they couldn’t spray champagne, so they sprayed Coca Cola. This car is on exhibit covered in Coca Cola and confetti. About every year it attracts a lot of dust and they take foam cosmetic wedges and gently remove the dust without disrupting the confetti. When the confetti is disrupted, it has to be re-adhered to the car.

Alex Beard: We don’t want to disrupt any of the signatures of the people that worked on the race team.

Andrew Ganem: Of course. not.

Mose Nowland: I just wanted to add that the- It is a Wood Brothers car, number 21 Fusion that Bayne (Trevor Bayne) drove. They stop in here twice a year, the Wood brothers do, just to take a look at the car and see how it’s being treated. They’re very, very fussy about don’t knock off any of the confetti or change anything. We’ve got terrible black scars on front and rear bumpers where the boys get into the commonly known drafting exercise on a track at 190 mile an hour. We’re not allowed to clean that up. It’s sitting there just the way it had come off the track. They’re keeping tabs on it.

The 2011 Ford Fusion Stock Car with which Trevor Bayne and the Wood Brothers Racing team won the Daytona 500. The 2011 Ford Fusion Stock Car with which Trevor Bayne and the Wood Brothers Racing team won the Daytona 500.

Alex Beard: Yes. I did remember that stuff actually sitting there. I didn’t know if it was dirt, but I sure didn’t touch it. Do you guys have anything else you’d like to add? Everything you’ve talked about today has been really interesting.

Andrew Ganem: I’d like to make a concluding statement to the quadricycle. I’d like to say that our replica quadricycle has built up a reputation of being the quadricycle everyone sees running around the village during Old Car Festival and has made its own impact in history that’s probably just as important as our original quadricycle.

Alex Beard: Yeah. I can see that the visitors aren’t as far removed from the original nowadays that they see this one actually functioning and running around and having a life of its own.

Andrew Ganem: Carrying on the torch if you would.

Conservation Specialist Alex Beard dusting the 2011 Ford Fusion Stock Car Conservation Specialist Alex Beard dusting the 2011 Ford Fusion Stock Car

Mose Nowland: I’d like to add one thing if I may. A previous year when I was out at the Old Car Festival in charge of the quadricycle, I had two different occasions where gentlemen would approach me and ask me for particular pictures of the car. I’d kind of pull the ropes to one side and let them come in and photograph it. Both of them claimed at the time that they were replicating a car like it also. I offered my email address and phone number. I’ve had contact with them on both occasions, both fellas that are attempting to build them, on suppliers and style of material that was used on it.

That’s an example of the interest that the car has had. People see you going down the village road and wanting to ride with you and things like that is just tremendous. It’s always a big hit and that’s why we’re so dedicated to keep the thing running.

Andrew Ganem: Definitely.

Alex Beard: Yeah. Maybe someday, Mose, some people will try and make some reproductions of cars you’ve worked on.

Mose Nolan: I’m sure they will.

Alex Beard: Thank you guys so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I appreciate it.

Mose Nolan: You’re certainly welcome. Thank you for the privilege of joining you this morning.

Kevin: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody

]]> Preserving Henry Ford’s Legacy: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI (Episode 67) ]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D5B9B979-954D-83CF-7B9FBCBB19BC66D3.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D5BA63D3-BDDC-4E20-6B8E7AFE8018029B Preserving Henry Ford’s Legacy: Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI (Episode 67) National Park Service Collections specialists, technicians, and conservators Alex Beard speaks with several collections specialists, technicians, and conservators at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In this podcast, they will discuss their jobs at Henry Ford and how they are preserving American history 1093 no full 67

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Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

Today we join NCPTT’s Alex Beard as she speaks with several collections specialists, technicians, and conservators at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In this podcast, they will discuss their jobs at Henry Ford and how they are preserving American history.

Alex: Hi. My name is Alex Beard. I’m here recording today at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and I’m with a couple members of the Conservation and Collections Management team. First, I’m going to be talking to Collections Specialist, Julie Dzurnak.

Julie: Here in the museum when you look around, you can see a lot of different artifacts that we have on exhibit, such as the Rosa Parks bus. We have the chair that Lincoln was shot in, but most of the objects that we have you don’t actually see on the museum floor, although we do have a large percentage here. They’re in off-site storage locations. What was hired on to do here was help with the re-housing and relocation of a majority of those collections from one of our storage facilities to a new storage site a little bit closer, in much better conditions than we currently have. Oftentimes, the need for the collections will outweigh the resources that a museum has in terms of funding or even workforce.

Basically what my job entails is re-housing objects. This can be anything from toasters to baby carriages to auto parts, anything really. We’re re-housing them in safer storage conditions, just in smaller boxes with the proper packaging to make sure that they can withstand the move, and then also that they’ll be safe and properly stored for years to come, which is kind of preventative conservation, making sure that the conditions are good for the objects now will ensure that they last longer into the future. That way our conservators will have not as hard of a job to do.

Alex: Do you work closely with the Registrar’s Department and Conservation Department? Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Julie: Yeah. It definitely is a team effort between all of the departments. Registrars are really responsible for maintaining the records of the object, and then conservators, too, are constantly working with them to make sure that we as collections managers are making the right decisions in terms of different materials to use when packing objects, which kind of goes with collections management, too, just taking steps to ensure the well-being of the objects in the future. Especially with a collection like the one that the Henry Ford has, there’s a lot of different materials that we see.

It’s a huge, diverse collection, so we have to make sure that we’re working with the conservators. I think it’s really interesting to see different things that the conservation labs are working on, whether its textiles or things related to the IMLS Communications Grant. But then also, too, I think it’s been really interesting learning how to move large objects, which is part of the move from off-site storage facility. We work closely with the exhibits team to get things like automobiles onto the museum floor. I will definitely say that has been a learning experience, and often entails a lot of all hands on deck kind of mentalities.

Alex: I bet you have some stories for us.

Julie: Yeah, some of these older cars, they’re just extremely large. They’re boats of cars, so it might take about 5 or 6 guys to be pushing it, and also steering. You need someone to be in the car to steer. You need to be making sure that you’re not going to hit anything as you’re navigating through the museum with all the other objects on display. Also, too, you have to make sure you get it through the doors, which our doors are 20 feet high in some cases to accommodate for the larger artifacts that we put on the floor here. The Allegheny train came through some of those doors. We also have airplanes and buses, just a lot of large artifacts here that it takes quite a crew to move sometimes.

Alex: That’s really fascinating. That sounds like such a fun, unique place to work. Thanks so much, Julie, for talking to me today.

Julie: It is.

Alex: Right now, I’m here with Collections Specialist, Jake Hildebrandt, Conservation Specialist, Cayla Osgood, and Conservator, Jessica Lafrance-Hwang. They have been working on the IMLS Communications Grant-funded project for the past 2 years or so. Could you guys tell us a little bit about that project, and start by saying what IMLS stands for, please?

Jessica: IMLS stands for the Institute of Museum and Library Services. They’ve given us a grant to work on communications equipment from the collection over a 2-year period. As Julie mentioned, we will eventually be moving the collection from numerous storage buildings to one storage facility that’s closer to the museum. The objects in this IMLS grant are all coming out of a storage facility on-site that houses mixed collections, including the communications equipment. Our goal for this project was to catalog, conserve, photograph, publish online, and rehouse 1,000 objects from this collection. We passed the goal already, but we get to continue working for a few more months.

Cayla: So far in the grant, we have been working on televisions, radios, computers, recording equipment, typewriters, and cameras, and we just acquired the Apple One, which isn’t part of the grant, but was a fun acquisition.

Alex: So, conservators. Could you guys tell us a little bit about some of the obstacles you guys face dealing with the IMLS artifacts. I would imagine it would be a little challenging dealing with some of them considering some sat in a storage facility untouched for half a century.

Jessica: It has been a challenge. One of our biggest challenges have been hazardous corrosion products, like cadmium and lead, that form because of just … Part of it is the way the objects are built, and then another factor is just how they were stored for so long. We’ve also had challenges with asbestos, which is normal to find in objects that would have had heat sources, and as well, we’ve had problems with cellulose nitrate, having been left inside cameras that were acquired and then put into storage. The cellulose nitrate degrades over time, and also causes degradation of everything around it.

Cellulose Nitrate Degraded Cellulose Nitrate Film

Cayla: Some of our other issues on this grant have been mold, which, the storage facility that we have been pulling the communications objects out of had a mold problem in the past. We have taken extra precautions to make sure that we protect ourselves from the mold to avoid overexposure, and to prevent another outbreak from happening in the new storage facility.

We have also encountered a lot of tape on objects, and the adhesive on the tape is extremely hard to remove, especially when it’s been on the object for half of a century. Another thing that we have encountered a lot of is objects that have no information with them. They have no tags.

That is a problem not only for us, but for the registrars and collections management departments, so we’re working on tracking down the information for those. Also, we have encountered a lot of grease on objects, but that is due to the nature of the objects themselves, but it’s quite a challenge to remove all of the grease. In order to protect ourselves and the other people in the lab, we make sure to clean the objects before we bring them into the museum. That way we don’t have spores create another outbreak in the museum or in our new storage facility. Since mold thrives in a warm and wet environment, we make sure that we aren’t putting ourselves at risk.

Jessica: As you just heard, a lot of these challenges are a little bit hazardous to us, and also a lot of the general conservation work can be hazardous, just because of the amount of solvents and the amount of particulates that are created when you’re removing corrosion products and dust. We take a lot of safety precautions when we’re working. This includes wearing a half mask and the proper cartridges with your mask, but also running ventilation and disposing of hazardous materials properly.

My piece of advice to people at home who may have objects of their own, is to treat them with care, keep them out of the light, keep them dry, keep them covered to avoid dust accumulation, and don’t over-clean them. If you really have something that you can’t figure out, or an object that’s in poor condition and you’re not sure how to handle it, definitely call your local conservator. There are conservators all across the country who would be more than happy to help you out, even just to answer your questions. You can also contact the conservation department at the Henry Ford for advice and treatment options, and they can also help you get in contact with somebody in your local area.

Alex: When dealing with potentially hazardous artifacts or precious family heirlooms, it is always best to contact your local conservator or the head conservators at the Henry Ford Museum for treatment consultation.

Alex Removing film Removing Degraded Cellulose Nitrate Film

Jake: One of the really interesting parts of this project was the inter-departmental nature of it. It’s a really good excuse to work with registrars, photography, certainly conservation is one of the big major players of it. But some of the stuff we’ve uncovered has been interesting stuff for the public, so we’ve been doing a little bit of talk with marketing and all that, so it’s really been a whole-institution project, which has been great for all of us to meet people and to see how all kinds of things work. A little bit about what I’m doing on the project, I’m sort of the last step on the pipeline, basically figuring out the best way to store these artifacts.

Our plan is not real long-term for them to be in deep storage, anyway. Hopefully we’re getting our new storage building in 2 to 5 years or so, but we’re playing on the cautious side, planning for decades. We’re using Ethafoam and corrugated plastic, which is a lot like corrugated cardboard, but made out of a stable, long-term stable inert plastic, so it’s water-resistant. It’s very sturdy, so a lot of these artifacts are very heavy for the small size, so it’s good to have sturdy handles that they can be carried around in and everything should be protected mechanically and chemically, and from water.

Alex: That’s great, Jake. Jessica mentioned earlier that the goal of the project was to stabilize and preserve at least 1,000 artifacts. How many boxes would you say you’ve made, and what do you think’s been the most difficult box to construct so far?

Jake: A lot of them have been big enough that they just live on pallets with dust covers and things like that, so I haven’t made 1,000 boxes, but maybe 5 or 600. They’ve all been relatively similar in how to make them and pack them. The hard ones are the artifacts that have a lot of stuff sticking out, like rods and knobs and things. It’s a little bit harder to pad them out so that they don’t jab into the side of the box and that kind of thing. Where the really challenge comes is … The verb we’ve started using is Tetrising, basically fitting boxes into larger boxes. We have these big 4-foot cube pallet crates that the boxes I make go into, so it’s a real challenge of packing them efficiently.

One of our earlier things was this computer system from the mid-’80s that had all these big, really heavy parts that were fragile. They all have glass picture tubes and all that, so trying to fit that into a reasonable number of pallets was strenuous physically and mentally, but it’s really satisfying when they all sync into the pallet neatly. One of the really interesting things for us with this project is that a lot of the artifacts we’re bringing in are not historically significant per se, although a lot of them were, but a lot of them are just mass collections that were done a long time ago, which was sort of Henry Ford’s MO, to get just truckloads of things.

His original idea for a lot of the museum was to show a bunch of similar things in a row to display them evolutionarily, so that you could see the stylistic and engineering progress as it went. It was kind of a precursor to current open storage ideas, where there’s not too much curation basically. You look at all the things and you can see the difference on your own, which we were able to do a bit here and there as we worked, and it was really interesting.

Alex: Now I’m speaking with Senior Objects Conservator, Clara Deck, and she’s here to shed some light a little bit on some of the interesting projects she’s worked on through the years, and her involvement in the IMLS Grant project.

Clara: Yeah, I’ve been here for 25 years as a conservator, and I’ve worked on many great things, including moving our 1914 carousel, and reassembling the Dymaxion House inside the Henry Ford Museum was a 3-year project and an ongoing responsibility. But as a Senior Conservator in place so huge with about a quarter of a million 3-dimensional objects, ranging from thimble-sized objects to steam engines, it’s important for conservators to be multi-taskers, but also to understand the basics of risk management. Conservators in a big history museum need to understand what are the greatest risks to collections, and to address those first and foremost. We don’t want to be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, and working on a tiny little item when whole storage rooms full of materials might be in jeopardy.

Copper Corrosion Copper Corrosion on a Film Camera

That was definitely the case with the IMLS Grant. It was actually initiated because I found mold in that huge storage facility, so it’s a warehouse sized building, and we found mold, and mold does spread everywhere, and so we realized that if we wanted to move the collections – we have a big plan to consolidate all the collections into one storage location very close to the museum – we needed to deal with that mold problem. Part of the grant application was to get the staffing we needed to start on a pilot project to clean that storage building. In my view, the IMLS project is really a mold remediation project, and all the benefits and the great staff that has come to us as part of the project are sort of icing on the cake.

Alex: Thank you so much. That was great. I’m here with Paper Conservation Specialist, Brooke Adams. Could you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing at the Henry Ford and what your favorite project has been so far?

Brooke: My favorite project that I’ve been working on is also a project that I’ve been working on with the IMLS team of conservators, and I’ve been working on the boxes that Spindizzy cars come in, and boxes of really everything that IMLS or a collector had held onto, so a lot of boxes. I think I’ve gotten very good at repairing boxes and surface cleaning the paper that is found, and the cameras and the toy boxes. A lot of those also had little guarantees, instruction manuals. I like working with IMLS because I get exposure to all these toys and photographic processes that I’ve never been able to handle before. These are all way before my time.

That’s part of what I like in general about working in conservation. I love working with papers. One of my favorite exhibits I worked on here was the Abraham Lincoln 150th anniversary of his death. That was incredible. You never get to touch those things. I got to surface clean and mend one of the pamphlets for the theater show that he went to see the night he was murdered. That was really interesting. There are a lot of wood block engravings that they had for his memorial. I got to mat a lot of those.

Yeah, surface cleaning things, that’s normally what I do, flatten things, mend them with Japanese tissue, and archival adhesive. I did re-house 200 glass plate negatives of the Wright Brothers, one of their flights in France, but I did that with Minoo, the paper conservator. We just brushed them off and had fun holding them up to the light to see what was on there. They were being re-housed for storage. They had been sitting in one of the storage areas for many years in the box that the donor had put them in, so an acidic cardboard box.

Ferrous Corrosion Ferrous Corrosion inside a Magic Lantern

They were all piled together, touching one another, so Minoo and I were putting them in the little paper folders that they were supposed to be in so they could properly be in their own little folders, not touching anything. We brushed off the dust that they were on. We made sure that they weren’t flaking horribly. If they were, she’d set it aside or if it was broken, because some of the plates were cracked, she would put it on board between more board to hold it all together so it was one cohesive piece for storage. I don’t think something like that could go on exhibit, really, because it would be damaged from all that light exposure.

Alex: Well, thank you, Brooke. That was really interesting. That concludes our podcast here today at the Henry Ford. I just wanted to thank all of you guys one more time, and I look forward to speaking with each of you again in the future.

Kevin: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Why Historic Preservation? Talking with Historic Preservation Students about their career choices (Episode 66) ]]> Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D5E94AAE-9BEE-5044-160F6158AAEA0E7F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D5EE27BF-B681-5126-D6E7D101B7E3BAAF Why Historic Preservation? Talking with Historic Preservation Students about their career choices (Episode 66) National Park Service Talking with Historic Preservation Students about their career choice Today we join NCPTT Jason Church as he speaks with members of the Student Preservation Association at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this podcast SPA members talk about why they chose historic preservation as a career path 1072 no full 66

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with members of the Student Preservation Association at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this podcast SPA members talk about why they chose historic preservation as a career path.

Davis Allen: Hi I’m Davis, I am a senior undergraduate student, and I am from Atlanta, Georgia.

Derek Llamas: I’m Derek Llamas, I’m also a senior undergraduate student. I’m from Waynesboro, Georgia, I’m also the president of SPA.

Jaime Dail: I am Jaime, and I am a second year grad student, so I will be graduating with an MFA.

Maggie O’Neill: I’m Maggie, I am the SPA communications director, I am also a senior undergraduate in historic preservation, and I am from Montvale, New Jersey.

Eli Lurie: I’m Eli, I’m from Boston.

Jason Church: So you guys have all chosen to come here to SCAD to study historic preservation, why is it? What is it about historic preservation that interests you?

Derek Llamas (BFA, Historic Preservation 2016) cleans a grave marker in Laurel Grove Cemetery North during Preservation Week 2015. Derek Llamas (BFA, Historic Preservation 2016) cleans a grave marker in Laurel Grove Cemetery North during Preservation Week 2015.

Derek Llamas: It’s sort of funny, whenever this question comes up. The original reason I got into preservation always seems so silly to me, a little juvenile, because honest to god, the original reason, I just thought that old houses were pretty. It sounds very simplistic, but that was the original reason. I originally came to SCAD and entered the interior design program. But I transferred into this department under the recommendation of a high school history teacher of mine, who told me to check out this department; history was a pet subject of my high school. I was already interested in beautiful architecture, and architectural interiors. Obviously my interior design degree that I was pursuing at the time, and so I thought this was a great way to get some history and some beauty and some architectural 101, and of course since I’ve been here I think now my reasons have expanded, certainly there is a community aspect that I enjoy, and I think it’s a good way to bring communities together, which is important I think as the world grows smaller from technology.

Maggie O’Neill: I kind of had a similar path, when I was, even now, I always really liked stories. Everyone who knows me that I will talk endlessly and will just tell stories constantly given the opportunity. But I started off on photography actually and worked my way through stories that way and worked my way through people that way. Like in high school you see a lot of people doing photo shoots in abandoned places, it was definitely my niche, so it was definitely where I liked to go. I liked to break into things and shoot there, but over time I drew less away from the physical photography aspect and more towards, “Okay why is this place abandoned? What was someone doing with it? Oh my god they’re gonna knock it down” which did not sit well with me.

And much like Derek, I ended up in this department through a recommendation of my AP art history teacher in high school, who recognized that I liked the art history side of it, but that I also really preferred the architectural history side of it, and even then I would end up coming in with stories about all the places we were studying in class. So she knew that I was looking at SCAD, and she said they had a great historic preservation program why don’t you check that out before you fully commit yourself to photography, which I’m glad that I did. I don’t know if that would have ended well for me.

Davis Allen: I grew up in Atlanta and it was pretty infamous for knocking down anything that was relatively historic. So I was always surrounded by that, and I’d get really passionate about saving historic buildings. From just when I was a young age, and I knew growing up that I wanted to do something related to architecture or design, but I wasn’t really passionate about new contemporary design, or polished glass and steel buildings. I thought they were just kind of there, and I was really drawn to historic buildings. So when I found out about this program, I thought it was definitely a good fit for me.

Jamie Jamie Dail (MFA, Historic Preservation 2015) removes failed mortar from a historic brick wall.

Jaime Dail: I guess for me it kind of started at a young age because I grew with a family farmhouse that we used to go visit, so it was built in 1855, and at the time I didn’t know anything about it other than it was this old building that my family had. So that actually started me into my path for undergrads, I did architecture so that I was really interested in the building environment. So I went through that and as I was doing my studies, I actually did a study abroad in Spain. So at the time we went and saw a whole bunch of, all these sort of buildings that a lot of things were going on with, and at the time I was really interested was the adaptive reuse part of it. So taking these historic structures that were no longer relevant for what they were originally built for and kind of seeing how people were using them for current times. So that they kind of got this new life instead of being torn down.

So I got offered a recommendation from one of my professors, they were like oh well if you are really interested in this, you should really think about preservation. And so at the time I didn’t really know what that was, and so I started looking into it and found out that the department was here at SCAD. So I was like oh that sounds really cool and so the further I’ve gone into it, the more that you see every building has a story to tell and not just the new architecture that’s being built. And why its built but then why they were built originally whenever they sustained so long.

Eli Lurie: I was accepted to SCAD for architecture and it was my first quarter here and I was going through architecture alone, and then I found out about the historic preservation department, which I had never thought would have been a career and a job and a future path for me. So I sort of talked to my parents about preservation and all the things it could offer for me, for the future, financially, that type of thing. My dad was just not for me going for this career path, there wasn’t a good money outlook for it, there wasn’t a good financial future for it. So that really worried him, so after that I decided that I was going to do a double major with architecture and historic preservation, and with that came a minor of architectural history.

So here I am with all three of those and hoping to do adaptive reuse one day with that. So that I can do both architectural plans for that and have a preservation outlook with that, that most architectural offices don’t keep with them. They don’t really keep with that preservation mindset that I feel like is very crucial whenever you are doing anything involving historic or older structure.

Davis Allen uses a Faro Focus laser scanner to document a historic structure on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. Davis Allen uses a Faro Focus laser scanner to document a historic structure on Lantau Island in Hong Kong.

Jason Church: Well we can definitely hear there’s a passion in all of your stories, but you all came about it in a very different way. What do you hope, once you leave school and enter the job force hopefully, and start a career path, what do you all hope to do with your preservation degrees?

Davis Allen: Our program, I found, is pretty unique in regards to a lot of preservation programs in that they really stress adaptive rehab and adaptive reuse of historic buildings, and how you can accommodate modern needs into a historic building. So I myself, along with I know a lot of other people, would really like to go into that field, a lot of times through architectural firms. So that’s eventually something I would really enjoying doing.

Derek Llamas: Well, sort of riding-on-the back of Davis’s statement. I fall into that category. I find adaptive rehab to be the biggest draw in preservation to me. I’ve always enjoyed doing projects and taking something that other people might look at as being older or obsolete, maybe unusable … Taking it and transforming it into something amazing. I think I got some of that working with my grandmother. My grandmother works on vintage and sometimes antique furniture. Sometimes it’s refinishing, sometimes it’s re-purposing, but I’ve worked on that with her for a few years, and I enjoy doing that and I think that’s the draw to adaptive rehab for me. I like to see a project from beginning to end.

My family also questioned a little bit, much like Eli’s, the profitability aspect of it, but I think that preservation is going to be, especially adaptive rehab, is going to be a growing field. I think its going to be a trend really as more people are saying, empty-nesters as well as people from our generation are wanting to live in historic districts, in down towns. I have a positive outlook for it, and I’ve got a little bit of entrepreneurial aspirations, so I hope to have my own adaptive rehab business.

Maggie O'Neill and classmates measure the Savannah Powder Magazine to create HABS Standard documentation. Maggie O’Neill and classmates measure the Savannah Powder Magazine to create HABS Standard documentation.

Maggie O’Neill: Going in a completely different direction from everyone else. I definitely really, really love the adaptive rehab aspect of preservation. However, as I have gone through this program, I’ve realized my draw tends to be more towards historic landscapes and advocacy in general. I’ve always been for, a vast majority of our projects, the one’s coming to mind is my preservation law class. We had to do an advocacy project, which is something I was excited about to being with because I love getting the word out about things, I like talking to people. I like communicating about preservation and getting the word out, raising awareness. However, with that class I became kind of infamous for promoting the preservation of landscapes in general, whether they’re natural landscapes or urban landscapes, or things like that, just anything that’s threatened because of the build of a mass building or development, general development.

I’ve become infamous for this. If I don’t bring up The Palisades in New York and New Jersey at least once a class per quarter, its been a very strange quarter for me. I will scream about it. Actually, while I was presenting about that project, broke a chair. I was so involved and getting so hyped up about it, but I tend to fall under just sustainability and environmentalism and really promoting the conservation of land and landscapes for both preservation purposes and also for preservation planning and climate change awareness and planning for that as well. I think preservation fits into that niche very well and it’s somewhere that we can definitely expand too, and promote the general sense of preservation with them.

Jaime Dail: I think mine, mine’s kind of similar to the two stories we’ve heard. Just from my previous experience being in the architecture field and then also coming into preservation, a lot of what I’ve seen is that you have the architects that do architecture and you have preservationist that do preservation and so there seems to be somewhat of a gap between the two. There is some that, you know you have preservation architects but they just don’t seem as prevalent as I feel like they should be. So I guess my goal is to help be that bridge between, even if it’s a small scale, just being able to do the architecture drawings but then also have the understanding of the preservation and how to address these buildings if it comes up in project or something else, to be able have the mind set of those so that they can both have equal parts instead of one being less than the other. So just being about to mix the two together.

Maggie O’Neill: I think jumping off that, just I speak for everyone here, correct me if I’m wrong. We would all long term within preservation like to see it be promoted more as something that’s not a scary word. You see a lot of people won’t call themselves preservation architects because preservation can be seen as old ladies in tennis shoes or chaining themselves to a building they don’t want to be knocked down. Again, I speak for everyone, our department and everyone that we’ve encountered through conferences or just general meetings, is not like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but our generation is much more making preservation more accessible to everyone. I think long term if we can make it accessible to everyone we will all be content and have achieved our goal.

Derek Llamas: Yeah, I would definitely say we’re maybe not the house museum generation. We’re looking into how we can make these historic places relevant to today by making them usable by people of all walks of life. There’s also a lot of talk about universal design. How can we make places compatible with ADA, special needs, all sorts of things, and I think that we’re the generation that’s very interested in that. And I think it’s a good point in time for that, because again I stress I think people are getting more interested in that rehab. People want buildings with character, and hopefully we can capitalize on that.

Jaime Dail: I think one of the big things is, preservation is typically seen as, you capitalize things. So you take it an older building and you stop it right whenever it, or landscape. Whenever it gets to that stage of significance in fifty years, when people don’t want to touch it anymore because, they go its frozen in time. I think something that’s an in opportunities that’s missed because then if you freeze it like yes you get to see all these great things, but then it may actually end up hurting it in the long run because it’s not longer relevant for the future generations that want to use it. So that way if you can find. I think that’s adaptive reuse is such a good thing and you can still keep the integrity of the building and the character of the building and put a new function inside of it. So just being able to use both of them without having to stay such hardcore into “You can’t touch anything.”

Derek Llamas: And as its often said by some of professors, the building that is already there is the “greenest” building. So it’s also environmental, it really is.

Eli LurieEli Lurie: That’s one thing I found in the architectural program is that its just inconceivable for most people. Most people will be like “Yes, this is going to be very green building LEEDS Silver“, Net-Zero, that type of thing. What they don’t realize is if it’s on a property that’s already has a structure, tearing that structure down, all of the waste within that one building from building it, living in it, tearing it down, moving it offsite, putting it in a landfill, that’s a lot more harmful than their Net-Zero building that’s going to be there for probably thirty to forty years, which is the lifespan cycle of a current building that they are building in these days.

Derek Llamas: Think we have to plug that back in to the part. Cause some people do have trouble…

Jamie Dail: …understanding that.

Maggie O’Neill: Well I think from my end as the SPA communications director, you’ll hear a lot about people talking about social media and social medias role in things. I think because the next generation of preservationist is starting to move in, you’re seeing a lot more social media presence. You will see a lot more house museums, “like our house museum page”.

Now, okay that’s great but then a lot of social media campaigns to save things. Like the first one to pop into my head, unfortunately, is Glenridge Hall which was just completely demolished and I am still heart broken about. There was at least something to do. There was at least a protest managed and organized because of social media and you see a lot of things like that starting to pop up now that younger people are starting to moving in. It’s definitely something to take advantage of both as professional, well professional organization and as a professional, like young professional joining in because if we have a presence. Like SPA has a presence on social media and a lot of people follow us, and a lot of people have tweeted us and let us know about things, and that’s important because without having that outlet to speak no one is going to listen.

Derek Llamas: Yeah, I think we certainly have to take control of all of it, make use of all the tools that are available to us. I think maybe that that’s the area where we are definitely going to improve upon. Not just social media, one of the ideas that was presented more than once during this past year’s National Trust Conference was the idea that sometimes when preservationist are looking for allies, looking for people to back their projects you don’t go to other preservationists. Sometimes you go to people who have a different reason that they might help you save this building. They might not care that much that the building is historic or that it’s beautiful, that’s its got this perfect neoclassical facade, they might not care. Maybe a city needs a new health center and you can show them how this building is perfect for them.

I think making use of all those tools, all of the connections and sometimes that means going outside our comfort zone. You know, going to speak to people that we aren’t always so use to speaking with; real estate developers certainly come to mind. But I think its important that we start getting our place at the table that’s the thing. If you shut off communications with anyone you don’t have a place at the table and they are never going to get any of your input at all. I’d rather be at the table putting in my preservationist’s penny, you know where I can rather than not have any influence at all.

Jason Church: Well thank you for all of you and coming and talking to us today and we hope to hear from each of you in the future about projects your doing and as your careers develop and thank you again for talking with us.

Derek Llamas: Well thank you for speaking with us.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye everybody.

]]> HOPE comes to African House: Talking with Monica Rhodes and Molly Dickerson about the HOPE Crew Program (Part 2) (Podcast 65) ]]> Thu, 30 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/674677E2-9ACC-D970-7EAB223F93A82E31.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-679C7406-C323-4323-62B536A51DBA1729 HOPE comes to African House: Talking with Monica Rhodes and Molly Dickerson about the HOPE Crew Program (Part 2) (Podcast 65) National Park Service Monica Rhodes on the HOPE Crew Project at Melrose Plantation Today we join NCPTT Jason Church as he speaks with Molly Dickerson facility's manager of the Melrose Plantation And Monica Rhodes, manager of the HOPE Crew Program for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In this episode, Jason is talking with them about the recent HOPE Crew Project at Melrose Plantation. 739 no full 65

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Melrose Plantation Melrose Plantation

Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation of Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT Jason Church as he speaks with Molly Dickerson facility’s manager of the Melrose Plantation And Monica Rhodes, manager of the HOPE Crew Program for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In this episode, Jason is talking with them about the recent HOPE Crew project at Melrose Plantation.

Jason Church: In our last podcast, we spoke with Monica Rhodes about the HOPE Program. Today, we are here at Melrose Plantation where the HOPE Crew is finishing work on the African House. Molly, can you tell us a little bit about Melrose?

Molly Dickerson: Absolutely, well Melrose Plantation is owned and operated by the nonprofit Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches. They’ve been in operation since the 1940s, they gained Melrose in 1971 through a petition that they made to a land company that had recently purchased Melrose. At that point, they began restoration efforts on the plantation with the goal of operating it as a house museum. They were able to accomplish that goal but of course, their cyclical maintenance on all of our buildings and the need to undertake larger projects at times and African house was one of those projects.

African House African House

I came on with APHN about two years ago and they were speaking with a local architectural engineer firm in regard to the needs of African house. Although this firm was incredibly experienced in new construction and modern construction, they didn’t have a lot of experience when it came to preservation. Certainly when it came to a building like African house, there is no other building like African house so there were some red flags, there were some recommendations that were incredibly inappropriate for our desire to restore African house appropriately. At that point, I contacted National Center for Preservation Technology and Training to see if they could put us in touch with somebody with experience in preservation engineering. It was Sarah Jackson that put us in contact with someone and was a lifesaver. I mean, she really helped us with that project immensely.

Simultaneously, we gained the attention of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Stephanie Meeks, the president and CEO, visited Melrose. In addition, I submitted a nomination for African house as a National Treasure that was accepted and then, Monica was in the South, Monica Rhodes, was in the South looking for locations for a HOPE Crew project and it was Sarah, once again, that brought her to Melrose and when she explained the program, and we compared that with our needs African house, it just seemed like a perfect fit. We needed to do a restoration, we wanted to- it was a preservation restoration effort jointly. We wanted to reach out to people of great experience so part of the hope model is that they use a preservation trades expert and a preservation advisor.

In this instance, our preservation advisor was NCPTT and Sarah Jackson as well as Andy Ferrell. Then, our preservation trades expert was Alicia Spence and Gerald David. They had great experience in traditional timber framing, which is the construction of African house. It has a masonary base and then, the upper story is all hand-hewn cypress. They had a lot of experience with that so our relationship with all these parties brought us into a great partnership and we’re really happy with the results. Another great aspect of it, the model uses youth, young men and women who have some experience in construction or carpentry but want to learn more about preservation in particular.

Melrose Arts Festival Melrose Arts Festival

The Texas Conservation Corps, they identified young men and women that were interested in learning more about hands-on preservation and particularly, timber framing. Our group, for the most part, was very enthusiastic and learned so much. To see them grow and experience over the eight weeks that the project went on was exciting and to know that we were passing on this traditional trade to the next generation was also a great thing that we didn’t initially intend for when it came to the restoration of African house so it was a wonderful byproduct.

African house, in particular, had so many hands that touched it that made it what it is from William Metoyer, our plantation founder, he had it built. He was actually born a slave and went from being a enslaved person to a land owner and patriarch in the Cane River, Isle Brevelle community that’s still rich today. Also, it was constructed by enslaved people so the Africans it, it tells their story. Melrose, from 1919 to 1940ish, was an artist’s retreat and it housed artists that came to visit so it tells their story as well. Also, it houses the African House Murals that were done by Clementine Hunter, interestingly she became the most famous artist to leave Melrose but she was not an invited guest. She was an employee of Melrose so all of those things make African house so special and the construction method, it shows the way they constructed things before we had modern conveniences that we have today in construction but it was built very sturdily. I mean, it stood for almost 200 years before we needed to intervene so even that alone kind of tells a rich story that we wanted to make sure to preserve by using those same building methods when we went to preserving it.

Jason Church: Thank you Molly for telling us about Melrose and APHN. Now Monica, would you tell us about your involvement here in Melrose?

HOPE Crew saws timber for the African House roof structure. HOPE Crew saws timber for the African House roof structure.

Monica Rhodes: Sure, so they are working with a very experienced preservation professional, Alicia Spence who is also connected closely with the Timber Framers Guild. Alicia has worked on projects both in America and internationally so she is well known for the work and her work in the timber framing world. We are working- we have six corps members out there right now working alongside of Alicia with her guiding their work. They’re working on, right now they’re reframing or they’re doing some framing work around the structure. Their learning how to hew timbers, which is something that they probably wouldn’t have been … timber hewing is not something a lot of jobs call for but when you have those specialty skills and you can stand up and say, ‘well, I’ve done this before,’ makes all the difference.

They are learning those skills, their learning how to pit saw, they’re learning the process from beginning to end what it takes to really restore and rehabilitate a timber frame building. I think, it’s my hope that there really gaining something from being connected not only to a project and learning those skills but to the stories of these places. That is also what’s important about the hope crew program is gaining some real skills that in the next few years are going to be critical if we are going to be good stewards of our historic resources in America. We are going to need those trained professionals to be able to do that work.

Then, on the other side, it’s my goal that they connect closer to the history that’s in their own backyard. I mean, I’ve worked on projects where corps members have lived down the street and have never had a reason to come to the National Park Service and never come to that park. Had an idea what the story was about but if there is no reason to come there or if the park isn’t … there’s nothing for them to do or if there is no programming that really brings them into it, well, there is still that disconnect. There are now only getting the skills but they are getting to know a historic resource in their own backyard, like I said.

Then, the stories that are in these places are extremely important. I mean, you’re working on a- to think about the Africa house, these core members are working on a structure that was built in the 1800s. I don’t know what they think about when they go home and they lay their head down at night but at some point, it’s going to have to sink in like, ‘man, I’m working on something that was probably around’- was definitely around before their great-grandparents were even born. It was there, it was on this landscape and maybe it will sink in with them a few years from now or something along those lines but it’s not everyday that you get an opportunity to work on such a historic place, a historic building with such a rich story.

A member of the HOPE Crew shaves down a timber. A member of the HOPE Crew shaves down a timber.

What they also don’t get is, I think with preservation, is really knowing the people who built these buildings and in the case of Africa house, this is slave labor that built these buildings and other types of labor, rehabilitated over the years. Now, they are part of that story so they can see how this place was constructed, how the bricks are laid, how the timber has come together. If that says- what I think it could also do kind of turn or change their minds around what slavery was about. It wasn’t about people out, you know, picking cotton. The people were constructing things, using building technology. You can look at African house and you can see its connection to African architectural style so it provides all of these types of things.

For a corps member who really wants to get into it, there are these layers. I mean, if they’re interested in gaining more experience about preservation planning, they can look at Melrose plantation and kind of see how these buildings are situated. How the APHN curates these buildings and once they’ve got that, they’ve got their interpretation or if they want to get more into timber framing, I mean, there’s countless examples around Louisiana where they could take the same skills and go out and be paid for the skills that they started here at Melrose. I think you’ve asked me this question but this program has so many implications and we are just getting started here so I’m very excited to be a part of it and just plant seeds in people’s minds

The HOPE Crew team pauses for a photo after completing the major framing work. The HOPE Crew team pauses for a photo after completing the major framing work.

Just know, okay, working out and being a part of a project from seven until five every day and working with your hands is not your thing, then, are you interested in interpreting stories? Because that’s a part of preservation. If that’s not your thing, well, are you interested in the legal structure that supports our field? If you want to be an attorney in preservation law. There’s marketers specialize in marketing to preservation communities. There’s so many ways you can cut our field and this program just provides a little peek into everything that we do. If you want to wear a lab coat, you can be in the lab testing water and making paint.

There’s so many things that we try to introduce these corps members to if working with your hands or being out and hammering and pit sawing isn’t your thing, there are so many other ways you can be involved in preservation. We’re just trying to train and introduce a new generation to such a field that touches every single person in this country that we just haven’t done the best job at really selling and really marketing what we do nationally but we are everywhere. We touched a lot of corners and to get young people involved in that at 18, 19, 20, 21, it can be life-changing.

Jason Church: Thank you both for talking with us today and I hope to hear from each of you in the future.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time. Goodbye, everybody

]]> Where Preservation is Needed, there is HOPE: Talking with Monica Rhodes about the HOPE Crew Program (Part 1) (Podcast 64) ]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/67CDF613-098E-844D-A61948AF59C02442.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-67CF4E9B-FB0F-3D63-B249A7B1D25A4625 Where Preservation is Needed, there is HOPE: Talking with Monica Rhodes about the HOPE Crew Program (Part 1) (Podcast 64) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Monica Rhodes, Manager of the HOPE Crew for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In this episode, Monica Rhodes talks about HOPE Crew projects and the program's youth outreach. 1051 no full 64

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today, we joined NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Monica Rhodes, Manager of the HOPE Crew program for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In this episode, Monica talks about recent HOPE Crew projects and the program’s youth outreach.

Jason Church: Tell our listeners a little bit, what is the HOPE Crew?

HOPE Crew at Little Bighorn. HOPE Crew at Little Bighorn. (Montana Conservation Corps)

Monica Rhodes: Sure, the HOPE Crew stands for the Hands-On Preservation Experience. It is a new program of the National Trust For Historic Preservation to connect preservation projects with youth corps all around the country. Identifying trained professionals to come in and lead the work. Craft experts is what we call them in the program. Generally, that person has 10, 15, 20, 30 years of experience working on something like window restoration. That’s their specialty. That’s how they made their living. Working with those professionals to guide the work of youth corps who, Youth corps are in every state. They do all types of work, trail clearing, road work, for example, but never really gotten into preservation as a movement before. Again, the youth corp movement, they do a lot of things. Their roots are with the CCC.

If you imagine that type of work and what those young people were able to accomplish, you can copy and paste 1930 onto 2015, and you got that same labor force is still out there working. Now, it’s called the corps movement. If you imagine CCC, imagine them doing preservation projects and working on places that matter to American history or a part of our collective story. Connecting those young people to preservation projects, to teach, what really I found is a skill that is quickly leaving the workforce.

Most preservation professionals who have these hands-on skills are 50s, 60s, 70s. I even met someone who are in their 80s. They’ve done an excellent job with their career. Now, it’s time for them to have a real way to pass those skills on, and that went off times. We see the program is really stepping up to create that connection. There’s an inter-generational dialogue between people who are very interested and work very hard and want to learn about preservation, providing them opportunity to learn and connecting them with someone who does their job very well. That’s a snapshot of HOPE Crew and who the major players are in the program.

Jason Church: You mentioned students who are already in the Conservation Corps movement. What background do these students have that makes them interested in preservation?

Monica Rhodes: They’re large range. It runs the range of interest. Just to step back, the program is partnered with the organization called the Corps Network. They are the major voice behind the youth corps movement. Corps like AmeriCorps and SCA all fall under the young brother of the Corps Network. Whenever we need a corps, the Corps Network connects us to that particular corps in Wyoming, for example, or Montana.

Corps members, Some are completing their GED. Some are just finishing up high school or headed to college. There are corps members who have worked with and known, who have completing a 4-year degree and are looking to either if their background is architectural history and they did an undergrad, where they’re looking to get hands-on experience and learn a little bit more about preservation. We’ve had corps members who’ve done photography and journalism as their educational background in the university setting, and they still want to learn about preservation. They didn’t have an opportunity to do it.

We see the programs really introducing the feel to a larger audience who normally wouldn’t have an opportunity to work on a building that we’ve built in the 1800s. That’s not an everyday thing, get that. That doesn’t come by that often.

Jason Church: How would a student who has interest in this or hears about the HOPE program get involved?

HOPE Crew members at Little Bighorn. (Montana Conservation Corps) HOPE Crew members at Little Bighorn. (Montana Conservation Corps)

Monica Rhodes: Easy, they would join a youth corps. That’s typically how the program operates. We work within the infrastructure of youth corps. Youth corps is our wheel-oiled machines. This may be too much in the weave of things, but they have worker’s compensation, for example. They go through safety training. This is typical, this is their routine. On any project, they take someone out on, we know that a corps member is protected and is well trained to be on that job site. They also do job skills for corps members, how to fill out a resume, how to do those types of things or people or how to make a resume or put together a very strong resume. They do all the types of work.

For someone who’s interested in getting involved, the first step is join in a youth corps. They may be working on non-preservation projects. They may be in the backcountry clearing some trails or moving some stones around or working on a dam project, for example. Then a HOPE Crew project will come along as a part of their tenure with the youth corps. The first step is getting involved in youth corps and when there’s a project in a local area, then you reach out to that corps. As simple as they’re requesting, that they’re interested in getting into preservation.

Jason Church: Now, did they ever recruit specifically for preservation projects?

Monica Rhodes: Yes, they do. I was saying about 20% to 30% of our corps we worked with, they’ve already had a ready-made corp together already. A group of people that they just move around to project-to-project, and it happens to be a HOPE Crew project that they’re moving to as a next stage, as a part of their time with the youth corps. Most times, we’re working the Park Service or NCPTT and other organizations who are interested in having someone who has a construction background, for example. We will ask the youth corps to go out and recruit for someone who has roofing experience or window restoration experience not because we’re trying to exclude anyone, but because the job requires that they have a baseline understanding of how power tools work or be comfortable with working on scaffolding, for example, if the jobs calls for that type of work. When that type of request is made from the property owner, then we go out and we try to recruit the best people to fit that particular project.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about some of the projects that you’ve worked on.

Hinchliffe Stadium before the HOPE project. Hinchliffe Stadium before the HOPE project.

Monica Rhodes: Sure, we’ve worked on in the first year of the program, and we just celebrated the first year, March 10th of this year. Again, just about a year old. We completed 18 preservation projects around the country. We worked with over 100 young people and veterans on these projects. We worked at all 37 structures, helped support $3 million of preservation work that are, again, that federal partners and non-federal partners are putting in to historic sites. We’ve been a part of those types of projects. We’ve worked everywhere from Little Bighorn, working on the Custer National Cemetery with the Montana Conservation Corps. Working down at Texas, the Texas Conservation Corps on LBJ’s National Historic site. We’ve worked up in High Park New York on FDR’s garage roof.

We’ve worked in a lot of different places and a lot of time zones. We’ve worked down in Atlanta with the Greening Youth Foundation, supplying corps members and working to repair shotgun homes that happened to be right across the street from the birth home of Martin Luther King, Jr. We’ve done some pretty high profile projects and looking to do much more in this coming year.

In April of 2014, the National Trust did a project in Paterson, New Jersey. What I did mention before is the Hinchliffe Stadium is a national treasure for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. What a national treasure is a place that has national significance or place where we can show it has national implications for the preservation movement. If we’re working with lighthouses, for example, the strategies that we used to save that lighthouse can extend beyond that project, and other partners can use that as a grounding to what their doing on their lighthouses. Hinchliffe Stadium is national treasure. It was significant because it’s a Negro League baseball stadium. It’s the only Negro League baseball stadium that has NHL Designation, so a National Historic Landmark status.

One of the strategies for Hinchliffe Stadium was to come up with a day where we needed to involve or wanted to involve the community in the cleanup of Hinchliffe Stadium. The stadium had been closed for about 20 years, filled with graffiti. There was no real connection for this baseball stadium and community members. In its hay day, the stadium, of course, had a baseball history, had a racing history. They played football games in that stadium. People in their 30s, 40s, and 50s had those memories of Hinchliffe Stadium being a place where they went on Friday nights to watch football. Anyone in their 20s and 30s and teenage years didn’t really have those types of memories they could recall about being in the stadium and just knowing the space and really didn’t even know anything about the history of that stadium and what it represented for the Paterson, New Jersey.

As one the strategies there, again, was to involve the community, and so we came up with an idea to repaint the interior of the stadium to get rid of all the graffiti. Of course, it was really what we saw as a cosmetic in the sense, but I think what it provided for the community was a deeper connection like they walked in, graffiti everywhere, they left that stadium, and it has completely changed. We worked with our partner Valspar Paint to provide 1,000 gallons of paint to put 2 coats of paint onto the stadium.

HOPE Volunteers painting at Hinchliffe Stadium. HOPE Volunteers painting at Hinchliffe Stadium.

The way that we organized it, we had the young people or anyone under 20, 30 come in and put the first coat of paint onto the graffiti. They had the roller rolling right over all of this graffiti so they could really see every time they rolled, they were being a part of the preservation of the stadium. They immediately saw their efforts. We had the individuals who worked 30, 40, and 50 and had other experiences with the stadium come in and apply that second coat of paint on. It was 700 volunteers that we had to be a part of this day. Not to confuse it with a regular, typical HOPE Crew program with a crew size that is 4 or 5, 6, 7 people. It’s a smaller, more longer project scheduled for this type of project.

With Hinchliffe Stadium, that was a 1 day, 700 people came in, participated, painted. It was all hands-on deck there. We feel very good about the work that we were able to accomplish, how we’re able to organize all of those people, and then what it means for the stadium in itself. We’re talking to the city about doing some bond financing and funding and going to reuse plans for the stadium. I think what it also did was it showed the city of Paterson and the community members of Paterson what was possible when people came around and worked together for a very short period of time, what they could accomplish as a community. Yeah, I think, we did a pretty good job down there working with that project.

Jason Church: For our listeners, if we have a project that we think would be a good project for the HOPE Crew, how do we involve as a property owner, as a steward of historic site in trying to get the HOPE Crew to come out?

Monica Rhodes: Sure, we’re interested in working on all types of structures. I’d like to call our … What the work of a HOPE Crew is typically low-hanging fruit. It’s basic window restoration, basic carpentry projects. We wouldn’t ask them to do anything or we don’t do projects that are overly complicated or 3-year projects. We want to make sure that people have a real sense of accomplishment when they leave a job site. They saw it at the beginning and they’re walking away from it, 6 weeks later, and it’s dramatically different. It’s from their work that they can really see a tangible difference.

If people are interested in and getting involved or they have a site that they’re thinking about, we’d like for those projects to be fully funded. HOPE Crew members are paid for their work. We see this … We take it very seriously as a job training opportunity for participants. Not only funded to support the labor, but have the funding in place to have the materials there and also to bring on a preservation expert to be a part of that because that’s essential to them or to the project, meeting Secretary of Interior’s standards, we have to have that person in that position to be able to do that.

Hinchliffe Stadium after the HOPE volunteer's work day. Hinchliffe Stadium after the HOPE volunteer’s work day.

Fully funded, we like projects that are straightforward, not overly complicated for corps members. We have worked on and are open to working on projects in the backcountry but the more visible they are, connected they are to communities or in places or even if it’s in a rural community, if there’s a neighborhood around it or a community surrounding these historic resources, that’s better. We can pull people from that area to be a part of that project.

Those are the main things we look for, for these projects, fully funded, visible and have a public benefit, try to not work on private, places that are in private ownership, just because we want to make sure that corps members can’t take. Bring their families to these sites and walk around it or just really be a part of that. Those are some things we look for. It’s pretty easy, pretty straightforward.

Jason Church: Thank you so much for talking to us today, Monica, about the HOPE program and introducing us to the kinds of projects you do, the kind of people, the students and youth that you’re empowering. We really appreciate it. We hope to hear more from you in the future about future projects.

Monica Rhodes: Yeah, I look forward to sharing more. We have a very busy second year coming up, so I’m more than happy once every everything calms, my sanity to sit down with you and look back at year two together. We certainly appreciate you for inviting me on to the show to talk to you about the HOPE Crew program and all of the good work that the National Trust is doing to engage a new generation in historic preservation and really highlight the very good work that all of the partners are doing. It’s a pleasure.

Jason Church: Thank you very much.

Monica Rhodes: Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time. Goodbye, everybody.

]]> Saving Art Environments and Unpermitted Dinosaurs: Talking with Jo Farb Hernandez about SPACES (Podcast 63) ]]> Tue, 12 May 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/67F246B4-E54D-C23F-17AB962653E272A4.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-6AFB628E-E403-0F7B-46F3D1BAF5049D94 Saving Art Environments and Unpermitted Dinosaurs: Talking with Jo Farb Hernandez about SPACES (Podcast 63) National Park Service Talking with Jo Farb Hernandez about SPACES Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Jo Farb Hernández, Director of SPACES. In this episode, Jo Farb talks about SPACES and the organization's efforts to bring awareness to our environment and their self-taught artist creators to documentation and preservation. 1001 no full 63

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to The Preservation Technology Podcast. The show that brings you to people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services and National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Jo Farb Hernández, Director of SPACES. In this episode, Jo Farb talks about SPACES and the organization’s efforts to bring awareness to our environment and their self-taught artist creators to documentation and preservation.

Jason Church: Jo, tell us a little bit about what is SPACES and what you do there?

Hernandez lecturing, at a Spanish film festival about a film on Josep Pujiula, summer 2014. (Sam Hernandez) Hernández lecturing, at a Spanish film festival about a film on Josep Pujiula, summer 2014. (Sam Hernández)

Jo Farb Hernández: SPACES is a non-profit organization. The acronym stands for Saving and Preserving Arts and Culture Environments and this was a non-profit that although it wasn’t formally incorporated until 1978, it actually began in the late 1950’s with a group of people that bonded together. Just community activists and artists and architects and people that were aficionados of the earth to save the Watts Towers when the city of Los Angeles decided that they were public news and its needed to be take it down.

Originally, it was really centered on the Watts Towers. I think that the people thought that this was an anomaly. The fact that there was this monumental piece of public art. Then, they started realizing that there were some other sites in California and then they thought it wasn’t just the California thing. Then, they realized as people traveled and as information about the Watts Towers grew and other people heard about its stuff that in fact this is an international phenomenon.

Originally, it was interesting because the founder, Seymour Rosen thought that, “They’d be out of business in five years,” because he thought that they would identify the sites, they would advocate for them, everything would be fine, and then they’d be over. As it turns out, we’re discovering more and more sites. I don’t remember exactly how many we have listed right now in the website right now. Probably, close to 1,500 around the world. We discover new ones every week. People come to us with information about new sites, new images, new texts, that kind of thing.

Jason Church: When people contact you about a new site, what’s the approach that SPACES takes?

Jo Farb Hernández: People usually contact us through our website which is www.spacesarchives.org. Sometimes, they contact us at the eleventh hour when the bulldozers are at the other and they’re block practically and they all of a sudden realize that they want to try and save the site.

Stacy Mueller, archivist, working in the SPACES offices in Aptos, CA. (Sam Hernandez) Stacy Mueller, archivist, working in the SPACES offices in Aptos, CA. (Sam Hernandez)

Depending on what they need at the time and we do try and help them in those kinds of situations. There’s not too much we can do at that point except write letters, make some phone calls and try at least stave off destruction until we can see what the situation is and see what might be negotiated.

Sometimes there were issues like non-payment of taxes or somebody’s has a hold of building permit, those kinds of things. Sometimes those kinds of things could be easily resolved. Sometimes there are other more public health kinds of issues that seem to be a little more difficult to resolve.

One of the reasons that we think SPACES is so important is because it documents all these sites, identifies them, it advocates for them but it documents them. Therefore, if these sites do turn out to be ephemeral, if they do come down and many sites do, at least we have the records of what used to be there.

That’s helpful certainly in preservation if a site has become degraded and people bend together to save it. We have the documentation of what it used to look like so that conservators can look at it and they can form decisions about the procedures that they undertake.

I think the bottom line really between whether something’s going to work or not in terms of saving is whether the local community is behind it. I can come in from afar and send a letter to a congressman or to a city council person saying you have to appreciate what’s in your backyard but if I don’t vote in his district, he is not really going to pay any attention to what I have to say. It really is about getting community support, getting community organized to save their sites that have become part of the identity of the region where they live.

Jason Church: For our listeners who might not be familiar, describe to us what you mean by an art environment.

Hernandez at Basanta’s house, squeezing thru a door he made purposefully small so his wife couldn’t escape. (Sam Hernandez) Hernández at Basanta’s house, squeezing thru a door he made purposefully small so his wife couldn’t escape. (Sam Hernández)

Jo Farb Hernández: Art environments are sites that are generally monumentalist. Some level, it could be either in terms of their size. It could be a castle or a building or cathedral or something that’s been radically modified or altered or decorated or it could be monumental in number of components. Sometimes we see situations in which a sculpture has created 300 smaller sculptures but they’re all in a small little place and they’ve just become monumental in their impact.

They’re typically created by artists who do not have formal art or architectural engineering training. They typically start in a very modest fashion. Maybe, somebody fashions a birdbath and it’s successful and then they’ll make a little pond next to it and that’s successful and then they’ll go on and on. Typically, they have really no sense of the monumentality that they’re going to achieve until they look around 20 or 30 or 40 years later and see what they’ve done.

I think sometimes, people that really haven’t studied these works as much have a tendency to believe that the intent from the beginning was monumentality. The artist that I’ve studied and spoken to, I think out of the hundreds, maybe there’s one or two that have this overall intense idea of what they’re going to create.

They have success in sculpting, in embellishing, in creating and so they sculpt more, they embellish more, they create more. Success breaths success. As they do it, they learn they developed their technique, they developed their skills. When you’re making art, you’re thinking about making more art. It just kind of keeps going.

Jason Church: If someone contacts you, they didn’t necessarily have a space but maybe they had documentation of one, they visited one when they were young. Maybe they were related to or had some connection. Do you also take documentation and that sort of thing. How does that work?

Jo Farb Hernández: Yeah. Absolutely. We are absolutely thrilled when anybody contacts us with the possibility of providing information of art environments or actually any kind of self-thought art to us but particularly art environments as where our major focus is.

We will give them a good home. We are digitizing as many documents as we can. Legally, some documents are copyrighted and we don’t have the permission to digitize or post them online so those are available in our offices for personal review. But as many as possible, we’re digitizing so that we can get the word out about these materials on its wider basis as possible, a worldwide basis.

Jason Church: Can you tell us about some projects that you’ve worked with, some sites that you’ve worked with? Will you help them in their preservation efforts?

Jo Farb Hernández: Yeah. We’ve had several successes. We don’t always have happy endings given the circumstances of this field in which usually as I said because artists aren’t starting out thinking that they’re going to be making this monumental thing. They don’t pull a permit or they don’t do the right kind of foundation or they don’t do whatever they need but we have had some successes.

The most recent one that I’ve been really proud of about has been the site in Spain, Joseph Codulla, who has been working for 45 years on this site that unfortunately the land wasn’t his. He was actually forced to demolish the site three full times. He had to demolish it. He was grumpy for about a minute and then started over, build it all up again and then have to demolish it again and it happened the third time. Finally, the community got involved and really, really banned together because they realized that it had become part of the identity of their village.

Jo Farb Hernandez with Julio Basanta, artist who created the Casa de Dios, in Épila, Spain, 2014. (Sam Hernandez) Jo Farb Hernández with Julio Basanta, artist who created the Casa de Dios, in Épila, Spain, 2014. (Sam Hernández)

Last fall, the county designated to local heritage site which means that there will be some money and some thought at the very least about how to protect the site and how to provide some public access without having a potential for public safety issues. That was really super because we did a worldwide petition to get people to sign that. They were able to go in with look, we got thousands of international supporters as well as your local community. You need to pay attention at the fact that this is important.

There have been other circumstances that have just been kind of smaller successes. There was another site in Spain that a guy had built. Full size dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus Rex and some other dinosaurs. They got after him because he did not pull a building permit. It’s like, “Really. You have building permits for building dinosaurs? Who knew that?” They want to come and take them down. These guys get so energized by building. Once somebody makes them start, they lose a lot of the drive, they lose a lot of inertia of building stuffs as well.

So, I wrote to the mayor and explain to him. A lot of times if we can point them to the SPACES website and so that they can see that there’s the genre of work of people that have built monumental things in their backyards and it can become a draft for their villages rather than something that they need to be confronting and fighting against. They got back off. They rescind the penalties and now they are off just happily building again.

Those are really important steps I think in terms of expanding the definition of art especially in situations where there hasn’t been formal art education. People have the sense of the only thing that’s artist, what’s on the museum and it’s usually in a frame and usually has a picture of Madonna or something on it.

Just to wrap their minds around the idea that people can be creative in these different kinds of ways using different kinds of materials is a leap for a lot of people. We feel that as much as possible, they get the information about the fact that there are hundreds of these, thousands of these around the world. It will help to support all of the artists.

Just in general, we are actively soliciting images for the website. We are actively soliciting texts if people know about a certain site. If they’ve visited the site, they like to write a small text on the site, we’re thrilled because we’re trying to populate the website as much as possible. There’s so many site, there’s so many environments that we’re just raising to keep up. Any help that anybody wants to volunteer, we’re thrilled to take anybody’s documentation, images, etc. Of course, if somebody writes or let us post photos at the website, we apply full credit to the artist or to the writer and photographer.

Also, we don’t give the exact address on the website if that’s a problem because sometimes either the artist doesn’t want visitors or the site may not be secured or stable enough to have visitors come by. We would like to maintain the database as closely as possible to the reality of the world situation so we can keep the information in our archives yet just post the general information on the website so people know it exists that they can’t quite figure out how to get there.

We’ve been working with people all over the world to do this. We’re really very excited to find major sites in all kinds of places and really encourage people to keep their eyes open. If they find a site or if they have questions about the site to contact us and all our contact information is on the website.

Jason Church: Now you work for sites all over the world, do you see any major commonalities with the artists all over the world?

Jo with artist Juanita Leonard on Montgomery, Louisiana. (Jason Church) Jo with artist Juanita Leonard on Montgomery, Louisiana. (Jason Church)

Jo Farb Hernández: I tried to look at singularities rather than things in common because these aren’t like a group of artists that all went to school together or are all working at the same time and all had the same kind of influences and all were responding in a certain like the artisms of history.

I try not draw too many threads between them. In general, you can say they’re men. As I said they don’t have formal art or architectural engineering training, in general they’re self-taught and use the tools of the trade that they had prior to retiring which is another one. Generally, they’re older when they start.

Of course, there are exceptions to every statement that I just made. I think that the only thing that really is something that we can in general say even to much greater extent that those other caveats is that they often face existential issues. The house they’re building doesn’t look like the house next door, or the house across the street and the neighbors get upset or whatever or they’re building a 15-foot high dinosaur or they’re ornamenting a tomb in a way that seems unseemly to their neighbors. It could just be that they weren’t very good crafts people and they didn’t build in a way that would enable the material to survive. It could be that they used material itself that was ephemeral.

There are existential issues for most of these sites. That’s again why documentation at all levels are so important. One of the things that people do ask me this, “Well, you know, I have documentation of site but I see you already have photographs of it.” I say, “No, no, no. Any photograph, all photograph, we’re happy to have.” Every photographer of course has a different eye. They see it on a different day. They see it on a different time of the year. They see it in a different year. All of those documents and photos, we’re thrilled to add to the archives.

Jason Church: And, I know that most sites are constantly changing.

Jo Farb Hernández: Constantly changing. Right. Absolutely. We really encourage people if they’re going to go specifically to document a site that they be really clear about the exact date that they took it because if it’s looking like this on Wednesday, it may not look like that on Thursday.

Try to get the artist’s name for the different components of the site if that exists. Try to make sure that you get large wide shot views as well as detail shots. A lot of times, people are so taken with the details that they focus on those and then we don’t really have an overall sense of the site as a whole.

Any documentation. Of course, we can suggestion people do site plans and full inventories and that kind of thing but that comes later. If people are just passing something or on a Sunday outing or whatever, we’re happy to take any kind of shots. You don’t have to be a professional photographer.

Jason Church: Thank you so much, Jo, for talking with us. I hope listeners will go check out the SPACES website. I know I’ve donated things to it and I think it’s so fantastic mission that you guys do.

Jo Farb Hernández: Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much. We really appreciate your support.

Jason Church: We hope to talk to you again about future projects.

Jo Farb Hernández: Looking forward to it.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time. Goodbye, everybody.

]]> Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of Old Sheldon Church with Chad Keller (Podcast 62) ]]> Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E326BA43-F912-E0B9-C6A55FD831C46522.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E335B754-FE97-1D6A-14BB886E33AA4C86 Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of Old Sheldon Church with Chad Keller (Podcast 62) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Chad Keller, professor of historic preservation at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this episode Chad talks about a SCAD class project to digitally document and reconstruct Old Sheldon Church in Yemassee, South Carolina. 719 no full 62

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation, Technology, and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Chad Keller, professor of historic preservation at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In this episode Chad talks about a SCAD class project to digitally document and reconstruct Old Sheldon Church in Yemassee, South Carolina.

Old Sheldon Church Old Sheldon Church

Chad Keller: This was a ruin that was constructed in 1751 in Yemassee, South Carolina. It’s an angelican church and at this point it’s a ruin. One of the things that we are really interested in and excited about this was the fact that it is a ruin, that it had been destroyed twice. The first time was during the Revolutionary War and then it was subsequently reconstructed around 1825, and then it was destroyed again in 1865 during the Civil War.

Since then it has sat as a ruin. More recently, probably in the last 10 to 20 years there’s been more interest in the site and it has been cleaned up. Have images from about 1940 where you can see all the growth and things like that that have been embedded within the brick work and such. That has at least been taken care of.

This project was really part of a new class that was introduced at SCAD and it’s called Digital Technology and Historical Preservation. Really what it’s about is utilizing newer digital technologies within the research process. Primarily what we want to do is we want to be able to create new avenues of research, new types of documentation, and then thinking of ways that we can reuse the material that we have collected for site interpretation so that eventually it can be disseminated to the public.

To that end, this project involved using both traditional analog methods but then also digital methods of documentation. When I say analog, that’s just basic, traditional tools that we’re all used to with pencil, paper, and a tape measure. Some other things that we ended up doing with that project was also laser scanner and also photogrametry. It might sound in some ways like over kill, but this class was focused on introducing students to different ways of documentation.

Some of the things that we do with that is that with the laser scanning we were able to convert those back into two dimensional drawings. Some people might question, well why if you’re collecting this three dimensional data because that is what you’re collecting with the laser scan data. Even with the photogrammetric data you’re collecting three dimensional points. Those three dimensional points can be pologomized, turned into a 3-D model. As I said previously, people might question why you’re converting those back, but according to HABS standards, things need to be in two dimensional drawings. The whole point of this is to be able to at some point, to possibly submit them to HABS but then, even for students that are going to be working in different industries like per se construction, that they’re still going to be requiring, at least at this point, two dimensional forms of drawings.

Maybe 10 years from now we’ll be looking at things at 3-D on a construction site or on some sort of hand-held portable, but at this point the most accepted method of measured drawings is in two dimensions.

Jason Church: Now you say HABS wants them in two dimensional. Is that for view-ability, or archives, why is HABS

Professor Chad Keller with students at Old Sheldon Church. Professor Chad Keller with students at Old Sheldon Church.

looking for the drawings?

Chad Keller: It’s primarily I think for the way that they have set up their archiving. With the methods that are important to HABS with the 500 year old of ink and then the fact that needing to be carbon based you can’t have digital. That’s the methods that they’re wanting you to be able to submit these things. That’s all about archiveibility at this point. That’s some of the reasons of having to create the 2-D drawings.

Jason Church: The church you’re talking about, what is it’s surrounding area, what’s the landscape? Is it situated in a town, is it in a rural area?

Chad Keller: Yeah, it’s outside of Yemassee, South Carolina. It’s called Old Sheldon Road, the name of the church is Sheldon Church. It pretty much sits in the middle of nowhere, but at one time it sat pretty centrally to some major plantations within the area. It was the seat for the Bull family. The Bull family was instrumental in laying out Savannah. William Bull was instrumental in doing that. There’s evidence through the written record of where there was the Bull family crest that was located within the church. As the Bull family would walk into the entrance of the church, which at that point would be on the south side of the building, on the north side of the building is where the family crest would be. As they walked in they would be able to view upon their family crest.

Jason Church: You collected this digital data. What’s your plans to do with it, with these scans and the photogremetry?

Chad Keller: At this point one of the things was it was primarily an exercise for the class to be able to understand the differences between collecting data through the traditional methods. Doing this documentation traditionally and then being able to see what it was like using these newer, digital technologies. That was the main goal of the class, but what could be done with this information is that it could easily be handed over, with definitely some more work to create some sort of HABS format for that.

Some of the other things that could be done is that this digital information could be re-purposed for site interpretation. At this point there really isn’t any interpretation of the building on site and there really isn’t much of an interpretation of the building on the web so that you could have more of a web presence with that.

With these laser scans you can create 3-D models out of them. One of the things that the students did with this project, as I said it was a ruin, one of the things I was really excited about was the fact that they actually reconstructed the building and created a 3-D version of what they thought the building looked like in 1825 when the building was reconstructed the second time.

One of the things too is that in choosing the fact that it was the 1825 period and not the 1752 period from when it was originally constructed, is that there just wasn’t much information within the historic record. The students, through their research, were finding more information about the 1825 period and we agreed upon that that has the most information, and that should be the route of restoring that period.

How they ended up doing that was through the written record, through traditional research, and then also going around and looking comparatively at other churches within the region that were constructed around the same time period. Taking into consideration that this was a bit of a rural church and you wouldn’t find necessarily the same ornamentation that you would might find in a church in Charleston, but they were looking at other rural churches within South Carolina within the period at that point.

This could easily go onto a web site. They create a 3-D model of it that was put into Google Earth so this is something that could easily create some walk through or fly through at least to give people an idea of what it looked like. The other thing too is that this project could easily be continued because with 3-D modeling, sometimes people get the perception that, and especially with a rendering, that this is the final product and that’s really not true. This is more or less the first iteration. One of the things that could happen is for this to be passed on to other scholars of angelican churches of the period and for them to be able to vent this model and be able to say, “Well this isn’t accurate here. You might want to go back and re-think this aspect of it.” It could be an integrative model. This might be just the first generation of it.

Jason Church: It could easily be taken out and interpreted further and built onto.

Chad Keller: Exactly. Yeah, and then we could easily begin to show the whole process of creating the model and showing the different iterations and the different interpretations of that. In ways that through documentation and recordation, we always talk about process, especially in 3-D you can begin to show this process as well visually of how you first started out with the model and you have this first idea of what you thought and proposed it would look like. But then after further research and further discussion with colleagues and experts in the field, you’ve come to find out that maybe there was initial errors but then you’re going to go back and change that.

Jason Church: We need to keep in mind as conservators and historic preservationists doesn’t mean we’re architectural historians or curators so it’s good to involve the other fields into those decisions.

Chad Keller: Yeah and I think that brings up another point is that with the way the technology is going, there are so many other people that we’ve been able to work with through digital technology. That’s been exciting and I think it opens up opportunities to work with people that traditionally we haven’t worked with in the past. In some ways the field is expanding, but it gets a little bit smaller at the same time too. That’s been nice.

Jason Church: What other projects do you have planned in the future for your students?

SCAD students scanning the church grounds SCAD students scanning the church grounds.

Chad Keller: Well, this is actually for the first year it’s going to be mandatory. For all students in the preservation program, like last year was the first year that it was offered, it was an elective. Now it’s going to actually be part of the program so every student is going to have to take this course. Which is great because this is the way that the field is going as we see here with the summit. We know a lot of people from other industries and other universities are talking about these things, doing research, so all of these students are going to be getting exposed to that.

It’s really going to be on a per-project basis. I’m not set on this sort of model that we did the last time which was the project at Old Sheldon. Those things will be discussed, but we’re looking at other projects, other opportunities to do things in Savannah. For instance there’s been talk of doing more historic GIS projects. It’s really going to be dependent on what sort of things are available at the time.

I do want to try and mix it up. As I said, this year might be GIS, maybe the following year we go back to more reconstructions and things like that. It’s going to vary but still stay within the core of looking at these different digital technologies that are available.

Jason Church: Well thanks for talking to us. We look forward to maybe talking to you in the future about other work that your students are doing.

Chad Keller: Yeah that would be great. Thanks, it was nice talking to you and thanks to NPS and NCPTT.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye everybody.

]]> The Molecular Weight of Silk and Interpreting “Biscuits” (Podcast 61) ]]> Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E352E0E3-BB00-FF10-31945E6330969FF7.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E353F41F-F2CC-E411-C78D9A14D545250D The Molecular Weight of Silk and Interpreting “Biscuits” (Podcast 61) National Park Service Katheryn Hallett Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Katheryn Hallett, preventive conservation manager, Historic Royal Palaces. In this episode, Katheryn is talking about her time as an NCPTT intern and the conservation career that she has had since. 1106 no full 61

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of Americas Heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services, National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Kathryn Hallett, preventive conservation manager, Historic Royal Palaces. In this episode, Kathryn is talking about her time as an NCPTT intern and the conservation career that she has had since.

Jason Church: Kathryn you have the distinction of being the first summer intern at NCPTT, which we’ve had lots of and we’re doing several interviews with past interns currently and you’re actually the first. So can you tell us a little bit about spent your time at NCPTT?

Kathryn during her NCPTT internship. Kathryn during her NCPTT internship.

Kathryn Hallett: Sure, I didn’t realize that I was the first intern so that is quite an honor. My internship was in the summer of 2001, between roughly the beginning of June to the beginning of September. The internship came about because, at the time I was carrying out a master’s program in conservation science in London, and that was at the Royal College of Arts. I was doing a placement at The British Museum and my supervisor there was a scientist called Sue Bradley, who was a contact of the materials scientist at NCPTT, Mary Striegel. I was looking for a summer internship as part of my master’s program and Sue suggested that she thought I would get a lot form working with Mary, and I was interested in working abroad.

I contacted Mary and she very generously accepted my request for an internship and I yes, flew over a very long journey over to Alexandria airport which, for me was quiet an eye opener, tiny airport via Houston. Mary herself came and picked me up and was so very generous with her time and hospitality. While I was at NCPTT, the main project I worked on was … well I was working on a small part of a larger research project, to evaluate an awful organic polymer that was proposed for use on limestone. The aim of this polymer coating was to try and reduce sulfur dioxide deposition. It was an ongoing program and a joint research project between NCPTT and DuPont, the chemical company.

I was working with Mary and with another scientist called Elizabeth Bede, and a further scientist called Deig Sandoval. Together they had put together this project with DuPont, and I was able to go and work for a few months to carry out some of the practical work. I was working with the environmental chamber that had been built in the lab at NCPTT, so I got to know that piece of equipment, which is quite an amazing resource. I pretty much was able to take it apart and clean it and put it back together again and all of that sort of thing. Mary and Elizabeth taught me how it worked, what it was for, lots of buttons and switches. Essentially enabling them to expose samples of stone to very carefully controlled and monitored environments. So, things like the wind speed, the concentration to the various pollutant gases, temperature and humidity and all of that sort of thing.

We would then expose samples of limestone, some of which had been treated with this proposed polymer coating and some of which hadn’t been treated as a control setting. Then following the exposure to sulfur dioxide in the big environmental or chamber, we then extracted any deposited pollutants from the limestone and analyzed them using the ion chromatography equipment, which I think you just had upgraded. Then we were looking for, obviously sulfates, dissolved sulfates that might have been deposited on the stone to indicate how effective the polymer coating had been. A fascinating project to be a very small part of.

Jason Church: After you left your summer at NCPTT, where did you go from there, back to your master’s program?

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, That’s Right. I then went into the final year of my master’s program. It was a three-year master’s program because essentially it was run on a part-time bases. I would be part time at the Royal College of Arts, and part time in the labs at the British Museum, so it’s well over three years. My internship at NCPTT was between the second and the third year. Once I got back to London, then I was into my final year at the British Museum and writing up my dissertation, which was on a completely different topic. I was looking at lighting conditions for ethnographic exhibitions, so something quite different. Then I completed my master’s in 2002, then I was job hunting and I was really, really fortunate, I managed to find a job pretty much straight away. I then was working for Historic Royal Palaces, where I still am today. I was very fortunate to find employment, from yeah, right from the moment I graduated in 2002.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about your job now, with The Royal Palaces.

Hallett using an HPLC for size exclusion chromatography to determine the molecular weight of tapestry silk. Hallett using an HPLC for size exclusion chromatography to determine the molecular weight of tapestry silk.

Kathryn Hallett: When I was first employed, back in 2002, I was taken on, on a research contract. Over here in Europe, we have a funding program that’s run by the European Commission and at the time, in 2002. There was a funding round available for cultural heritage research projects. Historical Palaces was a partner in a European research project to study the deterioration of tapestries, so I was taken on as scientific researcher to work specifically on it from size exclusion chromatography to evaluate the molecular weight of silk.

We were looking to see whether we could use that technique as a marker of damage in silk, to help us to understand how deteriorated were the tapestries in the collection at Hampton Court. There were over seventy historic tapestries at Hampton Court, so it’s a fantastic collection to work on. That was the first three years. That project I was using size exclusion chromatography and I really benefited from the experience I had had in Louisiana because although ion chromatography and size exclusion chromatography are different techniques the actual equipment I was using was not so different. Obviously, I was using a different solvent and a different separation method, but in terms of the software, writing programs and how to care for the equipment, there was a lot of similarities so I was able to hit the ground running on that research project, which was very helpful.

As a result of that research project, we were successful in finding a good analytical method for identifying the level of deterioration in silk for tapestries. We were correlating the molecular weight of silk with the tensile strength, although obviously, the tensile strength tests were done on samples, because as you can imagine it’s very difficult to take the right sort of sample from a historic tapestry that one can then use for tensile strength testing, it just wasn’t going to work. So, from the historic tapestry samples, obviously very, very tiny, that we were able to take I could use size exclusion chromatography on those samples, but for the correlation between molecular weight of silk and tensile strength, those experiments were all done on model samples.

So yes, it was a fantastic project to be involved in, working with a great collection. That was up until 2005, when that project completed, then I was fortunate enough to be taken on a permanent contract as a Conservation Scientist at Hampton Court. I carried on some of the research that we’d started on the tapestries, but I also broadened out the research, really to support all of the conservation functions of the royal palaces. The charity is an independent conservation charity that at the time looked after five historic sites in the UK. As well as Hampton Court, the charity is also responsible for Kew Palace, which is in Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, the Tower of London, obviously an iconic historic site, world heritage site, Banqueting House in white, which is home to an amazing original Rubens’ painted ceiling, and also Kensington Palace, which is in Kensington Gardens and is still partly occupied by the royal family.

From that three year research project, from then being taken on as a permanent member of staff, I was able to widen out the research to underpin all of conservation functions of the department at Historic Royal Palaces. At that point, I started work on other materials, as well as tapestries and in fact also returned to stone conservation for a time. I was involved in a research project looking at preventive conservation Reigate stone, which is a particularly troublesome type of stone we have her in the UK. It’s a kind of sandy limestone or a limey sandstone, depending on who you talk to, incredibly porous and incredibly soft. Large parts of the Tower of London and Hampton court are built from Reigate stone and it causes us to have a big problem in terms of its preservation. It was great to be able to draw on some of the knowledge I’d learned with Mary Striegel and other colleagues at NCPTT about stone conservation to work on that project too.

Jason Church: That’s fantastic we would have ever known the connection between the two.

Kathryn Hallett: I know. Yeah, all of the research I was involved in, in Louisiana really helped me in many ways, not just learning about how to conduct a rigorous and large scale research project, but small things like, as I said, how to operate chromatography equipment, information about the chemistry and morphology of limestone’s. I’ve drawn so much on what I’ve learned from Mary and her other colleagues; it supported me very much in my career at Historic Royal Palaces.

Jason Church: That’s very encouraging, thank you. Any funny or interesting stories about your time here in Natchitoches?

Kathryn Hallett: Oh well, quite a few I guess, I’ve been racking my brains to try and think of some funny stories, and I’ve thought of quite a few actually. I guess, one of the first things that I noticed when I was in Natchitoches was the cultural differences between that town, and obviously I was use to London, but it gave rise to quite a few humorous situations for me. One example, I was staying in university accommodation for part of my internship and there was a supermarket quite a short distance away really, so I would obviously regularly go and visit the supermarket to stock up on my food. I didn’t have a car while I was in Louisiana, I didn’t really see the need for it, Natchitoches is quite a small town as you know.

I didn’t really expect to travel far, so I didn’t drive a car, but I found that that made me quite an oddity. When I would walk from my accommodation to the supermarket, a couple of times I had people pulling over an asking if I was all right because they were so unused to seeing people walking along the road. Whereas, of course, in London it’s the opposite really and people are very accustom to walking from a, to b, but I found that in Natchitoches that made me quite an unusual being. Especially when I was walking along the road in the August heat carrying my shopping bags and all of the kind folks in Natchitoches would think I was probably quite odd and pull over with their cars and see if they could help and give me a ride.

Jason Church: Yes, we’re not much of a walking town, for some odd reason.

Kathryn Hallett: No, which yeah, I found funny. Let me think, What else? Well as I said, Mary Striegel and the other colleagues I worked with, Elizabeth Bede and Deig Sandoval particularly, were so very kind to me, and the hospitality they showed me was amazing. They were always inviting me out for lunch and dinner, and showing me round and introducing me to people, so I really felt part of the community. One of the fun events they invited me to, and I don’t remember the name, but it was a festival, it was held at the university, in I guess one of the sports halls, it was over a weekend I think. During the festival I got the chance to try out some unusual cuisine, gator on a stick I had never had before and was quite unwilling to try, but I did give it a go. Everyone said, “Oh, it tastes like chicken,” wasn’t sure about that, but I gave it a go. I also got to soak up some of their fantastic blue grass music, have some daiquiris I remember was a big, lots of daiquiris, and enjoy the atmosphere there. That was fun. We had a great social life and everybody was so kind. I remember visiting a colleagues house for a crochet evening with lots of daiquiris. That was fun too. As well as all of the hard work that we did, I really enjoyed meeting everybody at the center and everyone was really kind in helping me feel at home.

Jason Church: Fantastic. You must have gone to Louisiana Folk Life festival.

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, that sounds about right, yeah.

Jason Church: Still a very standard festival for all of our interns to attend.

Kathryn Hallett: Oh good. It was a great experience and great chance to immense myself in Louisiana culture and have some of their Cajun cooking, yes all of that really. The cultural side of the internship, I enjoyed very much indeed. I remember being quite stunned about biscuits because in London or in the UK, a biscuit is something sweet that you have with your cup of tea, but something quite entirely different in the south of America. I enjoyed finding out about that to my surprise as well, that it wasn’t quite the biscuit I expected.

Jason Church: Well any projects that you have coming up that you want to mention to us, anything you have coming up in your current …

Hallett investigating the condition of the 16th century terracotta roundels at Hampton Court Palace. Hallett investigating the condition of the 16th century terracotta roundels at Hampton Court Palace.

Kathryn Hallett: At the moment, I’m working on a project to look at a Terra Cotta conservation. Again, as I mentioned, in my current roll I really focus on whatever material is required for the sort of conservation projects that we have coming up. So I can be working on any material from textile to arms and armor to gilded furniture, and so on and so forth, all of the contents of a royal palace. At the moment, my main research project is looking at a set of Terra Cotta roundels that are mounted on the gate houses of Hampton Court. They’re a fantastic survivor; they actually were commissioned by Cardinal Wolsey who was one of Henry the IIX advisors in 1521. There are eleven of these Terra Cotta roundels, they depict Roman Emperors we believe, and they’re still mounted outside on the gatehouse at Hampton Court.

We have been involved in a research project now since, gosh, probably 2008 to study the materials of these Terra Cotta sculptures to understand there manufacture original decoration because we know from the accounts at the time that they were originally painted and gilded, although they don’t appear that way now, to look at how they deteriorated. Some of them are in really good condition and others are in less good condition and then obviously to look at options for their conservation in the future. This research project has involved really every facet of conservation science, everything from looking at the geological provenance of the clay, we’ve been involved in ICP-MS trace element analysis to try and identify the geological provenance of the clay, that we believe is a local London clay.

I should say we know that the sculptor was Giovanni da Maiano, who was a famous Florentine sculptor, who worked at the court of Henry the IIX. We were looking at the geological provenance of the clay, so whether he brought his clay with him from Florence or whether he used a locally available clay. We’ve also been looking at thermoluminescence dating, because we know that all of the sculptures have been moved and have been restored in one way or another over time. We wanted to try and find out which where the original pieces and which are native additions. We’ve also been carrying out pigment analysis and using mammon microscopy, as I mentioned, to try and look at the decoration that might be remaining. We haven’t found very much, but in certain crevices and behind ears and noses of these Roman Emperor sculptures, we have found some traces of polychromy.

The second phase of the project has been looking at conservation options, so we’ve been trialing laser cleaning, for example, so that has been really successful. Removing black soiling from Terra Cotta is quite a challenge, because don’t have the same ease of color difference between the soiling and perhaps a paler substance like a paler stone, but we’ve been getting really good results with very little discoloration. That’s been very successful. We’ve also been looking at options for consolidation and various water repair compositions. We’ve been looking at different samples of mortars, different mortar mixes, different levels of hydrochloric lime components and we’ve actually been making samples and weathering them up on the roof of Hampton Court to help us decide which recipe of mortar is the right one to use. So, which one is going to weather well and be robust, but not so strong that it risks damage to the Terra Cotta itself. So really all encompassing holistic observation project that I’m really enjoying being part of.

Jason Church: Oh that sounds fascinating, maybe we’ll get to talk to you in the future, when you make some decisions on the sculptures, what decisions you made and why.

Kathryn Hallett: Yes, that would be great. The project is nearing its completion now so we’re starting to look up publishing. We published a paper in the ICOM-CC conference that was in New Delhi a few years ago. We published a paper there about our project and what we were looking at, obviously we’ve moved on since then and we’re now pretty much finishing off our ideas about the treatment phase. So yes, absolutely I’d be happy to talk to you about it another time.

Jason Church: Kathryn, thank you so much for talking to us, we’re glad to have caught up with you and to hear what our first intern has done in your time since here at NCPTT. We really appreciate it, we hope to talk with you again in the future.

Kathryn Hallett: Great, thanks Jason it’s been really great to catch up and relive my wonderful memories from Louisiana.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Laser Cleaning and Laser Scanning with Martin Cooper (Podcast 60) ]]> Thu, 29 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E36D5C4E-B66A-95B6-AD481743D131DDF2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E3711F9B-BB0B-C26D-F0864B17B85628B1 Laser Cleaning and Laser Scanning with Martin Cooper (Podcast 60) National Park Service Lynton Lasers Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Dr. Martin Cooper, a Consultation Consultant with Lynton Lasers. In this podcast, Martin talks about his work with Laser Cleaning. 905 no full 60

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Dr. Martin Cooper, a Conservation Consultant with Lynton Lasers. In this podcast, Martin talks about his work with Laser Cleaning.

Jason Church: Dr. Cooper, we know you mostly through lasers, that’s how I was introduced to you. How did you get into lasers and conservation?

Dr. Martin Cooper: Pretty much by mistake. I studied physics at University in Loughborough in England, applied for a few jobs, and didn’t get offered anything, and was toying with the idea of doing some research, PhD, and I just happened to see one day in the department there was an advert for a PhD looking into developing lasers for cleaning sculpture, in particular, bits of medieval cathedral from Lincoln. I thought that sounded interesting so we had a chat to the supervisor, who I knew, and I thought, “Yeah, I have a go and see what happens.”

Jason Church: How long did you stick with that?

Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT. Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT.

Dr. Martin Cooper: I spent three years at Loughborough working with Dr. David Emmony in the Physics Department there, did my PhD. Basically we were looking at different types of lasers for removing in particular hard black pollution crustaceans from limestone, medieval limestone carvings. I spent three years studying that. We ended up developing a prototype laser cleaning system that we tried out on a few bits of Lincoln Cathedral with the permission of the conservators there, of course, and that was pretty much it. Three years at Loughborough.

The work at that time, initially it was sponsored by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London through John Larson, who was head of the sculpture conservation there, so he got that program set up and running. He then, while I was doing my PhD, moved up to Liverpool to National Museums Liverpool so this project went there with him. By the time I finished my PhD, John had managed to get more funding to continue this research and development work we were doing. I finished my PhD then moved up to the Sculpture Conservation Department of National Museums Liverpool.

Jason Church: You were there for…

Dr. Martin Cooper: Initially I thought I was going to be there for a couple of years, ended up sticking around for twenty. No real planning there. Initially, we managed to get some funding from various charitable foundations in the UK to continue the work and help introduce this technology in the UK and training up conservators at the Museum there. Many sculpture conservators to work with the laser. It became fairly routine standard technique that they were using. We started to run training courses where we had conservators coming from around the world started running four of those a year. Yeah, I spent I guess about ten years working with the laser cleaning side.

I’m looking at the interaction of laser ablation of different materials as well, so all sorts of sculpture materials, things like limestone, marble, conductor stone, terra cotta, plaster, also doing various projects with students, so I’m looking at interaction of laser ablation with textiles and parchment and so on. After about 10 years, we began to get a little bit more interested in 3D laser scanning and we were successful in getting a big grant from the UK Government, which enabled public sector organizations such as the National Museums to basically generate funding instead of start to commercially exploit the research and development that they were doing.

The Museum in Liverpool, which gleaned that we started offering our services on the laser cleaning side and sculpture conservation, but also on the 3D laser scanning side to other museums, to heritage organizations, Liverpool authorities, and so on, as a way of furthering the technology, introducing it, and so on. Also, it’s we’re generating income potentially for the Museum, which could then go on to funding more development and research work and so on. I think I spent about 10 years working with my colleagues there, Marie la Ponce and Joe Parsons and various other people looking at developing 3D laser scanning techniques for cultural heritage applications, so very accurate 3D recording of sculpture, for example, monitoring decay, or replication artworks, which were at risk, that kind of thing, and also for reverse engineering and producing missing parts of sculptures and monuments that were being restored.

Jason Church: You mentioned replicating. How does that process working?

Dr. Martin Cooper: We were using; we were keen to develop or look into application of 3D scanning on the replication side. Being able to use that in a way, which allowed us to replicate sculpture without touching the surface. We were working with very fragile pieces, which you just couldn’t touch, you couldn’t take a mold from, maybe a piece where maybe it’s been outdoors, it’s so badly degraded, someone’s decided it has to come indoors, and then we can create a very accurate copy, which can go back in place.

We would typically scan the original object, two resolutions of about .1, .2 millimeter, then process the data to produce a very accurate 3D computer model, and then that could then be used to create the physical model and physical replica either go down two different routes that you go down, one of which would be computer-controlled machining where we could use the data captured from the scan to control a very accurate 3D milling machine to cut out a copy direct into a block of stone or we could use 3D printing technology, again, using the scanned data, to print a very accurate model, which itself could be the replica piece on this piece or we could then use that as a master pattern and take a mold from it and then cast into whatever material we want to use in these sorts of technologies. We are able to very accurately replicate marble busts in marble or into bronze, all those kind of things.

Jason Church: You moved on from that. Now you’re with Lynton Lasers.

Dr. Martin Cooper: That’s right.

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now.

19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool 19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool

Dr. Martin Cooper: I left actually Museums of Liverpool just over a year ago. I’ve known the guys at Lynton for 20 years, and Doctor Andrew Charlton, who’s the Chairman there at a meeting we had a Liverpool University years ago, got talking, and realized that the laser cleaning technology that we were using, for sculptural conservation, was very similar to the technology that Lynton Lasers was using for cosmetic and medical applications such as things like tattoo removal, for example, it’s the same type of lasers. They were, Andrew was very interested in getting involved in conservation side, same kind of technology, new income streams.

We worked with Lynton for a few years there to turn the prototype laser cleaning system that we had in the studio into a more user-friendly commercially-available piece of laser cleaning equipment. I think initially when Lynton got involved in the conservation side; they were expecting conservation to be quite a lucrative market. I’m not sure where he got that idea but I think quite quickly I realized that wasn’t the case but it was a very interesting field to be involved it.

The bulk of the company’s business is medical and cosmetic but they’ve been involved with conservation now for 20 years, small parts of the business, but interesting part of the business, and yeah, when Andrew found I was leaving the Museum, he offered me some work at Lynton just to see if we could spend a bit more time concentrating on the conservation side to help it develop and maybe offer a few new things, not simply building the lasers to sell, but also offering things like training courses, consultancy, testing, that kind of thing as well.

I’m now involved on working full time with Lynton purely on the conservation side and so helping them make contacts in the conservation field, sell lasers, install lasers, train up conservators to work with it, work with conservators to carry out testing, that kind of thing.

Jason Church: What kind of things do you cover in the training workshops that you do?

19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool after laser cleaning. 19th-century Istrian limestone panel relief from St. George’s Hall, Liverpool after laser cleaning.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Usually start off with a bit of background information about laser cleaning, where it’s come from, right from the beginning when lasers were first built back in the 1960s, when the pioneering work of Dr. John Asmus in the early 1970s and a bit of the history of the laser cleaning, look at what basically what a laser is, what laser radiation, what’s unique about laser radiation, why is it useful for cleaning applications, properties of laser radiation, look at a little bit about how the actual cleaning works, so what mechanisms, the underlying mechanisms behind laser cleaning. We’re working on artworks, and then obviously there’s the practical side and just going through setting up the laser, how to use it safely, looking at the health and safety issues, of course, also how to use it safely on an artwork as well from testing to practical work.

Jason Church: Can you tell us about interesting projects that you worked on in your career with both laser cleaning and scanning.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Certainly on the laser cleaning side, it’s only, if you were lucky enough to visit lots of interesting places both here in America and Boston and Philadelphia, and more recently I’ve been out to Australia to work conservation workshops there. I’ve certainly been lucky enough to travel and meet very interesting people. The thing about particular projects in the early 1990s, when it was still a relative, although John Asmus has done a lot of the work back in the 1970s, in the 1990s, it was still pretty much a new and innovative technique.

We did quite the interesting tests there where we would take out our old prototype Nd-YAG laser cleaning system that we’ve thrown together in the lab in Loughborough, where we’d literally you’d just gone and bought a laser off the shelf, built a trolley, screwed it together, stuck an arm on top, and there you go. That was our prototype piece of kit, which we would then shove in the back of a very clapped out old van and take to various places and doing all sorts of cleaning tests on bits of cathedrals such as Lincoln, we’d go ahead and do some work there with the conservators.

We’re doing some cleaning tests on the outside of Victoria and Albert Museum years and years ago, quite high up, various other cathedrals in the UK, we did some work on the Houses of Parliament as well. Certainly around the UK, we’ve left our mark usually in the form of a few cleaning squares, maybe a few centimeters square that probably touched since we’ve been back. We did one some cleaning tests with Lynton when I was at the Museums of Liverpool, we out to Copenhagen to what’s called the Marble Church in Copenhagen now where the conservators were very interested to try and look at using laser technology to remove thick, black pollution crusts from things like Swedish limestone and then Norwegian marble on the cathedral, on this particular church, but that was a long up from the scaffolding. I remembered that from moving and the wind quite hairy moments where we shipped, we’d flown the laser out, which at that time was quite a big, heavy unit, seen that it was all weighing maybe 100 kilo.

It was hoisted up on a very fragile-looking hoist. I’ve still got pictures of it being suspended 100 feet in the air, fingers crossed, hoping that it was going to get onto the scaffolding okay. It turned out all right. Looking at the scanning side, because again, there were a few people in the UK doing the kind of work we were doing at that time, we tended to get involved in all sorts of weird and wonderful projects that no one else would go near. You had other laser scanning bureau services, more typically we used to scanning engineering parts, bits of cars, that kind of thing, nice, smooth surfaces, but they wouldn’t be interested in scanning bits of artwork, which obviously far more complex and involve a lot more processing of the data afterwards to get good results.

We tended to get the most interesting projects, which initially we would take on and that sounds good and then you scratch your head a bit and think, “I’m not sure quite sure how we’re going to do this,” but we muddle through and get some quite interesting results and we help develop the applications and the technology, but we were involved in reproducing a marble bust of Emperor Caligula for the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen, which is one of the early projects we got involved with, and also we did a gilded bronze head of Minerva for the Roman baths in Bath in the UK, which was quite nice.

Obviously that involves quite a few steps in the process so basically this head of Minerva is one of their main pieces, important pieces, gilded bronze head; it was too fragile to touch. You can’t take molds from it so we were able to scan this head. We then printed a master pattern into nylon, our process called selective laser sintering, and to finish that off, so take out the build layers so that these models are built up in layers of about 0.1 in thickness. Take out these contours, hand finishing, that was then sent to the foundry, that was cast into bronze, then came back to us, patinenated the surface and re-gild it, conservators in the sculpture department worked on that one.

Remember, we’re doing one project, which lasted a bit longer than we anticipated. We’re working for Manx National Heritage for the conservator there, Christopher Weeks, who I’ve known for years, who was interested in scanning a boat, 18th century boat, I think the last of its particular type, so it’s about 8 meters long. Normally to scan something of that scale, you wouldn’t use close-range laser scanning, so you wouldn’t be scanning it to a resolution of .1, .2 mill. You’re using one of the longer-scale scanners type thing that we can use on buildings.

The problem was, this particular boat was in a cellar, this old building, and there was only about a meter clearance all the way around, and it was actually very close to the sea, very muddy cellar, and in the olden days, this boat had gone out of the doors, which you could go straight out into the docks, so basically when the tide came in, the wind was blowing in a certain direction, this is on the Isle of Mann, the water came in, because you couldn’t get one of these long-range scanners to scan it, the only option was to use a close-range scanner.

We took this really expensive, very accurate piece of kit from our studio, nice warm studio, into this cellar, and spent a week, the two of us, me and Annemarie La Pensee spent a week in this basement in January in the Isle of Mann, freezing cold, water coming in, lapping at your heels, scanning this boat, basically having to leapfrog the tripod all the way around, so we ended up with something like 16 different stations or positions where we’ve done the scanning from. The only way you’re going to capture that data, great resolution, any problem you then got is how do you stitch all this data together into one model that’s useful for someone?

We got there in the end several months later well Annemarie did, you basically generate huge amounts of data and try it turn it into something, which is useful, but maintaining the accuracy of the models, so it’s quite challenging, so we learned a lot from that particular project.

Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT. Martin Cooper testing the Lynton Phoenix laser at NCPTT.

Jason Church: Martin, Dr. Cooper, thank you for talking with us today. Hope to see you in Miami at AIC. I know Pam Hatchfield at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston is putting together a laser workshop as part of the AIC Convention this year, coming up in Miami, so I hope to see you there.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Yeah, I’ll see you there.

Jason Church: If not, maybe we can catch up with you at the next LACONA Conference.

Dr. Martin Cooper: Krakow, in Poland, 2016.

Jason Church: All right. Thank you for talking with us.

Dr. Martin Cooper: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to the today’s show. If you would like to more information, check out podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye, everybody.

]]> Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission (Podcast 59) ]]> Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E3A687C0-F8BF-49F1-0143C6EF8A0DD3E6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E3A81B88-A821-495C-5794BA24DCA60D22 Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission (Podcast 59) National Park Service Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Megan Lord, Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission. In this podcast, Megan talks about her work in Alexandria, Louisiana and her experiences since interning at NCPTT. 865 no full 59

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Megan Lord, Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission. In this podcast, Megan talks about her work in Alexandria, Louisiana and her experiences since interning at NCPTT.

Megan as a 2005 intern, documenting graves in Pineville, LA. Megan as a 2005 intern, documenting graves in Pineville, LA.

Church: So Megan, you were an intern here in 2005 in the Materials Research Program?

Lord: That’s right.

Church: What did you do when you were here?

Lord: Thanks for having me today. I’m glad to be here and that’s right. In 2005, I worked with you in Materials Conservation working on cemetery monument conservation training. So I did a lot of work in the Catholic Cemetery learning to reset monuments, mostly marble monuments that had broken, looking at learning to properly clean cemetery monuments, historic stone and putting together training methods to bring to church groups, people who are interested in taking care and properly maintaining their cemeteries.

Church: That’s right and you and I taught the first Cemetery Monument Conservation Basics Workshop in Anacoco, Louisiana, and that program has gone on now to teach two or three a year nationally that we do, and you and I were the first, that’s right. You helped do the curriculum for that program. So after you left here, what did you go on to do?

Lord: Well, I went back to SCAD, Savannah College of Art & Design for two more years. I finished my preservation degree there in Savannah and then the next summer and fall quarter, I spent at SCAD Lacoste in Lacoste, France, and so I studied there and got some hands-on preservation work. We restored a Lavoir there in sort of the valley where Lacoste is located. That was a great experience. Again, hands-on preservation work, masonry, restoring a stone Lavoir wash basin where they washed clothes around this farmhouse complex which is now, I have heard, one of the highest ranked most beautiful dorms in “House Beautiful”. It’s listed as one of the most beautiful dorms, so definitely wonderful facilities when I was there, not quite what they are now, but I actually worked on those facilities that they have now so I hope everyone appreciates that. Now, I had a great time at Lacoste doing hands-on preservation, really experiencing a historic small French Provence village and the lifestyle that goes along with it and traveling on our weekends and that sort of thing. So that was really an inspiring educational experience for me. I came back to Savannah the next year and ended up getting my MA in Architectural History also from SCAD. So I was really able to take advantage of the preservation in architectural history programs there and you know, those are just two things that are really, the hands-on preservation work and then the social and architectural historical contexts really go hand-in-hand and I am able to use those things today.

Church: I know you’re from Alexandria (Louisiana)…

Lord: Yes.

Church: …and I remember having conservations when you were here as an intern about how much you really loved your home town and wanted to come back and make a difference there and it’s interesting that you’ve literally traveled the world learning preservation, doing preservation and ultimately to do what you wanted, which was to come back, so what do you do in Alexandria?

Megan as Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission Megan as Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission

Lord: Sure, I am the Director of the Alexandria Historic Preservation Commission so we’re a division of the Planning Department in the City of Alexandria. Our Historic Preservation Commission is a little unlike other preservation commissions in that we are not regulatory. So we do not have guidelines that residents of the historic district have to follow. That gives us a little freedom to do some other events and sort of PR and outreach for preservation and educational programming and that sort of thing, so that we can educate people and give them good technical preservation information about how to do the proper repairs on their home, how to keep their historic windows and insulate properly in the colder months, that sort of thing instead of making them do it, but we give them the information and hope that they make the right decisions on their own. I’ve been there for four years now. We have seen a lot of interest, growing interest, from the community and from the historic district residents and even those outside, people wanting to move back into our historic districts. So we’re really happy with the momentum that seems to be gaining and we’ve had a lot of recent tax credit projects in our districts which are great because as everyone knows, when you do use state and federal preservation tax credits, they do require that you follow the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Preservation and so we don’t have to be seen as the bad guys enforcing those but we know that quality work and proper work will be done and our architectural history will be preserved there.

Church: You said historic districts, how many districts do you have?

Lord: We have three local historic districts; so we have our downtown area, we have the west end area, which at one time was its own small incorporated city before being annexed into Alexandria, and then we have the local garden district, which is probably the most well-known residential area, sort of a 1930’s suburb in our largest historic district and those are local districts. We have two National Register historic districts so a smaller portion of our local garden district is a National Register district and then we have a new National Register district that’s the Alexandria post war suburbs. National Historic Register district listed it in the summer of 2013 and so it is a post war district and we’re really excited and proud of this district. It is the very first mid-century modern district in Louisiana. It’s sort of a hidden treasure in Alexandria and we came together with some of the local preservationists and some people in the neighborhood and we were able to put together a successful nomination with the National Register and are really proud to be the very first mid-century district in Louisiana.

Church: So I know that was a really big project of yours, what other projects are you working on?

2-IMG_7019Lord: Sure, we currently are working with the Garden District Neighborhood Foundation for the local garden district group to put together our very first annual holiday tour of homes. So we’ll have four historic homes on tour December 13th and it’ll be an evening, they’ll be decorated for the holidays but we’re putting together the sort of historical tour version. So we’ve done research and worked with the homeowners on each of the houses and we’ll have a great tour that goes through and inside each of the homes. One of those homes is the Omar Bradley home, so when the Louisiana maneuvers occurred in 1942-1943 training for on-ground efforts in WWII, Omar Bradley, Eisenhower, they were all in Alexandria and sort of commanding this training and he lived in one of the houses. Another home on tour is Scott Thomas McDaniel home, which has been in the same family for 100 years and so it’s got a great family history. They’ve added on even a second story early in the 1920’s and so you really get to see sort of a Louisiana Planter’s cottage grow into this colonial mansion and the history that has gone along with that as far as it’s family history. There are some really neat details and kind of an evolution of architectural history too there. And then two other really interesting structures are; one is the Bottle House which is in someone’s backyard so a lot of people don’t know it’s there, but it is a home built entirely out of pharmaceutical and wine bottles from a pharmacy that’s located right on the corner. The owner of the pharmacy built the structure from the left over bottles. He built it in the backyard so it will be a night tour; it will be lit from the inside of those glass bottles and kind of glow. It’s really, really interesting the construction methods, the walls are entirely of glass bottles and all put together with bricks and railroad ties, so it’s really vernacular and local construction and it’s a really fun structure to visit. Then we’ll have the Walter Hill home on tour, which is just a beautiful Italian Villa in our garden district. The owners took on a seven year restoration doing most of the work themselves. It’s really beautiful, they did everything right and they took their time hand laid the tiles and the flooring themselves and a lot of care put into it so it really shows hands on preservation work done by the residents themselves, really bringing beauty back into a historic home. And we want to show people through these tours and other events that we do, that preservation isn’t out of reach. It’s not something that just happens in New Orleans or Savannah or Natchitoches but can happen in Alexandria too and you can do it yourself and it’s within your reach and it is well worth it and it makes a difference for our community. It establishes our sense of place in our districts. That’s something we don’t want to lose.

Church: Do you have any future projects that you want to mention to us?

Lord: Yes. One thing we did last year and we’re going to do again this year is our historic house fair. We do that in the spring and we got the idea from the Main Street program. We are not a Main Street community in Alexandria but we work with our State Historic Preservation Office and it’s an event that other Main Streets have done and we thought that sounds like a really great opportunity to get people in our historic districts out on the streets interacting with one another in a way for us to give them information about tax credits or preservation practices and connect them with local salvage companies and that sort of thing. Last year in the spring, we worked with homeowners on one block in our Garden District and we chose this block because it had recently had several homes on either end of the block restored using the tax credit programs. So they used tax credits so the restoration work was done the right way, not only did they receive a huge incentive by using the tax credits; we wanted to show off a really transformed block. You saw a block that had several rental properties, private residences that had been converted to duplexes and triplexes in some cases and absentee landlords. An investor who lived locally in the neighborhood and purchased those homes with the intent to restore them to single family dwellings and so did a great job of doing that and sort of bookended that block with other primary residences on the home, people who took great care of their property and valued their historic property. So it was a great way to show off preservation making a difference, revitalizing a neighborhood, an individual block really within a year’s time. So we took that, had some open houses, invited the community organizations to come out and had a little jazz band and created a great atmosphere for preservation, got people walking around the streets and had a good morning celebrating our neighborhood, our historic district and exchanging preservation ideas.

We have a great commission, we have a lot of people who are dedicated and have been for a long time to promoting preservation in Alexandria. So I really love my home town, never thought I would be back as soon as I did come back, but I have really enjoyed being able to work with people who are dedicated who know so much about the history of the town and a lot of that hasn’t been written down, so that’s one of the things that we’re working on is gathering that information. A lot of it is oral history, riding with some of the longtime residents and they know when a house has been altered or changed, they know the history of who lived there and so I’m collecting that information and writing it down and recording it for the next generations. And then we’re seeing younger generations move into our historic districts that have families that want their kids to grow up in the neighborhood with character and where they know and talk to their neighbors. So that’s really encouraging too and we’re seeing those younger people wanting to get involved. I really enjoy working with people in our districts and I think that’s something I learned when I worked in New Orleans. After I finished grad school, we moved to New Orleans and I worked with the state with the grant program helping people restore their homes after Katrina. We often called it social work for historic houses because everyone has a story that goes along with their house, everyone had a Katrina story that was really relevant and you needed to hear before you could help them be ready to make those changes and those repairs to their home. So not only did those stories come after a disaster but they come anytime you have a significant event history with your house. I really enjoy hearing those stories and helping people to do the right thing, make the right repairs and continue telling those stories through the architecture of the home.

Historic House Fair 2013 Historic House Fair 2013

Church: Thank you so much Megan. We look forward to hearing more about all the work you’re doing in Alexandria. I will definitely be down for the house tour. I want to see the bottle house now that you told us about it.

Lord: Yes, it’s really cool.

Church: Thank you, we hope to hear some more from you and maybe some of those house stories as well.

Lord: Yes, I’d love to share.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Conservation of a World Wrestling Entertainment Costume: Alison Castaneda, Conservator (Episode 58) ]]> Tue, 07 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E3DB4C67-F068-3848-CADA95929E930A48.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E3DE7C6B-00CB-29C2-BB9E60A07191EC03 Conservation of a World Wrestling Entertainment Costume: Alison Castaneda, Conservator (Episode 58) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Alison Castaneda, Conservator at the Textile Conservation Workshop of South Salem, New York. In this episode Alison is talking about a recent treatment to a WWE wrestling costume. 538 no full 58

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Alison Castaneda, Conservator at the Textile Conservation Workshop of South Salem, New York. In this episode Alison is talking about a recent treatment to a WWE wrestling costume.

Church: Alison, you had a very interesting poster here at AIC entitled “Adhesive Smackdown: Consolidating a Synthetic Leather Wrestling Costume.” Tell us a little bit about first of all, about what you do and where you work and then what was this project about.

Castaneda: Sure. Well I work at the Textile Conservation Workshop in South Salem, New York. I have been in textile conservation for about five years now. After graduate school, I trained there and I learned a lot. A Few years ago we got a call from the World Wrestling Entertainment. They had an outfit from Shawn Michaels, who is in the Hall of Fame, and they did not know what to do with it. It was synthetic leather, it was flaking really badly, it had been stored in a plastic Tupperware for many years so they brought it out and we tried to untangle all the chains, all the elaborate crosses and male symbols and finally we found just this really degraded synthetic leather chaps and top. So we were trying to figure out what we should do with it and we realized the first thing was to find out what sort of synthetic leather it was.

With some research and some testing, the Biostine Copper Test to be precise, we determined that it was polyurethane. Now there are two types of polyurethane, polyurethane ester and polyurethane ether. By boiling some of the flakes found in the box and sodium hydroxide for thirty minutes, we found that it was polyurethane ester. With that knowledge we started looking into previous conservation treatments and it turns out that a lot of polyurethane ester sculptures have been conserved in Europe and they’re using a lot of different adhesives but Impranil DLV and Plextol B500 seem to be the most successful. So using that research and also some of the other employees there, Mary Kaldany in particular is very knowledgeable in adhesives. She suggested I might also want to try gelatin and B72. So we bought some lengths of nylon fabric and we sprinkled the little flakes onto this nylon fabric and we tested the adhesives using the ultrasonic nebulizer. Now that broke up the adhesive into very, very tiny atomic particles so it would seep through the flakes and adhere them and not just rest on the top. We chose the nylon fabric because testing the piece that came in, we found that it was the polyurethane ester foam adhered to the nylon fabric substrate.

Pre-treatment detail top WWE, Ring Entrance Costume Top Pre-treatment detail top WWE, Ring Entrance Costume Top

So with the tests, we then had everything adhered and we wanted to see how well they were adhered. We used a blower, a brush, shook it a little, tried to move it with our fingers and we found that the Impranil DLV definitely adhered the flakes the best. So this is a polyurethane based adhesive so it makes sense that you would want to use it on polyurethane synthetic leather. Once we found that out, we vacuumed the costume. The structure of the foam with the nylon substrate then slightly expanded the foam layer very thin and then the embossed skin layer on top, so where the skin layer had fallen away there was just some powdery foam. We weren’t interested in preserving that. It wasn’t what the piece would have looked like; it was basically just adding dirt and texture and drawing in environmental pollutants. So we vacuumed that part up, the part where the skin layer was left. We kept it and then we sprayed the Impranil DLV in a 22% solution with the ultrasonic nebulizer. It adhered pretty nicely. Of course it’s not going to bring back the flakes that have already completely detached but it will keep anymore from falling off.

We then packed it up in an archival box, tied all the chains in place and hoped that they wouldn’t be swinging back and forth knocking into the flakes we just so time consumingly re-adhered and we gave it back to the WWE who was very happy and they have just brought us three more costumes for us to conserve in the same manner.

Church: In addition to the skin, did you have to do any conservation treatment to the chains and the charms hanging from them? Castaneda: Yes, actually. When the polyurethane degraded, it becomes very tacky and it sticks to the metal aspects. This costume also had mirrors so it was on the mirrors and using a dilate solution of ethanol, we wiped it off with some swabs and some mechanical action. They polished up quite nicely.

Church: What’s the age of this costume, do you know?

Sean Micheals Ring Entrance Gear Conserved Shawn Micheals Ring Entrance Gear Conserved

Castaneda: It’s not too terribly old. I think it’s from the late eighties. They seemed a little unsure. They did have records but they weren’t looking into them for this purpose. I think that’s the time of Sean Michaels.

Church: What is the future for this costume?

Castaneda: It’s too degraded to ever be displayed. So they just wanted to keep it in their archives, in their storage units, and I think for the most part the costumes they’re bringing us are set for long term storage, not to be displayed. I think they mostly try to display costumes that don’t need conservation as of yet. But polyurethane synthetic leather is a material that just naturally degrades. It basically has such inherent vice that air, moisture; anything will cause it to degrade over time.

Church: So the three they brought you now, do you know anything about those?

Castaneda: They’re actually all Shawn Michaels.

Church: Oh, okay.

Castaneda: Yes, they were from giant wrestling festivals, they’re yearly events that they use for; I’m not sure what they’re called actually. They are something else. One looks like a take on a gladiator’s outfit, another is somewhat zebra like and the third is red synthetic leather with black chains everywhere and the gentleman in charge of the archives told me that two sisters have been designing these costumes since the start. They got their start when one of the sisters had a crush on Shawn Michaels and mailed him a costume that she made just because she liked him and he was such a fan, he asked that the WWE take them on as staff costumers.

Church: Do they design just for Shawn Michaels or others as well?

Conserved Shawn Michaels Ring Entrance Gear Conserved Shawn Michaels Ring Entrance Gear

Castaneda: No, they’ve branched out. They do all the costumes now.

Church: Are they still using synthetic leathers?

Castaneda: It seems like yes.

Church: So there will be a lot of work in the future?

Castaneda: Yes, absolutely.

Church: So what other projects are you working on at the textile workshop?

Castaneda: We have got quite a bit of modern artwork now. We’ve been lucky enough to have some Matisse silkscreens. We’ve gotten a fabric panel from the Modern Artist Blinky Palermo. Other aspects of older textile art, we do a lot of silk embroideries, silk paintings, I specialize in the costume conservation and right now we’re working on a 1920’s English court gown, very extravagant, a long train, big feather headdress, fans, it’s quite beautiful but we also get a lot of flags. Those are always popular.

Church: I’m sure it’s always something new. It sounds like a huge variety of materials to work on.

Castaneda: Yes. Textiles are really in everything. You don’t realize how much they are.

Church: And where did you go to school? What did you study?

Castaneda: I went to FIT’s program in textile conservation. They also have a branch of curatorial but I love working with my hands and sewing so I stuck with the conservation track.

Church: Well thank you for talking to us and we’re excited to see more of the WWE outfits come out of conservation and hopefully one day be on display. So thank you for talking to us.

Castaneda: Thank you.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Plinth Magazine: Lessons Learned from the Small Museum (Episode 57) ]]> Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/E3F51194-D4F1-27C5-C457CFD087876EE4.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-E3F5EA53-A695-71FB-49767BE53D89E045 Plinth Magazine: Lessons Learned from the Small Museum (Episode 57) National Park Service Today we join NCPTTs' Jason Church as he speaks with Christian Hernandez, writer for Plinth Magazine. In this podcast, Christian talks about his work with Plinth Magazine and lessons learned from the small museum 715 no full 57

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTTs’ Jason Church as he speaks with Christian Hernandez, writer for Plinth Magazine. In this podcast, Christian talks about his work with Plinth Magazine and lessons learned from the small museum.

Church: Christian, a lot of us know you as a textiles conservator and your work with museum collections management, things like that, but today we’re here to talk to you about your work that you’ve been doing with Plinth Magazine. Tell us what is Plinth Magazine?

Hernandez: Thank you Jason. It’s great speaking to you. So Plinth Magazine is a magazine geared toward promoting interesting and innovative people and programs and exhibitions in museums mainly in the U.S. but really across the world and we have the main goal of promoting things that are great and we want them to be more noted.

Church: Now what format does this magazine come out in?

Hernandez: So right now this magazine is an online magazine that is coming out quarterly starting in September but we originally started as a blog with blog posts maybe once every week or two, or one blog post every week or five days and then we turned into a monthly magazine in January and we’re turning into a quarterly magazine starting in September.

Church: So as a reader what kind of articles could I expect to read in Plinth?

Hernandez: You can really expect anything from one on one interviews with directors of museums to interviewing people behind the scenes or front of house or exhibition curators, it’s really everything that can happen in a museum is up for grabs and we will profile it. Some of the things that I particularly love profiling is, kind of the more humanitarian aspects of museums, so how they help the visitor and how the visitor leaves with a more well-rounded perspective of the world around them.

Church: Is it focused mostly on art museums or is it fairly open to just the museum world?

Kath and Kiva, watercolor with birds as part of SPARK. Kath and Kiva, watercolor with birds as part of SPARK.

Hernandez: It’s fairly open to the entire museum world. So the American Alliance of Museums defines a museum in general as a collection of anything and that includes zoos, aquariums, science centers, art galleries to the more traditional museums where objects are on exhibit. Plinth really covers everything. So we’ve profiled science centers, museums, I recently did an article on a conservation lab and I have dreams of one day profiling a museum that has some work with an orchestra or symphony and then have a tie in with just culture in general. So Plinth is really interested in profiling anything.

Church: Now how did you get involved with Plinth?

Hernandez: I got involved because there was a call for writers on LinkedIn and at this point I had just left my job at an architectural firm, and I was looking for something to do in museums and culture and I had also just finished my thesis, so I used to write a lot and once my thesis was finished, I wasn’t writing anymore so this was just the perfect time to use the skills that I gained as a writer and focused more on museums because I had gone to a Museum Studies Program with the conservation track. I was always very aware that publicity is a very important part of museums but it was never really a part of my schooling, so this was a really good way for me to learn about it. I submitted a resume and a writing sample for some blogs that I had written for some local conservation groups in New York City and then I was accepted as a writer and my first post was in October.

Church: Tell us about some of your favorite articles that you’ve written and deeply worked with.

Hernandez: Okay so one of my favorite, favorite, favorite articles was actually my very first article, which is on SPARK, which is a program with the Racine Art Museum and ten other museums and cultural institutions in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I had the opportunity to interview Tricia Blasko, who is the Curator of Education at the Racine Art Museum. She spoke to me about the program which is geared toward providing a safe space in a museum for people with memory loss so they have Alzheimer’s or dementia or Parkinson’s Disease in general and also their caregivers because a lot of times people with memory loss have a caregiver who is oftentimes their partner. So they have a lot of programming devoted to care couples and they provide through this variety of programming a safe space for people to have fun with art and that can be anything from painting a picture inspired by a piece in an exhibit or they get an artist to come in and help with some arts and crafts activities. Sometimes there’s music involved, sometimes there’s lectures involved and it sounds like a really great way to just stimulate the mind. SPARK is sponsored in part by the Helen Bader Foundation but it continues to grow and it hopes to be able to grow with more institutions and more states as they continue to get more funding.

Kids at the American Gothic House. Kids at the American Gothic House.

Then one of my next favorite articles that I wrote was actually for the American Gothic House Center in Eldon, Iowa. I wrote that for our December issue. The American Gothic House Center is the house painted in Grant Woods 1930 American Gothic. What I found most interesting is that even though Eldon, Iowa, as a city has just over 900 people, this museum, because it’s so well-known and so a part of this iconic painting it gets 15,000 visitors to the museum. I spoke to one of the two staff members of this museum because it’s actually a small museum and I just had the opportunity to speak to her about how this museum, which in general has a staff of one, deals with 15,000 visitors a year and she was talking to me about some of the public programming that she does and some of the ways that she could help her visitors without having to really focus on them one on one. So she has a very dedicated volunteer staff and then she also when the museum is closed, has some information about the museum located outside of the actual building. So there are some QR codes that if you scan them you can get your own after hours tour through this QR code and I really loved that article.

And one of my other favorite articles was for Art Out of the Box which is a program done in conjunction with the

Art In A Box, hospital kit. Art In A Box, hospital kit.

Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Children’s Hospitals of Minnesota. I had the opportunity to interview Krista Pierson who is their Community Arts Associate and Art Out of the Box is essentially a pizza box filled with craft supplies and some information about art. Then there’s a box that is given to the children and they have the opportunity to go through the craft program with a nurse who is trained in how to deliver this program and just have fun, which I think when you’re in the hospital and a child who is a patient, there is a need for a happy distraction. I remember Krista was talking to me about how there was this young child who was getting this painful but regular medical procedure. She used to not like it because it was just something that, although needed, was very hard on her body. So one day she was given a pizza box and her nurse helped her through the actual program. At the end of the program she actually wanted to go to the museum and it’s that sort of inspiration that I’m drawn to as a writer and I really feel is a very integral part of a museum’s place in the community.

And then one final article that I really love is for the Black History 101 Mobile Museum and I had the opportunity to interview Khalid el-Hakim who is this great guy who saw a need to teach African and black history to his local community but because a lot of children didn’t really have the opportunity to go to a museum, he just started a collection and put it in a truck and actually sets up exhibitions at schools around the various states. He also just sets it up in parking lots and streets and people can go to the truck and get a little bit of history and he’s actually had the opportunity to visit over 23 states and is publishing a book called The Center of the Movement, Collecting Hip Hop Memorabilia and he’s in the process of setting up an exhibit called The Peacemakers, which focuses on 15 men and women of African descent who have won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has dreams of setting up other exhibits on music, black inventors, and then black Greek fraternities and sororities, and I think it’s his grassroots desire to teach history that I’m also really attracted to and I was really honored to have the opportunity to profile him for our Plinth.

Artifact from the Black History 101 Mobile Museum. Artifact from the Black History 101 Mobile Museum.

Church: That was one of my favorite of the articles I’ve read as well.

Hernandez: Thank you. Thank you.

Church: We’ve moved forward and I know Plinth is re-doing the format. As we move forward, what are we the readers expect to see out of Plinth?

Hernandez: One of the things that Plinth is hoping to do is to get more fund raising. We are hoping to actually be able to have a print format so there could very well be a time where you pick up Plinth Magazine and you would get it in the mail and you could read our articles. One of the things that we’re hoping to do, we are doing it September and we will continue to do it is to have more themed issues. So our theme for this coming September is education. We are just using that broad topic of teaching and being taught and seeing how museums and the people who work in museums teach and have been taught by others. I think themes and a print format are some of things that we will hopefully be doing in the future and we’re hopefully going to be having more of an online presence on our Facebook page and Twitter but Facebook and Twitter and all forms of social media take a lot of time. As a volunteer staff, it’s something that we are really getting better at but we still need more manpower to do it.

Church: Sounds great. Well we look forward to continuing to follow Plinth in the future and for our listeners, if you haven’t please go to the website and read the back issues and the current issues of Plinth as they come out. I personally have found it a very interesting magazine to look at, especially some of the smaller museums that you’ve interviewed, sort of as you said, how they handle crowds and how they promote themselves and things like that; I found it very interesting and very informative.

Hernandez: Thank you so much Jason.

Church: Thank you. Hope to talk to you again in the future.

Hernandez: Awesome, thank you so much.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Goatscaping at Congressional Cemetery (Episode 56) ]]> Tue, 26 Aug 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/13221347-F24A-3811-F18BD93242D3BC9B.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1322C6A7-9845-3FA9-EE8A489B749057F2 Goatscaping at Congressional Cemetery (Episode 56) National Park Service National Park Service LGBTQ History Month Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Margaret Puglisi, Vice president of Congressional Cemetery about their recent goat grazing project 743 no full 56

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation technology Podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Margaret Puglisi, Vice president of Congressional Cemetery about their recent goat grazing project.

Newly arrived landscape worker. Newly arrived landscape worker.

Puglisi: So Congressional Cemetery was trying to figure out the best solution to some unmaintained land that was just south of our gate. We were having invasive vines choking out the tree growth and the trees were dying and falling on the monuments, so this is a really serious problem when you have a site that has 206 year old gravesites.

Church: So what sort of solution did you guys come up with?

Puglisi: Well we looked at various factors that we needed to consider. We had environmental impact, we had our societal impact because we have a canine dog walking membership so we have a lot of animals on site and we also needed to make sure that the monuments were considered. So we chose between mechanical, chemical, human or grazing which would be the goats and we came to the goats because there wasn’t an adverse impact on any of the conditions we were looking at and it also worked out better for costs.

Church: So you looked at mechanical and what sort of adverse effects did that have?

Puglisi: Well it’s using fuel and also in the case that we had at Congressional, there’s a large ravine and it is such dense overgrowth, there’s large trees, there’s large logs down, it would have been pretty hard for that. Also that wouldn’t have really killed anything because the seeds would still be there. With the goats, their digestive tracts decompose the seeds.

Church: So now you said you also looked at a chemical possibility but you decided against that. So what sort of chemicals did you look at and what was the decision there.

Puglisi: Well it was mostly herbicides and as we all know that’s really bad for headstones but then we also had the run off to consider and into the Anacostia River because it is so close and we had our dogs to worry about. We’re fond of them and we don’t want anything to happen. So it was cost and it was prohibitive with our considerations that we wanted to adhere to.

Church: So you decided on the grazing option.

Puglisi: Uh huh.

Church: Historically, had there ever been grazing at Congressional Cemetery?

Puglisi: We don’t have any record of it.

Church: Where did you, how do you go about finding a troup of goats?

Kids Watching the Kids. Kids Watching the Kids.

Puglisi: Well there’s actually a company called Sustainable Resource Management and they have a large herd of goats. They’re called the eco goats and this is what they do, they get sent around all over the place to eat invasive vines and take care of areas. The week following that they were hanging out in Congressional Cemetery, they were headed to the beach. So they clear out some of these yards.

Church: A little goat vacation. Okay.

Puglisi: Yeah.

Church: And this may sound like an odd question, are there specific types of goats that work better for this?

Puglisi: There are a whole wide variety of goats that came. We had pygmy goats, we even had, I think his name was Larry, he was almost as tall as me whose had a large differentiation of what they’re appetites were. They sent goats that liked kudzu, liked poison ivy, apparently they have different tastes so he had to kind of put them together to make sure that we had all of our plants taken care of and also they had unique personalities. I became very attached to a little brown pygmy goat named Weird Al.

Church: Nice. I would not have considered that they had names. That’s nice. Alright so now did you let them run freely through Congressional Cemetery or were they contained?

Puglisi: They were contained on the exterior of the cemetery. There was only one time that we let one out and I picked Weird Al to go with me so that we could do some photo shoots where there were headstones in the background, but he was on a short tether and he was really only interested in the grass. So they were on a one and a half acre tract of land that was outside of the cemetery gate.

The Goats Were Not Expecting Such a Crowd of Reporters. The Goats Were Not Expecting Such a Crowd of Reporters.

Church: How many goats do you think were in this project?

Puglisi: We had fifty-eight.

Church: Fifty-eight goats for one and a half acres?

Puglisi: Uh huh.

Church: What was our time frame? How long were they actually in the cemetery during the day?

Puglisi: They were there the whole time for eight days. Towards the end of the last day, they, Brian is the name of their guardian, he came and he got half of them and took them to the next project because they were doing so well they were losing finds to eat and he didn’t want them to get bored. So they eat everything from about all the way up to about six feet.

Church: So it took that time period for them to clear the one and a half acres, so if you were for some reason looking at a larger site, would you increase the goat population or do you think you would just have them do their job for longer periods of time?

Puglisi: I think it was a good number of goats. I think if you just gave them a little bit more time they would be able to accomplish the goal.

Church: Of course one of the immediate questions everyone has about the goats is what about waste management?

Puglisi: So they were not within our gates so that wasn’t really a problem for us but it’s fertilizer. I’ve actually heard people who say that while the invasive vines are there and the dense growth, wild flowers aren’t able to grow but you know with the fertilization, if there are seeds there, they pop up the next spring so we’re hoping to see that.

Church: Yeah, I guess the lack of competition now and the new fertilizer.

Puglisi: Right. Yeah.

Church: What was the public’s reaction, the general public’s reaction to the goats?29. Before & After

Puglisi: I’ve never seen people so excited about goats. We appealed to the public, the neighbors, the social media, we were on Al Jazeera, it must have been a slow week in politics because we had so many different media sources, international and national. We had school groups, it was really educational. People found a lot of different values and benefits from it.

Church: Now I’ve heard from you that it was successful and that you were very happy with the results, what about cost effectiveness? How do you feel that worked into the factor?

Puglisi: Our president actually did the math and figured out it was about twenty-five cents per goat to be out there. That’s pretty low manual labor rate and they did a great job in a timely fashion so.

Church: Yeah you can’t beat twenty-five cents. Okay. Do you think this something that the cemetery would ever consider for the inside grounds, inside the gates?

Puglisi: It would have to be, we’d have to put a little more consideration into it. We don’t really have the invasive problem within the cemetery so my concern would be that they would get bored and not be focused on eating and would climb on the headstones and that would not be worth the risk.

Church: Now I know you mentioned briefly before Congressional Cemetery has a very famous dog walking park, you have the K-9 Corps. Tell us a little bit about them?

Puglisi: They’re actually the reason I would say that we’re so successful because they create an environment that people want to come in, there’s people there, they’re smiling and they started in the nineties. They were tasking themselves to mow the lawn because we were in such a state of abandonment. They were just a really strong presence on our site and…

Church: …and people pay a subscription to become members…

Weird Al's Gravestone Photoshoot. Weird Al’s Gravestone Photo-shoot.

Puglisi: Yeah, they pay an annual membership and that goes directly towards our conservation of headstones.

Church: And is the cemetery available 24/7 for the dogs?

Puglisi: Uh hum, yeah so that also makes a really good security feature with our dog walkers there, they know when something is going on and they’re very happy to tell us if they see some suspicious activity.

Church: Now how did your very well-known dogs get along with your now very well-known goats?

Puglisi: Towards the beginning the goats were a little bit afraid of the dogs but we had a chain link fence between them and we asked the dog walkers to keep the dogs away because they weren’t familiar with dogs but by the end of the week, I think that the goats were a little bit more intimidating to the dogs after they realized that the dogs couldn’t get to them. They wouldn’t run away from the fence anymore, they would stand and nay and talk to the dogs.

Church: Is this a treatment, does the cemetery plan to repeat this in the future and if so how often do you think you might need to repeat it?

Puglisi: Right. So we have many other places that we could put the goats where there are areas with invasive vines and dying trees so we could do it all around the cemetery really. We’re thinking every two years it will be possible to fund it to bring them in.

Church: Now will there need to be treatments to the invasive species between that period or do you think an every two year cycle will be enough?

Puglisi: We’ll have to have a crew go in and chop down the actual, they only eat the green foliage so we’d have to have somebody come in and chop down the rest of the bushes to keep them low.

Church: Is this something you would recommend to other sites as well?

Margaret Posing with Weird Al After His Massage Margaret Posing with Weird Al After His Massage

Puglisi: I would as long as you’re able to protect the monuments. If the goal is to save the monuments from dying trees you don’t want to inflict more damage by having goats climbing on them.

Church: So what projects does Congressional have coming up now?

Puglisi: Right now we have, we received a $50,000 grant from Partners in Preservation and right now we’re working on the restoration of our mausoleum row of roofs and in that we’re fixing the drainage system, making sure that they’re water tight and also applying a live roof which we are going to put, we have six beehives at the cemetery so we’re going to put them on the live roofs and the circle of feeding the bees and the bees pollinating the flowers should be a good combination.

Church: Now we’re there live roofs there traditionally?

Puglisi: Grass on them and then I would say probably somewhere in the seventies, eighties, they paved it in concrete which is causing a lot of trouble with the interior and drainage.

Church: Now are you going to remove the concrete that’s currently there put on in the seventies and eighties?

Puglisi: Yes and we actually have Worcester Eisenbrandt is our contractor. We have an annual “Day of the Dog” where we have vendors set up, we put up an obstacle course, we have a lot of dog adoptions typically and it’s just a day to have the community come in.

Church: When is that?

Puglisi: That’s August 30th.

Church: And is that open to the public or just the dog walkers…

Puglisi: Open to the public, yes.

Church: Open to the public, alright.

Puglisi: It’s a good time to visit us and see if your dog enjoys running around then you might be interested in membership.

Church: Well thank you for talking to us Margaret about all of the animals of Congressional Cemetery. It’s gotten quite the reputation for it’s animals and quite the star goats recently so we look forward to finding out what you guys are doing in the future.

Puglisi: Thank you.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye everybody

]]> Lavender Landmarks of Charleston, South Carolina (Episode 55) ]]> Fri, 27 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/1347A463-C828-EBA8-DA32AEE9BBA6C0F3.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-1348DDE9-B8D6-1332-D351AE44DB7BBACC Lavender Landmarks of Charleston, South Carolina (Episode 55) National Park Service National Park Service LGBTQ History Month Celebrating the National Park Service LGBT History Month, NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Mary O'Connell Murphy, Library Project Manager at the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University. In this podcast, Mary talks about her work with Lavender Landmarks, LGBT sites in Charleston, South Carolina. 852 no full 55

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Mary O’Connell Murphy, Library Project Manager at the Schlesinger Library of Harvard University. In this podcast, Mary talks about her work with Lavender Landmarks, LGBT sites in Charleston, South Carolina.

Church: Before we get onto our subject, tell us a little bit about the Schlesinger Library.

Murphy: Okay, thanks Jason. I’m glad to be joining you on this podcast today. So the Schlesinger Library is one of many Harvard University research libraries within the university system but our library focuses specifically on the history of women in America. We collect both published and unpublished materials of women across America, both common women, everyday women, as well as more well-known women including suffragettes, famous second wave feminists like Betty Friedan and now third wave feminists. We’re really reaching out to try to collect those women’s papers as well. So the library originally began as part of Radcliffe College and now we are part of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Church: Very nice and today we’re here talking about the National Park Service has initiated June as LGBT month. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a project that I knew that you did in the past called Lavender Landmarks of Charleston, South Carolina. I have not heard the term Lavender Landmarks before, so what is that?

Murphy: So that is a term, I can’t remember if I made that up or if that was already floating around so, I started doing my research in this area in 2003 going into 2004 and it took me, I researched it for about a year. So the concept of studying historic landmarks associated with the GLBT community was sort of young in and of itself. The earliest that I could date the study of it was really in the late 90’s, around 1997 there was a lot of research that emerged, although I’m sure there was more before then. So the term Lavender Landmarks was just easy to remember, right. Lavender is a color that is associated with the gay rights movement, lavender, pink triangles, so on and so forth and so I just used that and then tied it to the built environment, Lavender Landmarks. I thought it was sort of handy and wrapped into the context of Charleston, South Carolina.

Church: For this project, Lavender Landmarks in Charleston, you actually made a historic walking tour of sites in Charleston that are directly tied to the gay rights movement. Can you tell us a little bit about the sites that you picked, why you picked them and what made them important?

14 Queen Street, Charleston, SC 14 Queen Street, Charleston, SC

Murphy: Right. So first of all, I will stipulate that the sites that I chose were not necessarily related to the gay rights movement. They are sites associated with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans-gender history. So there’s one of the sites that I researched, 14 Queen Street, which was actually the home of a hate crime that occurred in 1958 between a navy serviceman and another local man who was robbed, murdered in that home there. The man who perpetrated the crime was not held accountable by any means and the writing of what happened that night was really scathing and today we would look back and understand that that was a hate crime that occurred there and one that was significant in documenting the way, the poor way, that gay men were treated under the law in the 1950’s. So that was one of the sites and just an example that it was a sad history but one that was also significant.

7 Gibbes Street, Charleston, SC 7 Gibbes Street, Charleston, SC

So the other sites that I did, I sort of organized them in chronological order. We have 7 Gibbes Street, which is one of the most famous streets in downtown Charleston and that was home to Laura Bragg and she was the first female director of the Charleston Museum. So I thought that the site was significant in terms of women’s history in and of itself. But she shared the home with Belle Heyward who was a socialite in Charleston at the time. They were considered Boston wives. The assumption has to be made that they were a couple. Their history of course dates to the 1920’s and they started a salon in their home for significant poets in the area. This group that began inside the home on 7 Gibb Street would later see poets like Gertrude Stein and Edna St. Vincent Millay participating in that organization. So that’s the first site that I chose and some of the oldest GLBT history that I know.

56 Society Street, Charleston, SC 56 Society Street, Charleston, SC

I’m going to just skip ahead and say that two most interesting sites personally to me was 56 Society Street, which was the home of Gordon Langley Hall and he was a transsexual person who was very involved in the restoration of 56 Society Street and who in his personal life transitioned to a female and was involved in the first interracial marriage that took place in Charleston and that was in 1969 and it was the first interracial marriage at all in the city of Charleston and little is it known that that marriage involved a transsexual person and that ceremony took place in the basement of 56 Society Street. What I found so alarming is there was no note of this in the general history of this building. Many of the historic sites in Charleston are well documented and this house is also very well documented in the history of the original architects and so on and so forth but there is nothing noted about this key piece of history that took place there. It wasn’t until the historian James t. Sears, who is a southern traditional American historian who was interested in GLBT history, discovered this place and this story and then I, using his research went to the site, went to the place and documented the bricks and mortar history of it as well as of this tale.

So I thought that one was really important to me and I think one that is worth checking out and then

5 Liberty Street, Charleston, SC 5 Liberty Street, Charleston, SC

of course, 5 Liberty Street, which was the home of the Arcade Theatre and the Liberty Mix Nightclub and that is now, where today the College of Charleston School of Business stands in this place that once was home to very well-known drag queens of the era. It was a place that really documented the mid-twentieth century gay life history, right, it was the cultural headquarters for avant-garde artists and other gay Charlestonians and it was one that really marked the first time that the Historic Charleston Foundation put it’s toe in the water to defend a GLBT historic site when they were notified that it was going to be demolished. I happened to be doing an internship with the Historic Charleston Foundation at the time and we worked together to try to fight that demolition but unfortunately we were unsuccessful. So those are really interesting sites.

Church: …the time period of the Arcade Theatre and nightclub?

Murphy: Okay, so the Arcade Theatre was built by Augustus E. Constantine. He was a Greek born architect. He built a number of different buildings in the Charleston area but he did build the Arcade Theatre in 1947 and in sort of the art modern style. I actually had an opportunity to go inside the arcade with my boss at the time, Katherine Saunders of the Historic Charleston Foundation, and that was really neat. It was everything that you would think; a lot of wrought iron and rounded corners and I think carpet at the time. But its GLBT history started basically in the late seventies and ended in the early eighties. Once it was a movie theatre I believe. In 1984 it opened as the Liberty Mix. This was really an interesting time of course in the GLBT and GBLT America in the early 1980’s of course as the Aids crisis was sweeping through and so you have to make an assumption that that was also a really prevalent component of the history there too in the city of Charleston. It was this tiny little building that was sitting on a very lucrative piece of real estate but I don’t know. Today if the city of Charleston was looking at it again and if Charleston College was looking to build their business school today, I don’t know, maybe they would think twice because of where we are in the country about preserving Lavender Landmarks and the gay rights movement as a whole.

Arcade Theater, Charleston, SC Arcade Theater, Charleston, SC

Church: I noticed in the brochure that the nightclub operated until 1997 when its license was revoked because if it’s controversial nature.

Murphy: Yes, so again you have to remember that there was so much pushback at the time. It’s hard to almost put yourself in that place now. GLBT citizens have really enjoyed this remarkable revolution that’s been going on over the course of the last five years I would say. But in the south and in the eighties and nineties, it was a different story and I think that I can make the assumption that the over-the-top nature, like a maybe what some people would say, “in your face” community or culture of that nightclub was maybe not palatable for a lot of citizens and as a result they shut the nightclub.

So there are very few images that exist of the nightclub. I took them on my own. Both that nightclub and also Charleston’s Club 49, which was another gay nightclub that of course was flattened into a parking lot on King Street. There’s very little documentary evidence of these places. I think if there was piece of the history of Lavender Landmarks, it’s about sort of a secret history, a place where people could slip out of their normal lives and into their personal lives in these personal places even though they were in public if that makes any sense. So I actually found it quite difficult to find images of the buildings. There is one of the Charleston’s Club 49 at the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston that I know of.

Church: Other than yours, have you seen many other tours that dealt with the social history of the LGBT movement.

Murphy: Right, so the most famous is of course, there’s a couple of tours in San Francisco in the Castro District that I know of. There are also a number of public art projects that have happened in New York City but I know that the history based tours really do center in San Francisco. I know there’s one that focuses on Don Harvey Milk and I know that there’s one that just focuses on the Castro District as a neighborhood. But I think that may all be changing now right? I mean just the fact that the National Park Service is making this effort to roll in GLBT history under their larger umbrella of areas that they want to document in terms of bricks and mortar places and sites. More and more will pop up. There’s a couple of books out there too, like Historic Gay and Lesbian Walks of New York. There’s a couple of books like that that you can just Google search them online and they’ll pop up and you can do them on your own.

Church: Well hopefully you’re right. As organizations like the National Park Service publicizes this, maybe we will get more landmarks noted and more history will come out. Maybe people who have these photographs that you looked so hard for will come forward with them and then more progress will be made on documenting some of these sites.

Murphy: Right and I think that the same can be said generally for archives as well. Gay and lesbian archives, there’s a few really well known ones across the country but just a handful. So the power to be honest of Web 2.0 technology like flickr are really beneficial in this area because people have their personal collections at home that they’re now scanning and putting online, so I know researchers are doing a lot of their studies that way as well. But again for me, I started my research about historic sites in 2003 and to really see how far this world has come is really quite fascinating to me and you know there is a financial benefit to these things which was part of my research, that cities really if they want to embrace these histories and the National Park Service wants to embrace this under their umbrella, they will reap the benefits of communities of people who want to go see them and we’re seeing that as well or states and cities that are opening their doors in their communities to gay marriage.

Church: As we reflect on the gains and public recognition over the ten years since you began your research I think we can be very optimistic for what the future might hold.

Murphy: I know right, and I hope that people do check out the brochure online and try to do the walk. It’s all in a very dense area within Charleston. I sort of would like to do it again. It’s good to do over coffee like on a Saturday morning.

Church: Thank you Mary for talking with us today. We hope to hear more form you in the future, maybe any future research that you’re doing.

Murphy: Sure thing, yes, if you ever want to do a podcast on historic sites related to women’s history, give me a ring.

Church: That sounds good, thank you Mary.

Murphy: Thanks Jason. Bye, bye.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information, check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody

]]> National Mall Plan Project Part 3 (Episode 54) ]]> Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/1388BE54-D098-6F4D-2563171D3B28ACBA.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-138E19F7-C17C-0D0B-31D7640D84CB5E33 National Mall Plan Project Part 3 (Episode 54) National Park Service National Mall Plan Project Part 3 (Podcast Episode 54) Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Michael Stachowicz about the National Mall Plan Project. This is the last of a three part series about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project. 506 no full 54

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Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy, the Chief of Division of Professional Services and currently Chief of Facility Management for the National Mall. In the second of this three part series, they’ll talk about the installation of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Ok Sean, can you describe the Mall turf project as it has been implemented?

Sean: Well, the Mall turf project was to restore the turf and soil systems on the National Mall between 3rd and 14th street. The project included the installation of new underground cisterns to collect water runoff, and rain, and stormwater. We installed new irrigation systems, we installed new drainage systems, new soils, and new turf, as well as installed a granite curb edge around the turf panels that prevented the migration of the existing gravel walkways (the gravel itself) from migrating into the turf.

Paul: What is the time frame for this project, and where are you in the implementation process?

Sean: Well the project is actually three phases: we just completed the first of the three phases which was the section of green space between 3rd and 7th street and included three large center panels of the Mall. The second phase includes the center panels between 7th and 10th street, and then the last phase is the area between 10th street and 14th street.

Paul: Is the work being implemented by the NPS or outside contractors?

Sean: The work is being awarded by the National Park Service and we are hiring contractors, private contractors, to perform the work.

Paul: Can you go into more detail about the enhanced soil you’re using to alleviate the compaction on the Mall?

Sean: The soil that we’re using out there is an engineered soil that has a very high sand content to allow for drainage of the water very quickly so that we don’t have standing water out there. Then we can actually get the water back into our cistern systems a little more quickly. It also has a higher organic compound rate where we have a good mix of the sand and organics into our soil mixture.

Paul: What kind of grass are you using?

Sean: We’re using a turf type tall fescue with a blend of bluegrass.

Paul: How did you chose that particular [grass]?

Sean: Well what we did was we researched a lot with regard to other types of turf fields, particularly fields that received a lot of high use and high impact. We looked at baseball stadiums, football stadiums, and other types of venues that have a real high use and high impact events on them. We decided that the turf type tall fescue with a 10% bluegrass blend was the best mixture for the amount of use that the Mall gets.

Paul: How does the irrigation set up? Where’s the water coming from?

Sean: So the irrigation is a very robust underground irrigation system, it’s not your conventional (or residential) pop up head type system. We had a system like that previously that was just compromised too much with tent stakes and other types of high impact events on the Mall. What we did was we installed a very robust irrigation system it still, it does, have pop up heads but they are few and far between. They shoot the water out at very high rates, or flows, and pressures so that we can cover the center panels with the minimal amount of heads. We also installed the irrigation lines 4 feet deep, because one of the things that was changed in our permanent process is that no one can run a stake larger, or drive a stake larger, than 36 inches into the ground. We’ve lowered all the piping to 4ft; we’ve put all the heads on the exterior, or the perimeter, of the panel so that we have clearly identified ‘no stake areas’ on the National Mall.

Paul: How does the irrigation connect to the cistern system?

Sean: So what happens is, we have a number of drains around the perimeter of the center panels of the National Mall. The drains are collected through a series of piping, the piping then dumps the rainwater into our cisterns. When we are completed with the project, the total amount of storm water capacity will be 1,000,000 gallons. So we have four 250,000 gallon underground cisterns that will collect all the rainwater from the runoff from the center panels of the Mall. Through piping into these 250,000 gallon cisterns, from there we have various pumps that will transfer that water to our irrigation pump. When the water gets to that point the water will be filtered through a ultraviolet light filter system and then it will be pumped out into the irrigation system where eventually it will go to the heads and be sprinkled on the ground.

Paul: Has the paving system been looked at on the Mall?

Sean: We’ve looked at the paving system, we’ve looked at it very extensively. We continue to look at that. We do have some significant issues with the gravel walkways, however it’s something that we’re going to continue to work with the commissions (or review commissions or review boards) to look at what the best, or most appropriate, paving material is on the National Mall.

Paul: Were aspects of the project excluded that you would have liked to have seen included?

Sean: No, the first phase included a lot of the infrastructure that was necessary for the new soil and turf systems to thrive. We actually installed a lot of infrastructure to accommodate phases 2 and 3 in the first phase so phase 1 was a success. We are just getting ready for phase 2 and phase 3 as funding becomes available.

Paul: Do have any suggestions for institutions looking to do a similar kind of project?

Sean: Sure, I think that you really need to take a take a look at your soil mix and see what type of soils and turf is most appropriate for the application. I think that by doing a lot of research upfront, depending on how your areas are used, you can really drive what types of turf (turf systems) you use, as well as your soils.

Paul: Is there anything additional you’d like to add about the implementation of this project?

Sean: I think that it’s been a great project for the United States. I know our visitors have really enjoyed coming out to the Mall and seeing the true difference between what an investment we made is, compared to what we’ve been doing in the past. When you look at the newly renovated center panels it’s a big difference between what our investment has gotten us, compared to where we were years ago on the other areas, so it’s making a huge difference.

Paul: Is this going to be a model for future projects the National Park Service is going to be doing?

Sean: We hope so, we hope so. I think what we’ve learned from this, in terms of how to collect water, and to recycle water, how to design, install robust irrigation systems, and how to manage our turf is something we’re going to use as a model throughout the park. Another thing that we learned is that hiring appropriate staff is really key to the success of a turf system. The National Park Service hired the first ever turf manager in the Park Service, and certainly here on the National Mall it was something that we’d been looking into. We went ahead and made the investment in a high caliper type of a person, with a turf management degree, who was well versed in turf management and soil science. It was a great investment that we made in our hiring to actually hire a turf manager.

Paul: Alright, well thanks very much Sean for talking to me today, I really appreciate [it].

Sean: Hey, no problem Paul. I hope this helps, and good luck in all your future endeavors.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Sean Kennealy. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

]]> National Mall Plan Project Part 2 (Episode 53) ]]> Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/13CA858B-07DD-1E93-6F84240675961FDB.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-13CBB125-0EBD-5925-217205818CB9915A National Mall Plan Project Part 2 (Episode 53) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy about the National Mall Plan Project. In the second of this three part series about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project. 506 no full 53

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Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Sean Kennealy, the Chief of Division of Professional Services and currently Chief of Facility Management for the National Mall. In the second of this three part series, they’ll talk about the installation of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Ok Sean, can you describe the Mall turf project as it has been implemented?

Sean: Well, the Mall turf project was to restore the turf and soil systems on the National Mall between 3rd and 14th street. The project included the installation of new underground cisterns to collect water runoff, and rain, and stormwater. We installed new irrigation systems, we installed new drainage systems, new soils, and new turf, as well as installed a granite curb edge around the turf panels that prevented the migration of the existing gravel walkways (the gravel itself) from migrating into the turf.

Paul: What is the time frame for this project, and where are you in the implementation process?

Sean: Well the project is actually three phases: we just completed the first of the three phases which was the section of green space between 3rd and 7th street and included three large center panels of the Mall. The second phase includes the center panels between 7th and 10th street, and then the last phase is the area between 10th street and 14th street.

Paul: Is the work being implemented by the NPS or outside contractors?

Sean: The work is being awarded by the National Park Service and we are hiring contractors, private contractors, to perform the work.

Paul: Can you go into more detail about the enhanced soil you’re using to alleviate the compaction on the Mall?

Sean: The soil that we’re using out there is an engineered soil that has a very high sand content to allow for drainage of the water very quickly so that we don’t have standing water out there. Then we can actually get the water back into our cistern systems a little more quickly. It also has a higher organic compound rate where we have a good mix of the sand and organics into our soil mixture.

Paul: What kind of grass are you using?

Sean: We’re using a turf type tall fescue with a blend of bluegrass.

Paul: How did you chose that particular [grass]?

Sean: Well what we did was we researched a lot with regard to other types of turf fields, particularly fields that received a lot of high use and high impact. We looked at baseball stadiums, football stadiums, and other types of venues that have a real high use and high impact events on them. We decided that the turf type tall fescue with a 10% bluegrass blend was the best mixture for the amount of use that the Mall gets.

Paul: How does the irrigation set up? Where’s the water coming from?

Sean: So the irrigation is a very robust underground irrigation system, it’s not your conventional (or residential) pop up head type system. We had a system like that previously that was just compromised too much with tent stakes and other types of high impact events on the Mall. What we did was we installed a very robust irrigation system it still, it does, have pop up heads but they are few and far between. They shoot the water out at very high rates, or flows, and pressures so that we can cover the center panels with the minimal amount of heads. We also installed the irrigation lines 4 feet deep, because one of the things that was changed in our permanent process is that no one can run a stake larger, or drive a stake larger, than 36 inches into the ground. We’ve lowered all the piping to 4ft; we’ve put all the heads on the exterior, or the perimeter, of the panel so that we have clearly identified ‘no stake areas’ on the National Mall.

Paul: How does the irrigation connect to the cistern system?

Sean: So what happens is, we have a number of drains around the perimeter of the center panels of the National Mall. The drains are collected through a series of piping, the piping then dumps the rainwater into our cisterns. When we are completed with the project, the total amount of storm water capacity will be 1,000,000 gallons. So we have four 250,000 gallon underground cisterns that will collect all the rainwater from the runoff from the center panels of the Mall. Through piping into these 250,000 gallon cisterns, from there we have various pumps that will transfer that water to our irrigation pump. When the water gets to that point the water will be filtered through a ultraviolet light filter system and then it will be pumped out into the irrigation system where eventually it will go to the heads and be sprinkled on the ground.

Paul: Has the paving system been looked at on the Mall?

Sean: We’ve looked at the paving system, we’ve looked at it very extensively. We continue to look at that. We do have some significant issues with the gravel walkways, however it’s something that we’re going to continue to work with the commissions (or review commissions or review boards) to look at what the best, or most appropriate, paving material is on the National Mall.

Paul: Were aspects of the project excluded that you would have liked to have seen included?

Sean: No, the first phase included a lot of the infrastructure that was necessary for the new soil and turf systems to thrive. We actually installed a lot of infrastructure to accommodate phases 2 and 3 in the first phase so phase 1 was a success. We are just getting ready for phase 2 and phase 3 as funding becomes available.

Paul: Do have any suggestions for institutions looking to do a similar kind of project?

Sean: Sure, I think that you really need to take a take a look at your soil mix and see what type of soils and turf is most appropriate for the application. I think that by doing a lot of research upfront, depending on how your areas are used, you can really drive what types of turf (turf systems) you use, as well as your soils.

Paul: Is there anything additional you’d like to add about the implementation of this project?

Sean: I think that it’s been a great project for the United States. I know our visitors have really enjoyed coming out to the Mall and seeing the true difference between what an investment we made is, compared to what we’ve been doing in the past. When you look at the newly renovated center panels it’s a big difference between what our investment has gotten us, compared to where we were years ago on the other areas, so it’s making a huge difference.

Paul: Is this going to be a model for future projects the National Park Service is going to be doing?

Sean: We hope so, we hope so. I think what we’ve learned from this, in terms of how to collect water, and to recycle water, how to design, install robust irrigation systems, and how to manage our turf is something we’re going to use as a model throughout the park. Another thing that we learned is that hiring appropriate staff is really key to the success of a turf system. The National Park Service hired the first ever turf manager in the Park Service, and certainly here on the National Mall it was something that we’d been looking into. We went ahead and made the investment in a high caliper type of a person, with a turf management degree, who was well versed in turf management and soil science. It was a great investment that we made in our hiring to actually hire a turf manager.

Paul: Alright, well thanks very much Sean for talking to me today, I really appreciate [it].

Sean: Hey, no problem Paul. I hope this helps, and good luck in all your future endeavors.

Paul: Thank you very much.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Sean Kennealy. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

]]> National Mall Plan Project Part 1 (Episode 52) ]]> Fri, 06 Jun 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/41B78AC3-D4CD-1CB2-2FB7528C82A0197D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-41B818EC-F652-5AA2-C92786B7D01AE143 National Mall Plan Project Part 1 (Episode 52) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Paul Cady as he speaks with Susan Spain, the National Mall Plan Project Executive and a landscape architect with the National Park Service for more than twenty-four years. In the first of this three part series, they'll talk about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project. 773 no full 52

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Susan Spain, NPS landscape architect and Project Executive for the National Mall Plan. Susan Spain, NPS landscape architect and Project Executive for the National Mall Plan.Photo Credit: http://www.olmsted.org/events/frederick-law-olmsted-jr-symposia/background-information

Kevin: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Paul Cady as he speaks with Susan Spain, the National Mall Plan Project Executive and a landscape architect with the National Park Service for more than twenty-four years. In the first of this three part series, they’ll talk about the design of the National Mall turf renovation project.

Paul: Susan, could you describe your role in the design of the project and give a brief history of how it came about?

Susan: My role was to be the lead planner for the National Mall plan. This is an award winning, 800 page EIS [Environmental Impact Statement], that talked about how we’re going to manage the National Mall in the future. The Mall is the component part of the National Mall which contains also the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and so on. It’s about 750 acres overall. The Mall is a portion of that area and it’s the area directly west of the capitol and it’s surrounded on both the north and the south sides by the museums of the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution as well as the headquarters for the USDA [United States Department of Agriculture].

Paul: What were the design goals the project?

Proposed plan for the National Mall, from the National Mall Plan: Summary, Fall 2010. Proposed plan for the National Mall, from the National Mall Plan: Summary, Fall 2010.

Susan: Well clearly sustainability. We wanted to make sure that we could have a sustainable space. The Mall, and the National Mall, were never designed for the types and levels of use that they receive. For example, the Mall area between the museums held about 800 days of special events annually. It was never designed for that type of use, it was never designed for the level of use, and when we started planning, at this point in time, we had conditions that were unacceptable to virtually everyone. The soil was incredibly compacted (a soil scientist from Penn State University broke his probe the first time he tried to stick it in the ground), our soil conditions were like a concrete block and we didn’t have anything that was sustainable. Our irrigation system was broken; basically we looked pretty bedraggled.

Paul: Since it is such a visible project, with all the museums and other things around, how much input did the public have in the design process?

Susan: We had about 30,000 public comments during the National Mall plan time. The most common comment in our first round of public comments was ‘this doesn’t look good enough for what it means to our nation.’ People would tell us this was our nation’s front yard, or our nation’s stage, and they wanted to be proud of the way it looked and they didn’t feel like they could be.

Paul: What was the process for receiving input from the public?

Susan: We had a dedicated website and we were using the Park Service’s link, cross link to the Park Service’s PEPC [Planning Environment and Public Comment] site which is a internet way to submit comments. We also had a number of public meetings and we had fax comments, we had email comments, that came in to us. But you know, our process was a four year process to complete planning.

Paul: Do you use other examples of historic landscapes to help you with the design process?

Susan: Before we even started planning we undertook two Best Practices Studies. One of the Best Practices Studies was about local historic designed landscapes in the Washington DC area (PDF, 4.3MB). We had identified 7 historic landscapes and how they were managed to maintain high levels of high quality conditions. These could be things like American University, Georgetown University, [The Washington] National Cathedral, Architect of the Capitol grounds, the capitol grounds, so to speak, the National Gallery of Art and so on. We were looking at what techniques could they use to make sure that their landscapes were in good condition. We learned a great deal from that; it’s always desirable, for example, if you can close off an area (that’s not an option for us on the National Mall) or if you can restrict the types of use (which is also not an option for us). The second Best Practices Study we did was looking at heavily used urban parks around the nation, and around the world (PDF, 3.7MB). We looked at four urban parks in the United States: Central Park, Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Golden Gate Park and Millennium Park in Chicago, Golden Gate Park was in San Francisco. And then we looked at international landscapes in London, in Canada, and in Canberra, Australia. We looked at the national capitol because we were looking at places that had the right to protest, and what were things that they did in order to maintain their landscapes. It was very clear, probably early on, that no one had the level/demand that we did on the National Mall and in most cases, when you have gathering space for your nation, they are on hard surface spaces. It certainly rammed forth the challenge we faced in planning a sustainable future for designed historic landscapes within the National Mall.

Paul: How does the turf project fit into the greater Mall design project?

Susan: We had identified, right off the bat that this was probably one of the most degraded historic landscapes that we had. We had identified that we needed to restore the soils. We wanted to meet the sustainable SITES initiative. We needed to reduce the amount of potable water that we were putting on any place, because if we would have had an irrigation system that worked we would have been using potable water on that irrigation system. We had mostly gooseweed out there (as opposed to a healthy turf) and so we had the goals of really restoring our health of the turf, and the trees, and being able to still manage high levels of use in the area. That’s putting incredible demands on a turf situation.

Paul: How did you balance designing for the public while also the maintenance needs of the NPS?

Susan: We had identified, right off the bat, that to be sustainable it had to be maintainable. We knew that we needed to then make changes in the way that we managed events in the area. Basically we’re telling our events planners that they have to do things differently: they have to be in different areas, they cannot be on the turf as long as they were on the turf before, they may be required to use turf covers. We would like to disperse our events throughout the year and reduce the impact on the turf area.

Paul: So with these new restrictions in place has there been any positive or negative response?

Susan: There has been a huge positive response. For example, the first event we had after we finished phase one of the turf project was the last presidential inaugural activities. We had just finished the turf project in early January and this is taking place just two weeks later. Using turf covers, and having limitations on the amount of time the turf covers could be down, we came up with a situation where we took the turf covers off and everything, while there were a few dents for awhile, the turf looked fabulous. At this point in time, midsummer, it still looks very healthy and good.

Paul: So what other kinds of sustainable features were you designing into the fabric of the Mall to make it more sustainable?

Susan: We wanted to make sure that we would have a soil system that would be resilient; we did not have soils that were resilient. One of the things that were a result of that was that you would have increased runoff and storm water generation that could lead to some localized flooding. We wanted to be able to have soils that water could penetrate, as opposed to runoff from. We wanted to have turf that was as durable as possible, a mix of turf that would be as durable as possible, and we wanted to make sure that our irrigation system was placed deep enough so that tent stakes didn’t penetrate. That was one of the problems we had had in the irrigation system, but it was starting to look like, it had been punctured so many times that it couldn’t be used.

Paul: So how far along is the project?

Susan: We have completed phase 1 of the project. There’s phase 2 and phase 3 coming, and then adjacent to that will be replacement of gravel walks with another kind of paving. We’ve yet to determine exactly what that paving will be, but we wanted to make sure that we were putting infrastructure in the paving that would encourage people to be using larger paved areas for placement of tents and stages and things like that that have been typically placed on the grass at this point in time. It’s been interesting to see that the people were happy to utilize walkways to put the stages or tents on. We saw that in the new area last week, during the 4th of July, there were first amendment demonstrations up on the area between 3rd and 7th, very successfully using the paved areas.

Paul: What is phase 1?

Susan: Phase 1 was three panels of grass, and they were center panels on the National Mall. The National Mall, just as a reminder, is an area that has five panels that are filled with American elm trees and they are on a grid system (I think about 50ft on center) so it is a lawn framed by panels with elm trees. And it is probably the most historically recognizable landscape in our nation because at one end of the Mall is the Washington Monument at the other end of the Mall is the United States Capitol Building. It has these iconic symbols of our nation that are highly visible, which is what makes it so desirable for first amendment demonstrations and for a variety of activities: they want to be placed between the symbols of our nation.

Paul: When will phase 2 and phase 3 be implemented?

Susan: Phase 2 and phase 3 are under design at this point in time. I think we expect them to be under construction in 2015.

Paul: Ok, well thank you very much. Is there anything else you’d like to add about the design of this project?

Susan: I think that it looks so simple that people don’t realize that it’s a fairly complex system. We had taken a group of people from the Architect of the Capitol’s office up there last week and they were just astounded. While something looks simple, and they had helped us by taking photos during the construction period, they were impressed with the state of the art facilities that come from this project. We really planned on, and wanted to capture and reuse, rainwater; the rainwater was going to be reused to irrigate the turf. The system to do this is what impressed the staff from the Architect of the Capitol’s office, the sense of a real state of the art system that was doing cutting edge work in terms of reuse of water and reduction and the use of potable water.

Paul: Alright, well thank you very much for talking to me Susan, I really appreciate it.

Susan: No problem, thank you.

Kevin: That was Paul Cady’s conversation with Susan Spain. You can find the transcript of this interview on our website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time…

]]> Historic Preservation Program at Mississippi College (Episode 51) ]]> Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/41E058A8-9A64-2FE4-57315F848E97175D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-41E263A3-0182-73F7-35E1BAD40139B063 Historic Preservation Program at Mississippi College (Episode 51) National Park Service Today we join NCPTT's Jason Church as he speaks with Tricia Nelson, Director of the Mississippi College Historic Preservation Program. 551 no full 51

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Ammons: Welcome to the preservation technology podcast, the show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Tricia Nelson, Director of the Mississippi College Historic Preservation Program.

SAM_0643Church: And hello, this is Jason Church, Materials Conservator for the National Park Services’ National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, and I’m here today talking to Tricia Nelson, the Director of the Mississippi College Historic Preservation Program and we just finished up the International Cemetery Preservation Summit here in Niagara Falls where you had a poster about the school’s program. Tell us a little bit about the degree and the program and what your students are doing.

Nelson: Okay. Well in the fall of 2010, Mississippi College began offering a minor in Historic Preservation. It’s taught within the history and political science department. We do offer introductory classes such as Architectural History, Conservation, and Research and Documentation and then about a year ago we did offer a Historic Cemeteries course.

Church: Okay and you teach in this program and you had a lot to do with the cemetery course. Tell us a little bit about that.

Nelson: The cemetery course was unique in that we were able to use a local cemetery, Clinton Cemetery, to do a lot of our work. We were able to document stones, study materials, and successfully conserve parts of the cemetery. Some of these projects included repair of the iron fencing and we were also able to use the D2 to clean biological growth and so the students were able to see before and after and it was very successful. We were also able to partner with historic Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson, Mississippi, established in 1823. It’s the final resting place for six Confederate generals, seven governors, fourteen mayors and a host of other prominent citizens such as famous writer Eudora Welty. The students were able to help with Greenwood. There had been a recent vandalism of the cemetery and so many of the urns were removed from their grave markers, so the students were able to help walk around and locate those urns and try to match those with their markers, flagging various areas that needed special attention because of advanced vandalism. We were able to help with a couple of cemeteries there and the students really did learn a lot.

Church: Now how much do the students juggle the actual in-the-field work versus their classroom work when they’re in the program?

Nelson: Well we do a combination of lecture and fieldwork. In lecturing, I taught them about various historic cemeteries. The types of cemeteries we did study iconography and various things like that. We then went into conservation and then once we talked about those areas, we then went out to the cemetery and did some fieldwork.

Church: Now the cemetery class, is this is something you’re going to repeat on a regular basis?

Nelson: It was successful but it was a limited number of students so it just depends on how much marketing we can do and because it’s an elective course, it’s not required. It really does take more marketing but again, it was successful for the cemeteries and it was a way for us to help those entities so I would like to offer it again in the future.

Church: How many students typically are in one of the classes?

Nelson: We do have small classes at Mississippi College. We are a private, Christian institution so that is how we market ourselves. So that particular class had about eight or nine students in it, and I think that’s a wonderful course size because you can really work with the students and really get that one on one with them. So it’s not too large and a wonderful opportunity.

Church: Now you mentioned this is an elective. For the corps people doing this program, what are their backgrounds?SAM_0678

Nelson: These are usually history majors. Again, we do have some minoring in historic preservation program. I do hope to develop a master’s program and some of the art students have been interested in our courses as well. So we do get some of those type students.

Church: Now the program is fairly young, what are the students who are coming through this program hoping to do professionally once they leave?

Nelson: That’s questionable. I don’t know and I don’t know that they really know sometimes but what I try to do is give them a good background in preservation. I try to educate them in a lot of the different opportunities for a history degree that may be in preservation, a lot of the conservation type options, research type options. I feel that in teaching them about cemeteries, we’re opening up a whole new avenue that they probably never even realized was available. So there’s so many things we know they can do with this preservation degree, and so I think just educating them about those opportunities is one of the biggest things that we can do.

Church: If you live in the state of Mississippi and you have a cemetery or another historic site and you’re interested in working with the university, is that something you guys are open to if people wanted to contact you to maybe come to their site to do projects with students?

Nelson: Oh yes, that would be wonderful. That would give us the hands on opportunity to be able to go out and do fieldwork and I think it’s a win-win situation because in Mississippi we have so many resources, historic structures, and cemeteries that are in need of help. I mean this is one of the reasons why we began this program because there is no other program in the state. So, if we can partner with these entities to provide some conservation, documentation and things such as that, I think that that’s again just a win-win situation.

Church: So you’ve told us a bit about the cemetery class and the projects you’ve done in Jackson, what other projects are the students doing in the program?

Nelson: We have had other projects going on. One thing that we did was we offered a ten day tour of Virginia, Washington DC, and some other areas to the students and we were able to gain firsthand knowledge of our country’s heritage. We toured a lot of historic sites such as Mt. Vernon, Monticello, Montpelier. We also tied it in to the civil war battlefields and also revolutionary sites and so the students were able to see historic sites and also some dealing with historic preservation. Then the next year we took them to Pennsylvania and Maryland and we were able to see additional historic sites. So we’ve had some wonderful opportunities to travel with the students and give them that first-hand knowledge that I think that all history students and historic preservation students should have. Also in April of 2013, our Historic Preservation program received an award for excellence in the use of historic records in higher education because we are so adamant on research; this was awarded by the Historical Records Advisory Board. Because we are an institution of higher learning we were able to apply for that award and we did receive that. So we’re very proud of that.

Church: What kind of research are the students doing?

SAM_4858Nelson: Well part of the program is, as I mentioned earlier, research and documentation and one of those courses I actually teach students how to do a nomination for the National Register and so we get them into the archives. Fortunately the archives are right there in Jackson so we’re able to get them over to that and show them how to do the research and the documentation for that and so we’ve been able to document some of our historic resources in the area, which has been wonderful. People that we help are also so grateful because sometimes they have no idea where to start. And so I think that because we are able to do actual projects, they actually can learn so much more with that hands-on work that they do.

Church: So if a student, even a high school student or current college student is interested in this program at Mississippi College, who should they contact, how should they go about that?

Nelson: They can contact me, Tricia Nelson. My email address is tnelson@mc.edu or you can call us at 601-925-3221.

Church: Very good. Hopefully we’ll hear more from your students. Maybe one day we’ll be doing a podcast with some of the students and the projects they’re doing and watching them go out hopefully all over Mississippi and increase preservation awareness within the state and the country. We really appreciate you talking to us.

Nelson: Great. Thank you.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, good bye.

]]> FBI and Art Crime: William Toye and Clementine Hunter (Episode 50) ]]> Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D8566513-0598-5D59-0EA63C1A2EB7BD77.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D858DCD7-C010-F7D6-347423AB384A2B52 FBI and Art Crime: William Toye and Clementine Hunter (Episode 50) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with FBI Special Agent Randy Deaton about his lead in the William Toye Forgery case of Clementine Hunter. 674 no full 50

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Church: This is Jason Church of the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, and today I’m here talking with Special Agent Randy Deaton of the FBI.

Church: Now Randy, I know you were involved in a pretty major case recently with the Toyes being forgers of Clementine Hunter artwork. Can you tell us a little bit about that case and what your role was in it?

Deaton: I was a lead investigator on this particular case. It involved three main subjects that were ultimately successfully prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced for selling and creating forged works that were Clementine Hunter, the folk artist, forgeries. It was a case that involved a conspiracy amongst three people, a lot of victims, a large loss amount, spanned the country and it basically involved an art forger that had at least a forty year career forging art.

Church: Then not only were they forging art, what else were they forging?

Deaton: In addition to the actual works of art, part of the case was also a large amount of forged or fraudulent letters of provenance that was associated with other art work, other fine art forgeries and also with Clementine Hunter forgeries.

Church: What made this particular case, what made this crime worth pursuing as an FBI agent?

Deaton: Basically again, you had a conspiracy, multiple people involved; you had a lot of victims over a long period of time, at least since the early 1970’s. You had a forty plus year career forger that was creating and getting works out into the public that were forgeries and you had victims that did not receive justice for crimes that they were victims of since the early 1970’s and you had a historical significance to this case.

Clementine Hunter, if not the most well-known artist to ever come out of Louisiana, she was a folk artist that would not be considered a fine artist, but you know, it was significant and had a significant historical aspect to it, and we helped preserve her legacy and Louisiana’s art culture.

Church: Now I’ve heard people say that art crime is victimless, that art crime is not a real crime, there’s no death involved, it’s just a rich people losing money sort of thing. As an investigator, what do you think about art crime? What were the stakes in this case?

Deaton: I think by definition, in order for something to be a crime, you have to have a victim. Whether someone may not be a victim of a monetary loss, it could be an actual physical loss like murder, but in this particular case you had some very good people that believed they were buying original pieces of art that was created by the artist, Clementine Hunter. They were told various stories to support the sales of these paintings, and we had victims that were some well-to-do, some not well-to-do normal people, all good people that don’t deserve to be victims of crime just like no one deserves to be a victim of a crime. I think some victims in this case were destitute after they learned they had forgeries but still they deserve justice just like anyone else.

Church: As far as art crime goes, was this case any different? What made this case a little bit special?

Deaton: This case was unique in a number of aspects to include, you had an art forger with at least a forty year career in forging art and this involved folk art, not what the public knows as fine art, Renoir, Matisse, Gauguin, you know this involved a Louisiana folk artist. You had a large, large number of forgeries involved in this case and you had a number of private laboratories that the US government had consulted with and contracted with in order to do forensic work that the FBI lab just couldn’t do and all of it in support of a prosecution in this case.

Church: Now the sentencing itself, how was that a little bit different?

Deaton: In what aspect?

Church: That the Toyes had …

Deaton: All three defendants were ordered to pay restitution, a large amount of restitution, and all of this is public record also. What I thought was unique about the case is that the federal judge presiding over the case and the sentencing, ordered Mr. and Mrs. Toye to assist in the identification and cataloging of forgeries created by Mr. William Toye to include some victims wanted their forgeries to be signed by Mr. Toye, which did occur.

Church: Of the ones that were catalogued, what’s the numbers on this case that you know of?

Deaton: There’s no way anyone can say a specific exact number of Clementine Hunter forgeries created by Mr. Toye. That number is just not known, the exact number to be 100% certain, but there were over two hundred forgeries that were involved in this case that were ultimately identified.

Church: Now if you’re a listener and you have a Clementine Hunter, maybe you bought it from Robbie Lucky, maybe you didn’t, if you think you have a forgery, what should you do? What’s the next step as an art collector who might have a forgery?

Deaton: Well if you bought it from Mr. Toye or Mr. Lucky, then I would certainly be suspect of what I bought. Go to someone that or find out, an appraiser maybe or an authenticator. And just generally speaking of art in general, you want to consult with people and talk to people and have various people that have a lot of experience looking at certain pieces of art and get their opinion and ultimately whether you have a forgery or you have a real painting by a certain artist, it’s all a matter of taste for the owner. You may like the forgery better than you do the original; it’s all in the person who owns the painting. But I would also say if you have any information about art forgery or someone committing these types of crimes, you can always call the FBI.

Church: Just out of curiosity, I know the Toyes have been involved in forgeries of Matisse, Gaugin, Degas and things like that, do you have any idea what might have switched them to start doing an outsider artist , doing this self-taught artist from Louisiana. What might have switched them from the impressionists?

Deaton: Yeah, I think at the time, from the investigation looking at everything, when Mr. Toye was arrested by the New Orleans Police Department in early 1970’s, at that time there was a big show of Clementine Hunter’s works that was going on at the time. There was a surge in popularity for her paintings. I don’t know for certain. That could have caused that group of forgeries to come out then. In this particular case, late 1990’s, early 2000, this new group of Toye Clementine forgeries started coming out, maybe there was something going on at that time that would have meant a surge in popularity for Clementine Hunter that made it more valuable to some people, more collectible at the time. Who knows? Who knows?

Church: So we know the Toyes were forging a variety. Now they’ve been prosecuted for the Clementine’s. We assume of course that’s the end of their forging career. Was there any movement to go back and look at past crimes? Is there any restitution on art crime? I mean any statute of limitation on art crime?

Deaton: Well there’s no federal law like an art crime law. In this particular case, you had conspiracy charges and mail and wire fraud charges and there are statutes of limitations on those. So if you were a victim of wire fraud in 1970, the federal statute of limitations has run out years ago. So somebody can’t be prosecuted for that per se. A lot of the fine art forgeries that were linked to Mr. Toye and Mrs. Toye, that’s conduct that was never prosecuted so at this point it’s just an allegation. They were never prosecuted for that. Thank God we live in a country where everybody’s innocent until proven guilty.

Church: Anything else you want to add to this case?

Deaton: It was a very challenging case, involved a lot of good people, a lot of victims in this case and really good people. It was a pleasure to meet with them under not so well circumstances but I think what made this case was the honesty, the professionalism, and the cooperation that the victims put forth, not the investigators, not the prosecutors, not the scientists, but the victims in this case that chose to cooperate with the US government. They’re pretty much the heroes in the case. I can write reports all day and go interview people, but ultimately it would have been them that went to court had we gone to trial and told their story. So you’ve got a case driven by victims and there’s four victims, to give them justice even if it was from forty years ago.

Church: Well Agent Deaton we really appreciate your coming and talking to us today. Hopefully we don’t have to talk to you in the future about more art crimes. But I think we know that you’re always available if we have any questions and if we run across anything ourselves that we can contact you.

Deaton: And again, if the public has information about art crime occurring, call your local FBI office no matter where you are.

Church: Alright. Thank you.

]]> What do you do with a broken Orangutan? (Episode 49) ]]> Wed, 08 Jan 2014 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D8734B4C-0C67-6915-E67EF6CE1553CFBF.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D874277C-C42C-9395-08176DC81E5CA02B What do you do with a broken Orangutan? (Episode 49) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with conservator Fran Ritchie about her work with taxidermy collections. Fran is a former NCPTT intern in the Archeology and Collections Program. 744 no full 49

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Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. The show that brings you the people and projects that are advancing the future of America’s Heritage. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. In this podcast we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with conservator Fran Ritchie about her work with taxidermy collections. Fran is a former NCPTT intern in the Archeology and Collections Program.

Church: So I’m here today with Fran Richie and Fran you were a former intern at NCPTT so we are sort of catching up with you finding out what you did back then and what your are doing these days.

Ritchie: Thanks. Well it’s great to talk to you. I was at the NCPTT for the summer of 2005. Which it’s hard to believe it’s been that long. I worked with Dr. David Morgan in his first summer having an intern in the Archaeology and Collections dept. We kind of did a bunch of different projects as we were figuring out what it meant to have an intern. One of the more significant things for me was learning how to use GPS and GIS and then basically just learning what the National Park Service does and what the NCPTT does. And that’s been really beneficial for me, being in the field of conservation, to know what kind of research you guys provide.

Church: And so what are you doing these days?

Ritchie: Well, I’m completing my masters in art conservation from Buffalo State College. I’m in my 3rd year. That means I am off for a kind of apprentice ship for the full year at the Harvard Peabody Museum where I’m working on organic objects; things from our coastal Alaskan collection. Which has been really exciting and really fun and we’ve been collaborating with people from Alaska on our treatments and materials.

Church: I know I’ve seen a recent ANAGPIC presentation that you did and you’ve also been working on other types of collections as well.

Ritchie: I have yes. I’ve tapped into my experiences in the south and I’ve cultivated a love of taxidermy. I’m hoping to become a taxidermy conservator so I’ve been presenting on a project I did as part of my Grad program; conserving a broken taxidermy orangutan from the Buffalo Museum of Science. Which has been very enriching and it’s definitely been an ice breaker for people.

Church: So exactly what do you do to a broken orangutan?

Ritchie: Well that one was very interesting because there were modern materials added to a traditional taxidermy mount. So the amateur – well I think he was an amateur based on my research and looking at other taxidermy specimens. This taxidermist replaced the palms of the hands and the pads of the feet with latex rubber. He just nailed the specimen to a heavy piece of driftwood back in 1966. Over time that rubber has degraded like it does and it pulled away. The specimen has pulled away from the mount and it ripped all the hands and the feet to shreds basically. I even had to recover finger fragments that were left on the wood – nailed there. So I just recovered those fragments and I lined the latex rubber with Japanese tissue infused with BEVA film which was very successful and in some places you could tell the latex rubber couldn’t – it needed a little manipulation before it would adhere to the Japanese tissue but over all it was a good process. We also had to add internal armature pieces to this specimen so we could attach it to a new display mount without having to nail into the latex again. It’s a great project, it involved many different techniques and materials and I even got to talk to a taxidermist about what to do and a new display mount and things like that. Fortunately there were no heavy metal pesticides which is common in these types of collections. We used x-ray florescence and x-ray radiography to confirm that.

Church: What were your armature pieces made of?

Ritchie: We used wooden pegs inserted into one of the hands and then a threaded metal rod inserted perpendicularly into that and both of those were held into place with Araldite epoxy. We then reconstructed the palm around the threaded metal rod using lightweight spackle. It’s micro balloons in acrylic emulsion adhesive. For the other areas it was just threaded metal rods that we inserted directly into the feet and into the legs and into the palm of the hands. We drilled into the new display mount and inserted the rods from the specimen into those new holes. We then covered them with washers and nuts and camouflaged it in the mount which was fun too.

Church: And did you have to treat the fur or the body of the orangutan any?

Ritchie: Surprisingly I didn’t. Orangutan have sparse hair so the juvenile female orangutan looks a little weird but there’s no hair missing. Some hair did detach a little bit but that’s to be expected with something that old. Fortunately we didn’t have to deal with that. The top layer of the skin was flaking off so there was a lot of skin consolidation and inpainting to give it a more visually uniform appearance. Taxidermy specimens are valued for their aesthetics so I got to do extensive aesthetic compensations just to make it display worthy again. This is the only specimen that the Buffalo Museum of Science owns of an orangutan. It’s probably the only one it will ever own because the species is endangered. So it was very important that they are able to display it because otherwise it is of no use to them.

Church: So what is the future of our orangutan?

Ritchie: Well, I think she is going to be going back to the museum and then hopefully not only used for display but also for teaching purposes. They have some curators there that are very interested in human evolution so they like to have these different primates to illustrate that with students and whatnot. I think that’s really great because not many people have seen an orangutan and not many people know what they are. I have been very adamant that it is not a chimpanzee and its not a monkey or a guerrilla or things like that.

Church: Well I know any conservation project you get really attached after the hours and hours you spend on it. Have you named the orangutan?

Ritchie: That’s such a great common question. This speaks a lot about me. I was so adamant that I wanted to know this was an orangutan that I kind of refused to name it. I wanted to continue to refer to it as the orang or the orangutan. But one of my classmates in grad school – in my grad school you become very close with your classmates and I loved the comradery – I was very close to many of them and one of them immediately named it ChimChim before it even came to the lab. I was like NO NO NO it’s not a chimpanzee. People are going to be so confused but of course that name stuck and that’s what almost everyone called it. Everyone, professors and students, were a little weary when she first came into the lab because she looked pretty bad. Some people were not used to taxidermy but by the end people were calling her ChimChim and giving her nicknames and what not. But I still go with orangutan. Which is interesting because when I first started working on taxidermy I did name everything. There are several specimens at the Biltmore estate in Asheville Carolina that have names but I think at this point I’ve worked on so many that – And I am very much into the biological side of it. That’s one reason this intrigues me too. I can learn about each specimen as I’m working on them. I maintain that professionalism.

Church: So you’ve got your year fellowship that your finishing up. What do you hope to do after that?

Richie: Well I will be a Mellon Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of American Indians. I am really excited about that because not only will I be able to work on Native American objects – which are very intriguing to me and have been my whole life – but there is also a research component to that. I will be researching how to consolidate attaching hairs on hides and furs. Not only does it relate to Native American collections but also continues with taxidermy. No one is really – as far as I can tell with my personal research – people haven’t really tapped into that and it’s something that is very necessary. I think that all these taxidermy collections – they are kind of coming of age and they are in many different types of locations not just national history museums; historic homes, discovery centers, educational centers. They have these collections and I think they are just starting to realize – like “oh wait a minute there’s hair below that caribou over there. What do we do about this?” It’s a very difficult problem so I’m hoping to start to tackle it. I’ll be a fellow at the NMAI and then we will see where I go from there – That’s for a year or maybe two. I am very much looking forward to working in Washington DC and tapping into that network of conservators. I’ve never worked there and I’ve always wanted to so its kind of a dream of mine that’s coming true.

Church: Good. Well if you could talk to people who are thinking of getting into conservation what recommendations would you give them?

Richie: Getting into conservation can be a little bit daunting. This is definitely a path that I have been following since I was an undergraduate at the University of Delaware and I was very lucky I just kind of fell into conservation. I didn’t know about it before accepting to go to Delaware. I was looking at their program right before starting my freshman year and saw they had this and was learning about the field right from the beginning. But the main thing is to get your academic prerequisites out of the way as soon as possible. The main things: chemistry, general chemistry, organic chemistry, a slew of art history and studio art classes. I actually took the more anthropological route and took anthropology classes instead of a lot of art history classes. So you can do that as well. And you need to look at the different schools and see what they require. So get those out of the way as soon as possible because it’s difficult to go back. Especially when you are busy working you don’t necessarily want to go take organic chemistry at night and deal with those labs and what not. But then the next hardest step is to just get your experience. Sometimes that might require you volunteer in labs because there aren’t an overwhelming majority of possibilities that are paid. That’s just an unfortunate reality of the field but there are many people that are willing to take on volunteers in turns and they know what that entails; what to teach them, the basics of the field, not only techniques but also ethics. That can be difficult but if you go to AIC’s website and you can find a conservator you might be able to find people in your area and then contact them and begin your networking to see who is available to have interns and volunteers. You should expect to have at least a year, probably more, of pre-program experience before applying to grad school. I just think that’s so necessary because you need to know what you are doing – we were working on priceless artifacts. You need to have the confidence and the skills and the humility to be able to work on these. But I would stick with it even though it’s been a long winding road for me but it’s been very rewarding. I’ve been able to travel to many different places and countries to do conservation work. Even though it’s a small field within the United States there are a lot of opportunities for some exciting adventures.

Church: We hope you the best and we hope to hear from you in the future.

Richie: Thank you. I really appreciated my time in Louisiana. It was a great time in my life and I recommend it to many other young people. I’m happy that this project has continued this internship program.

]]> Maintaining Adobe Buildings in the Southwest: Interview with Jake Barrow of Cornerstones Community Partnerships (Episode 48) ]]> Wed, 20 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/100907B7-E591-F21D-A2A00C598BF64D77.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-101379A8-9E85-E24F-D59F6C18C0A3CD8B Maintaining Adobe Buildings in the Southwest: Interview with Jake Barrow of Cornerstones Community Partnerships (Episode 48) National Park Service Miriam Tworek-Hofstetter speaks with Jake Barrow, Program Director at Cornerstones Community Partnerships, about organizing communities to preserve adobe architecture. 939 no full 48

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Miriam: Hi Jake, thanks for joining us today.

Jake: Well Thanks for having me, we really appreciate the support of the National Center here at Cornerstones and so I’m glad to be able to participate.

Miriam: To begin, can you describe Cornerstones and the work that you guys do there.

Jake: Yeah, sure. Cornerstones was founded in 1986 here in Santa Fe. We’re a non-profit, community organization and our mission is community and heritage, and it’s focused on communities and the preservation of their heritage.

The reason that Cornerstones got started was because in northern New Mexico there’s a lot of little villages–very historic little villages–predominantly built of adobe vernacular architecture and the center of the village in these communities was the little church–the mission church usually–and often times these things are 200 years old or older, and these churches were disappearing and becoming challenged in their preservation and so a group of very interested individuals in Santa Fe got together and formed Cornerstones to help those communities try to save their churches and that’s what we’ve been at ever since day one.

Miriam: Can you briefly explain the process of adobe construction and its significance?

Jake: The historical of significance of adobe or earthen architecture is pretty broad and I’ll start with that because it sets the context for something about the preservation of earthen architecture. And I’ll use the word “earthen architecture” in the broader sense since adobe is one methodology or one technique within the whole framework of earthen architecture.

Earthen architecture is one of the oldest forms of architecture known to mankind and it’s fairly ubiquitous throughout the world–predominantly in the equatorial regions–but almost every country has a tradition of earthen architecture and it’s generally believed that 50% of people in the world live in earthen architecture structures, so there’s a big broad history–international history.

And when we look at America we mostly look in the southwest–although it’s not completely true there’s sod houses in other states and we find adobe architecture in New York State–but predominantly in the southwest. Of course it’s a Native American tradition before the Spanish ever came to this region in the 17th c. and you can see examples of that–I think the predominant one that everyone knows so much about is the Casa Grande ruins in Coolidge Arizona which is like a 12th-13th c. puddled earth structure–multi-story–that survived all those centuries and is now a national monument.

And so the native American population used earthen architecture in a major way: all of their structures were built of earth or earth and stone. When the Spanish came we have a historical context there where different aspects were introduced particularly the adobe block. And so then we had some changes in the 17th c. coming to the southwest New Mexico primarily and later Arizona southern California Texas and in a state like New Mexico you could say that until the 20th c. the predominant architecture was earthen so we have that context here.

Then as a result we have a challenge of preserving that architecture and like anything else–like any other kind of preservation–it depends upon an extensive knowledge of material, how it’s used, and the history of it. So that’s what we’re involved in. And earthen architecture like all architecture has the characteristic of preservation maintenance being a factor–like a wooden building might be painted and the painting might be the sacrificial coat to preserve the wood, for example.

In earthen architecture it’s often been the protective skin which predominantly has been a mud plaster and so the preservation of these buildings is similar to other buildings in that you want a roof that doesn’t leak and a skin that’s compatible with building material and works with it and preserves it. And you want good drainage around the building so that water doesn’t get retained. So it kind of follows the same precepts of other building preservation but it’s just a different material and has its own characteristics that have to be paid attention to.

Miriam: Is there anything you see as the greatest challenge to conserving earthen architecture in the United States?

Jake: Well that’s an interesting question. There’s several challenges. One is the modern industrial material such as, let’s say, Portland cement. That’s one of the dominant ones that’s a modern material that has seen widespread use in the 20th c. in all kinds of ways. This material’s not particularly sympathetic with earthen architecture, and so a lot of old historic earthen architecture buildings have been coated with cement stucco and this has not been really positive treatment for earthen architecture buildings, basically because any moisture that gets in the walls of those buildings gets trapped in that cement skin and doesn’t allow it to evaporate out. You get a lot of subsurface deterioration on a historic earthen architecture building when it’s been cement coated. This is one factor and a real challenge for preserving earthen architecture.

Another factor is the building codes and we’re fortunate in New Mexico to have a historic earthen architecture building code which allows historic buildings to avoid being subjected to the contemporary earthen architecture building code so we’re lucky here. I can’t say that same thing is true in Arizona and some other states that don’t recognize earthen architecture, or have a much more rigorous building code for modern earthen architecture and they apply that to the historic buildings. It really has unsympathetic results, so struggling with building code is an issue throughout the southwest for preserving earthen architecture in addition to incompatible materials.

The third thing I would say is that there’s been a lack of a continuation of traditional knowledge and traditional ability and skill level to maintain earthen architecture which was very well known in the villages in the past–in the 19th c. and 18th c. But in the 20th c., with these new materials those traditional methods have been lost and people have forgotten how to do it so that’s where we come in with Cornerstones and so we really, really make an effort to help preserve the traditional methods of earthen architecture preservation and try to help those people in some way maintain a traditional knowledge that they need to preserve earthen architecture.

Miriam: Great. Can you tell us a bit about the people who volunteer for you and what skills they gain when they’re volunteering?

Jake: Yeah, we are predominantly a volunteer organization. We have several other outreach venues: we have interns, we conduct training workshops–but primarily we help communities organize volunteers to get out there and do work. We really have no skill set requirements. Typically what happens is that a village is working on a building and we’ll come in to help them with tools, equipment, and perhaps some leadership and organize workdays and get everybody started and usually we have a very standard process where we look at materials–of course we look at the problem and identify the issues and establish what the work elements are going to be: wall repair or mud plaster or what have you. And then what we like to do is to set up an adobe making workshop where we take really unskilled people, all ages, and make adobe bricks. We go through the process of selecting material and mixing materials the process of forming the bricks, drying the bricks, evaluating the bricks and that kind of thing.

Then the same thing with the walls: we’ll prepare walls and look for structural issues on walls and how to stitch and make those structural repairs. Cracks may be issues or erosion that’s happened in the wall. Often times we’re taking cement off. Then we’re evaluating the walls and we’ll go into a process of material selection and mud plastering and how to do that. And we really, really will find out over a period of a couple days who of the volunteers are picking it up and we try to get leadership going in that way to identify individuals who may know something about it or may have a natural talent for that kind of work and we encourage them to take leadership and we begin backing out, we begin disengaging as the community can take over. Our whole thing at Cornerstones is getting the community empowered to do the work and us kind of disappearing. The ideal situation is when the project gets going good we may not be there really hardly at all and then at the end we might come in and pick up our tools and equipment and scaffolding and demobilize and look at the work and give it a stamp of approval and pat the community on the back and make a plan for another workshop next year.

So that’s the ideal setting and we have volunteers from all over. I mean we certainly like to have volunteers from the community, but we’re a nationally recognized organization so we’ll get inquiries from people coming to the southwest who want to participate in some way, they’re on vacation usually or they’re a university crowd that may be doing a class in the southwest for a semester and they want to do some service learning in a community and we’ll connect them up. So a lot of times the workshops that are going on in the communities will be a mix of the community people and half the people will be coming from other environments. For instance this week we’re starting with a class from Castleton College in Vermont that are down here for a semester and they want to do a service learning project in the community so we’re participating with them in one of our communities to give those students a chance to experience the hands-on adobe but also the history of New Mexico in a tangible way so it’s really great–it’s a great process.

Miriam: Well that’s great and community involvement is so important for preservation generally. Now you mentioned moisture as being an issue with earthen architecture, and I know that Cornerstones worked with the community of Hatch, New Mexico when it was devastated by a flooding event. What does a person–who has a building constructed with earthen architecture–what do they do in the event of a flood?

Jake: Yeah, you know it’s a very tough question. I know the national center supported Cornerstones in putting out a little booklet called “How to Save Your Adobe Home in the Event of a Flood Disaster.” And for anyone that is interested we still have a number of copies of that to distribute to anyone on request.

Just in a nutshell, just to talk a little bit about that the process and everything, since adobe architecture is made of earth, water is one of the predominant causes for deterioration of an adobe building, and so in a flood incident, it can be catastrophic. I think just a rule of thumb would be that if there’s an anticipated flood coming then the idea is going to be to begin mitigation as soon as possible so the impact of the water on the building needs to be minimized in every way possible. Depending on the landscape around the building there could be some berming put in, some sand bag and berming help spread the water away from the building. Then secondarily, when floodwaters come, there’s a lot of groundwater there and it may have gotten into the building.

So the second mode of defense is to get the water out as quickly as possible with drainage and pumps as soon as the flood has subsided if you don’t want any standing water in the building. [Draining] would get it out of there as quickly as possible and once the flood has passed, an evaluation of a base of the substructure’s going to be required. Typically what is done is a visual evaluation, but if the building is cement-stuccoed it’s going to be important to cut windows, small 12 inches by 12 inches windows in various locations and see if the wall has gotten wet inside. For how wet is the wall, the concern is if the base of the wall gets totally saturated and stays saturated for a period of time it and can’t dry out, the likelihood of a structural slumping is very high and so the building owner has got to be prepared to shore the roof of the building as quickly as possible. And so once that evaluation is made to determine if the basal part of the wall is saturated with water or even got saturated and began to dry but is still wet–it’s very subject to settlement and so our suggestion is to go ahead and shore the roof structure so that if there is any settlement the roof is not going to collapse. And then piece by piece there’s a procedure of going in and making those strategic repairs to the base of the wall–basal stabilization we call it– to give integrity back to the basic wall structure.

Anything like introduction of concrete around it or anything like that are really very negative treatments and do more harm than good. Essentially what has to happen is that a structural system of going in and underpinning that deteriorated area with solid new adobe is what really is required. There’s a system for doing that and it’s described in our little handbook so I would encourage people to contact us and get a copy of the handbook–it’s free and we’ll send it out to them and it’d be helpful in terms of planning for that kind of event.

Miriam: Well thank you for talking to us today Jake.

Jake: Yeah, it’s great and any time and we’re so appreciative of the recent grant that the NCPTT gave to us for the curriculum we’ve been working on and we’re excited about that, it’s going into the community college this year it looks like and so we feel that the opportunities to train young people through curriculum development gives us another way to reach out to the larger community for the purpose of extending the traditional methodology for preserving earthen architecture, so thanks again to you too.

]]> Recording Civil War Earthwork Fortifications with LiDAR (Episode 47) ]]> Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/667A740A-CFA2-49FF-5EA144FE503F4996.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-665ABDA4-E413-92D8-8666CC010E1BBE27 Recording Civil War Earthwork Fortifications with LiDAR (Episode 47) National Park Service Ben Donnan speaks with Matthew Luke an archaeologist who is using augmented reality to aid with preservation and interpretation of South Carolina battlegrounds. 565 no full 47

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Ben: Hey Matt How is it going?

Matt: Its going pretty good.

Ben: If you would please tell us about what kinds of projects you have been involved with at the trust and what are your current projects?

Matt: Currently we are working on recording Civil War earthwork fortifications and Revolutionary War fortifications using 3D ground-based LiDAR scanners and also developing augmented reality apps to interpret the data we are collecting to the public.

Ben: Cool. So what is augmented reality and how is it used to preserve a site?

Matt: Well augmented reality is basically adding three dimensional or 2D objects such as 3D models of forts or 2D images, maybe historic sketch of the fort or engineering drawings and video content and audio content to the real world. So basically when you are on a site and you watch the app and move around with your smart phone you actually be able to see the content related to that site. So as far is it being used as a preservation method I would say it has more of an impact on preservation as in getting the public back involved with preservation and interested in preservation there for supporting the preservation as far as the public side of it.

Ben: So you guys are heavily focused on encouraging the public to be involved with these sites, now you mentioned ground-based laser scanning and LiDAR, how do you guys use that in terms of geospatial datasets and the process where you would go through collecting the data and then processing it? how does that work?

Matt: So basically we have Leica C10 Laser scanner that we are using from Georgia Southern University and what we are doing is going out and recording 3D topographic data these fortifications these earthwork fortifications. And how that works is that sensor sits on a tripod and fires a beam of light and measures the time it takes for the light to reflect back to get the distance therefore recording a survey similar to a total station but without the reflector. So this machine actually collects thousands of these points these measurements per second and this data can be used then to generate 3d models of the ground surface with all the vegetation removed giving us a better overview of the site and how the different features of the fort relate to each to one another. And as far as public interpretation we use these models and augmented reality but the data can also be used for monitor sites and managing the site as far as erosion that may occur over the years we can scan the sites and go back in a year and scan them again and measure erosion as far as road beds that have been cut through or any kind modern features that are impacting the sites or concerns as far as erosion. It also preserves the site digitally as it appeared on the day of the scan. So there is always high resolution three dimensional survey of the site digitally preserved so in the future we can go back and if anything happens to the site we can go back and see how it looked on that day.

Ben: So do feel using this data and inputting it into AR so people could see it, do you think this is one of those methods that should be added to a modern toolkit for preservationist or person involved in historic preservation?

Matt: Yes, and I think that we have had a somewhat of a disconnect with how we interpret our data and findings to the general public. We may find site reports and technical reports interesting and journal articles interesting but the general public as far as that type of information being consumed by the general public it usually does not go over to well. And also we have been interpreting sites primarily with text based signage or text and image based signage which as I have been scanning sites I watch visitors come to site look at the sign they don’t really read any of it look around kind of wonder what happened here and walk off. So with the increase use of smart phones and tablet pc, you know a device that essentially everyone has now.

BEN: a Mobile device?

Matt: A mobile device yeah. We have decide that, that will be a way to reach the general public on a device that they are familiar with, familiar using would be with the augmented reality.

Ben: So a lot of this work is stemming from your master’s thesis work. Can you tell me a little bit about it? A little bit more specific detail about it.

Matt: Well we have been collecting data for the last four years now, on various earthwork fortifications related to the Civil War on James Island in SC. We have compared the number of known sites with the number of sites visible using freely available aerial LiDAR data and the size of the features to kind of gage how well freely available data performs for prospecting and locating sites. We have been using the ground-based laser scanner to assess the erosion that has occur on the sites since their construction to the present day to get a general estimate on erosion rates into the far future and to better manage the sites. And we are taking the LiDAR data and actually comparing profile slices of the parapets and other features related to the fortifications to contemporary engineering drawings of the fortifications.

Ben: Now I know from working with you before I know that you have been working on trying to integrate the aerial LiDAR with terrestrial LiDAR and how would that work and has it been effective has it been good for use in augmented reality?

Matt: well we have been trying integrate and we have successfully integrated several datasets that we have collected from James Island with the freely available aerial LiDAR that was shot for flood plain mapping and as far as the results we have gotten pretty good accuracy and that has occurred by picking out landmarks, such as street corners drive ways etc. houses, and conducting high resolution scans in those areas and then overlapping that data and georeferencing it to the aerial based data. And what this does is the aerial based data actually gives a much better picture of the landscape and how the sites relate to the landscape and the area as a whole while the ground base data gives the high definition and detail of the actual features still presence at the site so it kind of gives a micro and macro view of the site.

Ben: Before concluding is there anything else you can think of or would like to add to anything we have discussed?

Matt: I would just like to say that you know I believe getting the public involved in and interested in these sites is key to preservation and I think that we often over look. Without public interest and public involvement with these sites there’s no funding there’s regulation to preserve these sites. So you know anything, I think we need to step up our interpretive sides of historic preservation.

Ben: And additionally, do you feel augmented reality could be one of those solution?

Matt: Yeah and augmented reality is definitely one of those solutions. You know it is format that devices format that everyone is familiar with that is widely used every day. If you walk on a college campus or you are walking down the street, you will see numerous people texting checking their email surfing the web. So it is a device that the public is very familiar with and that they use every day and if we can present or if we can reach them through this device I believe it will be a very effective means of interpreting a site and getting our interpretations of sites up to par.

]]> Restoration of the Camden House Orchard with with arborist Rico Montenegro (Episode 46) ]]> Tue, 17 Sep 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/68ED7168-D286-C8D5-0D211C46ACD5E450.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-68FF49A2-FC92-62B1-A4961BBE4AB69165 Restoration of the Camden House Orchard with with arborist Rico Montenegro (Episode 46) National Park Service Paul Cady speaks with Rico Montenegro, Chief Arborist for The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, about pruning neglected historic orchards. 853 no full 46

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Paul: So the first question I was wondering about was how did you originally become involved with the Camden House?

Rico: Well, I’ve been involved with the Camden House orchard at Whiskeytown National Park [National Recreation Area] for at least 13 years. At the time I was involved with the construction of a new botanical garden for a new museum and garden complex called Turtle Bay in Redding, CA.

I was also teaching in the Horticulture Department at a local college called Shasta College. I had previously been involved with managing a university botanical garden in southern California that had at the time the largest collection of fruit trees of any garden in California and it was certainly the most popular of any of the classes I had taught. So, I had a real interest in this area and when I was made aware of this old orchard up at the Camden House, I went up to visit it. I become friends with the botanist that was there at the time, and I expressed interest in helping to restore it and possibly bringing students and others up to help with its pruning. So I became involved with the orchard, as a volunteer, and little by little, with the restoration of the old apple trees that were associated the Camden House.

Paul: Do you happen to know when the trees were planted and who planted them?

Rico: The trees range in age from 100-150 years of age and were planted in association with an early homestead and a hotel that was built to provide a way station and a source of food for travelers that were going from the inland to the coast and back. The site had been developed by early pioneers, prospectors Charles Camden and Levi Tower, who were involved with providing a rest stop and a gateway for travelers to the coast. They actually had a toll bridge there so people had to pay a toll to cross over the creek to get on the road that took folks over, through the mountains and to the coast where gold and redwoods were located.

Paul: What are you planning on doing with the trees now that you’ve started working on them?

Rico: Whiskeytown National Park [National Recreation Area] is now really quite committed to the preservation of these old trees and providing some resources to insure their survival. When I first became involved with the orchard it had actually been let go for quite a number of years and the trees had been subject to a lot of neglect and abuse. Originally it was an orchard of about 1000 fruit trees of all types. What is left now are about 30-35 apples, some cherries, a few pears and a stand of persimmons that are native to the eastern part of the United States. Some of the pear trees are also quite old with some possibly being original while others may be seedlings. The intent right now has been to do what I can to restore them. Because of the condition of the trees, none of them can be essentially brought back to what they originally were. Somebody years ago went at the trees with a chain saw, leaving trees with very large wounds that never healed. This resulted in decay, with many of the old trees being heavily damaged. Most of the trees rotted out in their crowns with some losing as much as, some essentially were left with about a quarter of the trunk, and some so decayed that they could easily be pushed over. A few of these trees have maybe two or three inches of cambium tissue left. When I first became involved with these trees, they were heavily infected with fireblight, which is a bacterial infection that causes severe dieback. The trees, if they were lucky, had fruit that was very small and inferior. But since that time the annual pruning that we do has eliminated the fireblight, though it comes back periodically. The trees are now very productive with lots of fairly good size apples and healthy vigorous growth. There has been some work with the propagation and grafting on new rootstocks off some of these trees and some replanting in one section of the orchard near the Camden House.

Paul: Do you prune overgrown trees differently than the ones that have been pruned for a longer, more consistent, period of time?

Rico: Yes, there are basic pruning principals that apply to all tree pruning, but the goals and methods used are different than on a newly planted tree or one that has been pruned and maintained annually. I teach and follow basic pruning principles that are taught by the International Society of Arboriculture. I am a certified arborist. In a commercial orchard you will always notice that the trees are trained so that they branch fairly low to the ground, so typically I tell people, that you want to train them so that they start their first branch maybe about 18 inches from the ground, that way you can keep the trees lower. And the lower they are, the easier access you have to the fruit and the easier it is to maintain the trees. In earlier years it was a whole different procedure because they had a lot of predators, especially with the wildlife, like deer, but you may have also had problems with bears which is a much harder problem to deal with. So they typically trained the trees so that they branched very high off the ground and they used orchard ladders to maintain and harvest the fruit. Most of the trees branch fairly high off the ground right now but we are working with staff to reduce their height. All the trees that were pruned heavily in the past with the chain saw were not maintained so the trees grew back up with what we call water sprouts, so they just went straight up. Many of these trees, when I first started working on them, were almost 35-40 feet in height, but with very weak structure. They had a tendency to split and break apart when they reached a certain height because of poor attachment, because of rot and decay, and sometimes bear climbing up on the trees. Bears love apples, and they can bring whole sections of trees down. So the intent is to reduce the height of the trees using a technique called crown reduction, which is a very specific pruning method for size reduction, as well as doing lacing or thinning out of the trees. As the trees come into production we use pruning techniques that will encourage and emphasize good fruit production.

Paul: Are you pruning these trees by yourself or have you been able to develop a volunteer core to help you out with this?

Rico: Well, the first year I may have worked on the orchard by myself. I then started bringing some college classes that I was teaching up to the orchard as part of the course, then I opened it up to the community. Over the years I have offered classes annually to the community on basic fruit tree care and pruning, starting from young trees up. On the first Saturday in February, I’ve offered a free class on restoration pruning at Whiskeytown National Park [National Recreation Area]. The classes I teach provide information on restoring older trees, particularly fruit trees, though the techniques I teach can be applied to any type of tree. The information I provide helps people learn how to properly manage their own trees. The classes are of particular interest to people who have had trees that have been badly abused, like the ones at the park, or trees that have been let go and neglected and they want to know what I do to restore them. What is most popular is that I encourage people to bring their own pruning tools, and after we’re done with the class they have an opportunity to have some hands on experience.

Years ago, I started off with a handful of people who came up every year to help and learn about how to care for these trees. Over the years this activity has grown. Normally I’d have between 15-20 people show up on a Saturday morning. Last year I had over 40, and this year, I had over 65 people show up. I always hold the activity the first Saturday of February, which is a good time to do the pruning on these old trees in this region, while the trees are still dormant. The best time for pruning in other regions will vary, depending on their climate. Park staff, this year, was actually taken aback by the number of people who showed up. It was by word-of-mouth and some emails, because I didn’t really have the chance to get it in the paper this time, but the turnout was amazing and people seemed to really appreciate receiving the information and knowing how to accomplish the pruning.

I tell everybody, not only are you going to have an opportunity to have some hands on experience, but then you are going to walk away feeling you’ve made a positive contribution to the [National] Park Service and to the community and the restoration of these old historical trees. People feel really good about that. So they’ve gotten a chance to learn by doing it, they’ve had, or they’ve seen what mistakes others have made, and they then learn how to make corrections, or how to restore damaged older trees. I always tell people that with young trees figure it’s going to take about 3-4 years to develop the structural framework that will be permanent on that tree. When you’re restoring older trees you’re approaching it from a different goal, so I tell them to figure 5 or 6 years, or it could even be a little bit longer, because you’re going to work on restoring the trees slowly until you’ve gotten it back into a state of structure and productivity. Most of those trees were in pretty bad shape when I started 13 years ago and they will never fully be restored to what they could have been if they had not been so badly damaged. So the intent is to bring them back into a stable condition so people can see these historical trees and their association with this historical home on the site as well.

Paul: What happens to the fruit when it is ripe?

Rico: People are always invited, to come out, especially the volunteers, and taste the fruit. School children enjoy this part when they show up for field trips. Two years ago, and this fall will be the third year, the Park Service held a harvest festival associated with the apples and the old house. They had a minimal amount of advertisement the first year but the response from the community was so great, that they decided again last year to do it with an equal response. So now they have determined this is going to become an annual event at the park with activities for the kids and even an apple tasting of some of the different fruits. Last year I did two tours of the orchard at the festival and was able to talk to people about coming back and participating in my classes and helping with the trees. That’s probably why, though I didn’t do a survey, so many people showed up this last February to participate in the restoration class that I taught.

Paul: Are you in a partnership with the Park Service to develop a management plan to maintain these trees in the long term?

Rico: Yes, that’s evolving right now as they are not only looking at the trees, but they are looking at the whole historical site itself. The house referred, to as the Camden House, is open up on weekends at certain times of the year for tours. Before coming to this region years ago, I managed a botanical garden that had a mid-1800’s historical home on the premises that had become a significant part of the gardens with associated period gardens and activities. This drew a whole different group of people. The Park Service here has done a lot of work on the house already and are now looking to develop a plan for the house’s use, as well as associated gardens around the house which includes the apple orchard.

I feel really good about what has happened, especially because now the Park Service has a committed to see that this site is preserved and maintained. Just this last year they replaced a decaying redwood water storage tank that was used as the only source of water for irrigation for a section of orchard that’s closest to the house. Most of the trees in outlying areas still don’t get summer irrigation so they just survive on their own without supplemental water. Hopefully, at some point in the future, the other outlying trees will get supplemental water during the summer months. So the answer, is yes, there is a management plan that’s evolving. The plan also includes the propagation and the preservation of the gene pool that we have with the trees here. Many of the cultivars and varieties growing here are not necessarily available in the trade anymore. Many of them though have been identified, but not all of them as yet.

Paul: Before we finish up are there any additional comments you’d like to make about historic orchards and their care?

Rico: Some people look at these old trees and question the reason for putting such effort into the restoration and preservation of them and think, are they really worth bringing back? Some fruit trees, especially apple trees, can live as much as 200 years. There’s a real growing interest in these old cultivars. As I’ve experienced around the country, and because of the work that I do now with the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, where we donate fruit tree orchards throughout the world, I’ve had the opportunity to come in contact with a number of older growers who are still growing some of these old varieties and cultivars. People are beginning to realize not only do they have historical significance, but they have attributes that some of the newer varieties and cultivars don’t have. These fruit trees are significant, as people really feel they are part of our living history and fabric. They have a lot of real important things that they bring to our community. I’ve seen communities come together around the planting of community orchards, and here the preservation and restoration of this magnificent old orchard and that’s pretty exciting to me. I think the Park Service realizes that, and I know across the country there’s a few old orchards associated with historical sites. I think Monticello is an example of that, they have done work for a number of years, on the perseveration of some of their old varieties of fruit trees.

Paul: Alright, well thanks very much for talking with me Rico, I really appreciate it.

Rico: Well it’s been a pleasure and it’s been an exciting experience for me over the years volunteering and bringing the community together in the restoration of those old wonderful trees. So, thank you very much for letting me share this.

Paul: Thanks Rico.

]]> Learning From the Texas Wildfires: Bastrop State Park and Beyond (Episode 45) ]]> Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF41967B-C60C-03E9-BAE203BF71E8C3B2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-69446381-AAC2-3BC8-59E316BD30A2B7E6 Learning From the Texas Wildfires: Bastrop State Park and Beyond (Episode 45) National Park Service Sarah Hunter speaks with Fran Gale, Director of the Architectural Conservation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, and Miriam Tworek-Hofstetter, recent graduate from the University of Texas’s Historic Preservation Program. The three will discuss a recent NCPTT grant project titled “Learning from the Texas Wildfires: Bastrop State Park and Beyond.” 757 no full 45

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Sarah: Hello Fran and Miriam. Thanks for joining me today.

Fran: It’s our pleasure.

Sarah: Miriam, could you tell me a little about the Bastrop State Park and the wildfire?

Miriam: Okay, well the park was established at the beginning of the 1930s and shortly afterwards the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, started developing the park. There are a number of CCC structures still standing. There’s a group of day use buildings, a group of cabins, two overlook structures, and a number of culverts. The 2011 fires, started in September and it burned through most of that month. During that time most of the buildings were protected from the fires. So the day use buildings and the cabins, the wild land firefighters were able to work the fire around the buildings, but the overlook structures and the culverts were all burned over in the fire.

Sarah: Fran, what were you trying to learn about the Bastrop State Park wildfire in particular?

Fran: Well, we thought it was an opportunity to gain some information about a really tragic event that had occurred. With the idea that the more we learned about what had happened and what the results were the better able we were to put together some guidelines for preventing damage in the future from wildfires. Specifically, we started out with the idea that we really wanted to assess the damage that had occurred. From our early site visit and from discussions with Texas Parks & Wildlife we knew that there had been some damage to some of the structures. So our idea was to really look closely as how the exposure to the wildfire had affected those materials and we approached that in a scientific manner. From the information that we gained we then learned a lot about how wildfires are likely to damage historic structures. With that information we could put together guidelines that the parks might follow to help prevent future damage, to help them be better prepared.

Sarah: How did you and Miriam become involved in the project?

Fran: Well, I got involved because I was part of a team that wrote a grant application to NCPTT. Our team was me, representing the University of Texas at Austin, and Casey Gallagher, a recent graduate of our Historic Preservation [Program] here at UT. We talked about this idea for a grant proposal, as we had both worked a bit with Texas Parks & Wildlife, we thought that they would be a really excellent partner. The grant application was put together by our team, but the grant applicant was Texas Parks & Wildlife. So Casey Gallagher and I were subcontractors, if you will, to [Texas] Parks & Wildlife; and worked closely with them throughout the project. We applied for the grant, I think, in Fall of 2011 and then in the Spring of 2012 we found out that we’d been successful with our grant application. That summer Miriam was between her first and second years of the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Texas and each student in our program is required to do either a master’s thesis or a professional report. So I talked with Miriam and I had worked with her before and knew that she was a good student, an excellent researcher and a person I could depend on. So I talked with her about this project and just shared with her the idea that this would make an excellent thesis topic and convinced her that this was a project that she could tackle.

Sarah: Miriam, Could you tell me a little bit about your testing and process?

Miriam: For my part of the grant project I spent a lot of time thinking about the stone, I think we all did. We knew from research that stone, even when it doesn’t obviously react to a fire through spalling [for instance], can still be damaged on a micro level. Our testing started with a water absorption test to see if that could give us an idea of any sort of changes in the stone between our unburned sample and the samples we had taken from the buildings. From that testing we got a range of different absorption rates, so there wasn’t anything conclusive from that. From there we contacted a geologist at UT’s Jackson School of Geosciences, and he was a scholar in the stone around Bastrop and was really familiar. I should say that the stone that was used in these buildings was all quarried locally. He came out to the park with us to look at the stone, and he helped me doing examinations with the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) and with those examinations nothing was seen that indicated real serious structural damage to the stone.

Sarah: Could you tell me a little bit more about how this could be applied to other wildfire cases?

Miriam: One thing that we haven’t talked about yet is the importance of building a defensible space around structures in a wild land situation. Having clear space for firefighters to be able to work fires around a building and preventing the fire damage in the first place is very important. Then also an awareness that fire is going to affect different materials differently. Different stones will react to the fire exposure and will be damaged more so than we believe that the Bastrop fires on sandstone was.

Fran: This was a very interesting project, Miriam’s work as she discussed was focused on the sandstone in a highly technical way. We had an opportunity to really look very closely at the effect of the wildfires on material. I think that her work adds to the body of knowledge about the effects of high temperatures and fire on materials, there is a body of literature. So I’m pleased that she could add to that. Because we looked closely at what had happened during that 2011 wildfire period and we studied the effect of wildfires on parks, both state and national in other parts of the country, we were able to develop some guidelines for Bastrop and other state parks in Texas and beyond to follow[in order] to be better prepared to deal with disasters of these type. Part of our grant products included guidelines for preparing and dealing with these kinds of issues. I think the other thing that came about through our study was the realization that you really have two communities who are involved with the study of wildfires in these sorts of situations. You have the historic preservation professionals, cultural resource managers, conservators, historical architects, and the like; and then the other community are the folks who are trained as firefighters and first responders. What we discovered was that these two groups in Bastrop, but I think we see this trend throughout the United States, don’t communicate as well as they might. Part of our study was to point this out and recommend ways to remedy this kind of rift between the two groups. The groups certainly are interested in the other groups work, but our recommendations were for ways in which these groups could better work together and coordinate their efforts. In my view that was one of the most important things that came out of this study.

Sarah: Thank you guys once again for giving your time today and talking about your project.

Fran: Thank you.

]]> Incorporating Wiki-based Assignments in Higher Education (Episode 44) ]]> Tue, 09 Jul 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/696BE330-0CC2-2807-C3639E71B87AD2F9.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-697A2A71-B635-F125-E387692653603E61 Incorporating Wiki-based Assignments in Higher Education (Episode 44) National Park Service Stephanie Byrd speaks with Bruce Sharky, a landscape architecture professor at Louisiana State University. 539 no full 44

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Byrd: Welcome to the Preservation Technology podcast. I’m Stephanie Byrd, and today I’m talking with Bruce Sharky, a landscape architecture professor at Louisiana State University.

Welcome Bruce!

Sharky: Hi, Stephanie. Thanks for arranging for this.

Byrd: Now, Bruce, you’ve been working to incorporate Wiki-based assignments into your classes, can you describe the projects for our listeners?

Sharky: Sure. I’ve done it in advanced studios, I’ve done it with graduate students – second year graduate students – and I’ve done it with seniors, undergraduate, and the classes that I’ve had with graduate students has been in regional planning and the assignment was what I called “Rain, Wind, and Fire,” and each of the students is assigned a natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, global warming, ground subsidence, and each one is assigned one of those topics and is to develop a storyboard to explain their phenomena, to explain how it works, all the factors, what’s the impact on the landscape over time, and as a part of that, I have them go to Wikipedia and find their topic, and one of the diagrams that they’re to develop to be in their final storyboard presentation is to be a diagram that could be incorporated into an already written Wikipedia article on their assigned phenomena, with the idea of the one of the landscape architect’s roles could be, in contributing to the body of knowledge, is to make the information in, say, a scientific article, more accessible through diagrams. Good visualization of a concept, and so, basically that’s been the assignment, and I’ve done it for two years.

With the undergraduates, I’ve teamed up with a biology teacher here at LSU who has upper division students, and they’re assigned something somewhat similar having to do with the coast of Louisiana in biology and we team up one of my students with one of their students. They’re students basically do the research and then serve as a client to my students who they request to develop a diagram to be included in the biology student’s report.

So, basically, those are the two assignments. The first, again, with the graduate students, and that’s a standalone, the students working through Wikipedia making their contribution there, and the second is with seniors working with biology students.

Byrd: Now, with the undergraduate project, was their report then translated into a Wiki article, or was it a standard report that was turned into the professor?

Sharky: The goal was for the report to be submitted to Wikipedia for consideration, and in the case of the graduates, the students would then post their diagram and it would go through the review process that Wikipedia has established. Some of them have actually been incorporated into an article.

Byrd: Why did you choose to have your students adding graphics to Wikipedia articles rather than written content?

Sharky: The course was a studio course, and this was some early research that I had them to do for a semester long project, which was going to be a planning design project, and it was not meant as a report. Basically, Wikipedia several years got a grant to try to facilitate and have more and more university involvement in developing Wikipedia contributions, and they had targeted students. Actually, in, not even in the sciences, it was in the social sciences, but I happened to be in this meeting, and I offered that I wanted to be involved with my students. I thought it would be a good learning process for my students for them to understand better how Wikipedia works and the quality of the articles and the information that one can get from Wikipedia and, at the same time, make a contribution. I wasn’t about to have them write a paper on ground subsidence on the coast, although they did do a storyboard and essentially it was a visualization of explaining the phenomena as opposed to doing some kind of research on the phenomena.

The assignment of developing a graphic for their assignment improved the quality of their ability to communicate, say, complex ideas, graphically or visually, which I thought was important.

Byrd: And it makes it so that the student’s work is also bettering people’s understanding like you were talking about earlier.

Sharky: You really have to understand something to draw it, to draw a really good graphic that communicates, very quickly, and is accessible, understood, by all levels of people looking at the article.

Byrd: You’ve said that you’ve done assignments like this for several semesters now, how has the assignment changed or evolved over time?

Sharky: The assignment has evolved in that the first two times I did it, it was students in a class, working individually to make their contribution and that their work was then posted to be reviewed by the Wikipedia community and then critiqued, and if it eventually became acceptable it was included. In the second case, the assignment changed in that their client, so to speak, was someone in another profession, namely biology. So the goal in the second case, and I’ve done that twice now, as well, was for my students to learn, to have experience talking to people in other disciplines and working together to arrive at some common goal. So, in the second case, I added the layer of working with someone in another discipline and actually establishing a client-consultant relationship, which I thought would be a good experience for the students.

Byrd: With the students, what were their initial perceptions and then their final thoughts of working with a Wiki?

Sharky: The graduate students actually had, I think, a better experience in that they were actually, once they posted their diagram, they were getting feedback [from] all over the world, cause it’s posted and anyone, I mean there are people all over the world that spend a lot of time as reviewers of Wikipedia articles. I don’t think there’s any other venue that gets vetted as on the Wikipedia review community and we had people in, literally, from many parts of the world critiquing the students. The students really then, not that they didn’t take it seriously, but they got much more serious about what they were doing because they realized that people took them seriously and were giving them critiques that they were not used to, say, in a design studio critique.

Byrd: Well, Bruce, thank you so much for joining us today and I wish you the best of luck in your further Wiki projects.

Sharky: Very good, and thank you, Stephanie. Good luck.

]]> David Morgan Talks About SEAC (Episode 43) ]]> Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/752C99F0-016B-D414-54C32BC287FF7920.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-753C7D98-CA1F-D312-6EDA5299B71C5F13 David Morgan Talks About SEAC (Episode 43) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Dr. David Morgan, Director of the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center. Today we are listening to David discuss SEAC’s mission. 828 no full 43

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Church: Thanks for talking to us today David. Many of our listeners will remember you from past NCPTT podcasts. But today we are here to talk to you about your position at SEAC and what SEAC is and what projects you’re doing.

Morgan: Sure, I’d be happy to Jason. It’s good to be back. SEAC is the Southeast Archeological Center. We were established in 1966 as one of but two centers of archeological expertise that the National Park Service currently maintains.

We were at the time, located at Ocmulgee National Monument and we moved to Tallahassee, Florida in 1995, where we could have a research partnership with a tier 1 research university, that being Florida State University.

What we are is really a support center for the Parks in the southeast region of the United States, so our territory spans from Louisiana up through Kentucky over to North Carolina, back down through the Caribbean and over, and so we’re located again where we are really, to be central to that larger sphere of the southeast and the Caribbean. As I say we provide support to all of the Parks within that region. So there are Parks that have archeologists there and so one of my duties is to also act as the regional archeologist, so I help coordinate the efforts of all the individual archeologists out in the Parks. But a lot of Parks don’t have on board necessarily, the cultural resource expertise to deal with archeological issues. So a lot of what we do for the Parks is really sort of multifold. On one hand we provide assistance with planning for projects because you don’t want to be, for instance if you’re Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home, you don’t want to be the park that accidentally destroys the archeological remnants of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood home.

And so Parks of course, as part of their compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act have to make sure that any sort of ground disturbing activity that they’re doing, they’ve really thought through. So the other component of that of course is that there’s a huge research component because often the archeological resources at these Parks are something that the Parks wish to highlight and to better understand and to interpret to the public. So we also do the sort of frontline primary research for the Parks as well.

A lot of times Parks try to figure out what resources they actually have. As many people might know, the Park Service has really surveyed in the southeast only about 4% of their terrestrial resources and about 3% of their submerged resources. So one of the things we do is to assist the Parks, and this is also part of planning, in making sure that they’re aware of the resources that may be on their lands as they go to develop them or interpret them or just simply manage them. So we provide a lot of management expertise for the Parks along the way.

We also serve as a repository for archeological materials for the southeast region. So at SEAC we hold under curation about 9.4 million objects and about three quarters of a million archival documents that support those.

So we are a centralized repository for the southeast and that again is a place where we interact with a lot of the public, so we get a lot of professional archeologists who are coming to do primary research working with the documents from say, WPA, to documents that people are working on most recently. So for example, Daniel Bigman has come from the University of Georgia as part of his doctoral research and has used a lot of collection from Ocmulgee National Monument in tandem with primary research of his own, a lot of geophysics to develop some really good cutting edge understanding of the Macon Plateau. So we do a lot of interaction with the public there.

Of course this is also a great cost savings for the Park Service because we can maintain one big collection environment with one set of pest management protocols, with one curator, with one set of trained professional museum staff members to take care of it as opposed to having to try and replicate that at every park or series of clusters of Parks, so it’s really an economy of scale and it’s also an economy of expertise. That’s one of the things that makes centers like the Midwest Archeological Center and the Southeast Archeological Center really special, is that you have a collection of experts and by having this economy of expertise there, it makes the kind of service that we provide the Parks really much, much more valuable and stronger than it would be if you have just your one archeologist in the park to really kind of work with.

Now one of the other things I should say too is that that’s really the behind the scenes support that we provide for the Parks but the other half of our mission is very strongly oriented to external activities. This is really a holdover from early days in the Park Service when the interagency archeological services units were created throughout the regions. There was legislation passed in the seventies that gave the Secretary of the Interior responsibility for assisting other federal agencies with their cultural resource needs. The Secretary of the Interior tasked that responsibility to the National Park Service and the National Park Service delegated it down to the regional directorates as this IAS, the Interagency Archeological Services, so SEAC still maintains that mission. Naturally a lot of agencies have their own cultural resource staff now. It’s nearly three decades since this legislation was passed. Many federal agencies have developed their own capacity for this but the National Park Service is still recognized as a flagship for cultural resource expertise, and so a lot of agencies still turn to the Park Service for assistance. In a lot of cases it’s more cost effective to the taxpayer and to that agency to have us come and do the work than for them to try and hire up the staff necessary to do it themselves. So we end up providing a lot of assistance, technical assistance, policy assistance, field assistance to numerous different agencies. This occurs at the federal level but also by their state and tribal partners. It also occurs on more local and community levels as well.

At present we’re assisting the US Forest Service and doing inventories of some of their properties in Florida to help them identify where their archeological sites are. We’ve been assisting the Department of Defense both with climate change studies, looking at coastal erosion and monitoring the effects of coastal erosion, as well as helping partner with a field school at Louisiana State University to help them understand some of the resources that they have on their property. We also work across the board with the Parks as well, for a lot of interpretation and public outreach.

We try to integrate volunteers into a lot of our projects. We make sure that the information gets out to the public, a lot of outreach. So those are some of the things that we do as kind of baseline work at SEAC. We’ve been with the Park Service now for forty years plus and so we have a huge amount of experience in dealing with our Park Service units. so we are truly well versed in what the Parks need. We also are a frequent “go to” partner for our Parks because they know that we understand the parameters of the organic act that they work with so that we understand that were not shooting for just mere compliance as kind of the baseline for which we’re going for. Instead we understand that we’re working to make sure that part of the organic act that we’re helping to safeguard these resources and keep them unimpaired for future generations. So we help the Parks in a great deal act as stewards for these resources along the way. So those are some of the things that we do for the Park Service and for our partners outside the Park Service as well.

Church: Sounds great. What are you working on now? Is there anything in particular, any large projects, or just really exciting ones that you’re working on currently?

Morgan: We are constantly working on projects. There’s always something exciting going on. There’s always something really interesting going on and that’s one of the wonderful perks really of getting to work with all of my colleagues at SEAC is there’s no shortage of really great minds looking at really great projects. Helping out the Parks and being able to work in the Parks is just amazing because these are truly the crown jewels of really the resources that America has to offer.

So some of the projects that we’ve been working on recently is we’ve been teaming up with the Submerged Resources Center to help build our capacity for preserving our underwater resources as well. Recently we’ve partnered with George Washington University, the Submerged Resources Center, and Biscayne National Park to document an eighteenth century wooden vessel that’s in shallow water, was in sort of a precarious position in terms of its preservation, and we came in and brought in a number of students and ran it as a field school for them to help provide training. For the Park, they got documentation of a fragile impaired resource and for us it helped us fulfill our mission of making sure that we can be stewards for these resources along the way. So that’s one of the projects that we’ve been working on in terms of the underwater side of what we’ve been doing.

In terms of the terrestrial side, we have staff at SEAC who are just now preparing to go out to do another season of fieldwork at Cape Lookout, where we’re documenting a number resources in our coastal environments that are really being subjected to sea level rise and are being eroded out. So we’re taking a position where we’re documenting these resources as we’re afraid that they’re being lost. But it’s also generating primary data on climate change because these sites prove to be several thousand years old and are in different environments than they were now. They’re becoming impaired again. We actually have a chance to do some cutting edge research on long term duration and effects of climate change from several thousand years ago to today.

Another project that we’re doing is with Canaveral National Seashore where we have some amazing shell mounds that are poised right on the edge of the water and every time the waves hit, erosion occurs. The damage and loss to these is almost inevitable so we’ve worked with some of our active partners to figure out a way to use natural resources to armor and reinforce the bank lines in front of these by growing sea grass, also by growing and restocking oyster beds and letting natural processes help defend and armor that site from the effects of coastal erosion on it. That’s given us a lot of good opportunities to partner with a lot of different universities and preeminent researchers doing things like 3-D documentation, using Donax shells which is a species of shell that are fairly common in these that are used throughout the Florida coastal Georgia area to make coquina. Coquina shells is the common name. They are used as part of sort of a cement matrix for buildings and one thing and another. One of our researchers, Erv Kluetmeier at the Florida Museum of Natural History is using those and by looking at them microscopically and looking at the staple isotopic ratios of various elements in them, is able to project back and determine what the sea temperature was when those coquina were harvested and died several thousand years ago. So by looking at this simple coquina shell, he’s able to actually reconstruct the paleo climate so that we understand in a micro environmental level how climate change has occurred every thousands of years.

So we’re doing a number of these kinds of projects. They’re all based in partnerships. They’re all based strongly in cooperation with the Parks and Park Superintendents, who are the primary stewards with our partners because of course, we certainly do our best to stay on top of everything archeological. We are very much aware that there’s great minds throughout the country that we can bring to bear on this. In times where the economy makes it difficult to do some of this ourselves, this is a great time to embrace the partnerships we have.

So we have a lot of research that’s ongoing. We’re on the move almost constantly because the Parks are always working constantly to try and get the information out to the public, to safeguard those resources, or to plan ahead for the future.

Church: Sounds like you are on constant move, lots of projects. Must be pretty exciting. We appreciate your talking to us today and I would like to talk to you again in the future on new projects that you might be doing.

Morgan: My pleasure. Thank you.

Church: Thank you.

]]> Issues with Hot Air: Venting Historic Stained Glass Windows (Episode 77) ]]> Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF81C541-A349-3D9A-0DF46C4A7B2B1419.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CFAF76E5-E854-3FD5-2C5C2C3694262066 Issues with Hot Air: Venting Historic Stained Glass Windows (Episode 77) National Park Service Jason Church with Michael Smoucha Jason Church speaks with Michael Smoucha about Historic Stained Glass Windows 514 no full 77

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast – the show that brings you the people and projects that are bringing innovation to preservation. I’m Kevin Ammons with the National Park Service’s National Center for Preservation Technology & Training. Today we join NCPTT’s Jason Church as he speaks with Michael Smoucha of Botti Studio of Architectural Arts Inc. In this podcast we listen to Michael discuss the work Botti studio is performing on the stained glass windows at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria Louisiana.

Jason Church: Now Mike we are here at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria Louisiana where Botti Studio is doing a lot of work on the stained glass windows in the sanctuary. Exactly what is the crew out there doing today?

Michael Smoucha: Well today they are installing vents to existing protective glazing which was put in a few years ago unvented.

Jason Church: What is the advantage of doing venting?

Michael Smoucha: Well what the venting does is two fold. One is it allows the temperature, which can actually build up quite a bit in this space and the inter-space between the stained glass and the protective glazing. It allows that temperature to equalize with ambient temperatures and actually by putting vents at the top and the bottom of each opening it allows convection. The cooler air will come in from the bottom, warm air will rise and flush out at the top. It also allows escaping of built up moisture. The moisture can either be in the form of actual water that gets in or more commonly water vapor.

Botti Studios installs a window vent on the second story.

Jason Church: Now how much temperature difference do you expect to see between the vented and the unvented?

Michael Smoucha: Well the unvented windows can get pretty hot. Basically the space in between those two are certainly not hermetically sealed so it’s not like a thermal unit where you have temperature controlled airspace between two layers of glass. So that space can actually heat up considerably.

Jason Church: Now what is the danger with it heating up against the stained glass?

Visible damage of window putty and lead in an unvented window.

Michael Smoucha: Well the dangers are two fold. One of them is the heat can accelerate the drying out of the putty that is internal to the lead cames which wrap around each of the pieces of glass. It can also accelerate the aging and drying out of the lead itself. The water vapor that gets trapped and heated up inside the space can cause damage both to the lead came matrix as well as to the glass and also again to the putty or the calcium carbon that is around the pieces of glass. Often times we notice that on the windows here there was calcium blooming on the exterior of the windows we actually see calcium leaching out of the putty and blooming over the lead and even onto the glass. All of those can have a detrimental affect to the glass and the lead.

Jason Church: I know historically we didn’t have a lot of glazing when did that come about?

Michael Smoucha: Protective glazing came about probably – I started seeing it a lot more in the 60’s. Currently with protective glazing there’s a lot of pro’s and con’s to putting protective glazing up. A lot of authorities say not to do it at all. Some places are more prone to wind and hurricane damage or to vandalism or other types of damage. In those cases if protective glazing is decided upon to be put up it just has to be put up and properly vented. Again the venting is a critical part of that and without it you certainly are potentially causing more problems.

Jason Church: Are there some materials that are better than others for glazing itself?

Michael Smoucha: We often prefer when protective glazing is called for to use a laminated safety glazing. A couple reasons for that is it is a safety glass so if anything happens to the glass it does stay together. Secondly there is an added benefit of the UV inner layer actually acting as a UV barrier. It filters out about 99% of UV. So it effectively helps to protect again the glass to a certain degree the lead and the interior spaces too where UV can damage.

Window vent.

Jason Church: I know here the church you are working on I’ve walked around and seen. You are installing vents in the top and the bottom to allow the convection of air like you were talking about. Is there any advantage if you have a yellowed – if your glazing has yellowed or frosted with time is there a real need to replace that or is there an advantage to replacing that?

Michael Smoucha: There are advantages and certainly the work being done at Emmanuel is meant to and has always has been meant to be an interim solution to prevent ongoing damage from getting worse with the goal to eventually remove this particularly glazing. Either leave the windows as they were historically or if the church decides to put protective glazing to put it an alternate glazing on there. As you mentioned some of the draw backs to the Lexan glazing are that they do yellow and they do discolor. Secondly they also have more deflection than glass would.

Jason Church: Now is this the type of work Botti Studios does a lot? Tell us about the type of work you guys do.

Michael Smoucha: This is one of the facets of work that we do. We perform conservation/restoration to the stained glass and of course to the system. That system includes the protective glazing if there is any to the frame system, all the architectural elements in that frame system. We also fabricate and design new work. Both in stained glass and mosaics, murals, statuary, painting and decorating. We are a full range architectural arts firm that also includes a lot of the architectural elements in those art pieces.

Jason Church: Basically anything involved with the stained glass windows. I know you do some masonry. You are doing some masonry here on the big cast stone, Rose window here but the glass, the system the whole.

Protective glazing that has fogged from UV exposure.

Michael Smoucha: Right. The ceiling system, the frame system, restoration of all of the frame elements be they stone, wood, metal and everything in between. We are currently working on St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City as a matter of fact doing work very similar to work that is going on here. Actually the work is more involved. We are actually replacing a lot of the protective glazing as well as working on the conservation/restoration of the windows themselves.

Jason Church: Now you mentioned earlier we saw some calcium blooms on the lead in some of the windows that glazing wasn’t vented. What would you recommend for that? Does that need to come off? Does it need to be cleaned?

Michael Smoucha: We remove them in the restoration process. A full restoration of the windows of course would include removal; disassembly, releading and all of that corrosion will be removed at that time. In the interim solution it would be removed by conservation cleaning of the windows in situ. Depending on the other conditions of the window as well as the church needs and budgets at the time. Work is scheduled accordingly.

Jason Church: I know with religious institutions I’m sure you have to work with a very wide range of budgets and really work with them to meet their needs.

Michael Smoucha: Right. Right. And to keep the pieces as safe and secure as they can be within the budgetary constraints.

Jason Church: Well Mike, Thank you so much for talking to us today. We look forward to hearing from you in the future with more work that you are doing.

Smoucha inspects on of the church windows while doing condition assessments.

Michael Smoucha: Thank you.

Kevin Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at www.ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> John Asmus on Laser Cleaning “Have Laser Will Travel” (Episode 42) ]]> Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/7552BCD3-B6E3-109E-F835B2F0D6D5B3EC.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-7557088D-CBBD-ED62-E1857EF532731626 John Asmus on Laser Cleaning “Have Laser Will Travel” (Episode 42) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Dr. John Asmus, Physicist at the University of California, San Diego. Today Jason is talking with Dr. Asmus about the history of laser use on cultural materials. Dr. Asmus is known as the “Grandfather of Laser Cleaning”. 953 no full 42

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Church: My name is Jason Church, Materials Conservator with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and today, I’m here talking with Dr. John Asmus. Dr. Asmus I was actually introduced to you at a LACONA Conference by Meg Abraham. She was explaining to me that you’re one of forerunners and she called you the father of laser cleaning. So what can you tell us about that?

Asmus: Well for recent years, actually they’ve been calling me the grandfather. We tend to think of Costas Fotakis, the Director Forth and Crete as the father because around 1990, he developed a very active program in laser treatment of artworks and he got LACONA going. I suppose the major thing I could say at that point was that most of the people who were doing treatment of artifacts with lasers at that time, thought that I had died twenty years earlier. In fact, it was Meg Abraham that said, “Why don’t you invite John to these things because he’s still around and he’s still active,” and so that’s how I got involved in the LACONA organization. I had long since moved into a number of different fields.

I did my first work on artistic materials using laser radiation in 1972 and it seems rather bizarre to me in retrospect, but several of us who were involved in the early projects in Venice and in Florence and so forth, as we usually do after performing some research, we wrote up manuscripts and we sent them off to the appropriate journal which in this case was Studies in Conservation. The editor of Studies in Conservation refused to even review our manuscripts and it’s impressed in my memory the letter of rejection that we received for several papers and the most succinct line that I recall is that “cleaning with lasers is so hypothetical as to not be taken seriously.” So I thought if that’s the way the community is going to respond to this, we’ll move on to other fields. So we adapted our laser divestment techniques to taking the paint off airplanes and more recently the paint off stealth aircraft which is a tremendously challenging application because you’re essentially taking epoxy paints off of epoxy composite substructures, which is a major problem in selectivity, far more complex than most of the things we find in the arts.

So we had been moving in those directions and then there were a couple of true believers in the viability of laser treatment of artworks. One of these was an art conservator for many years. He was chief conservator of sculpture in Venice and then he moved onto private practice in Padua and his name is John Carlo Calconyo and oh, every year or two, I’d get a call from John Carlo saying, “I’ve run into this terrible problem where we can’t get adequate divestment of something or another.” So I’d pack up one of the lasers from our laboratory and we’d go and work on Galileo’s office, the Cremona Cathedral, and other places and gradually the word spread.

I think after about twenty years, quite a number of art conservators and scientists who were interested in applying lasers to the arts, came to be familiar with this, and I think that culminated then around 1990 when Costas organized the first International Conference On Lasers In Art, which was subsequently renamed LACONA 1. It took place in Crete and it’s been going on from there. For a number of years, people referred to Costas as the father of laser art conservation. Somebody had pointed out that I had done it twenty years earlier and so they christened me the grandfather of lasers in art conservation.

Church: Now what was the first thing that you ever cleaned with a laser and when was it?

Asmus: Well, there’s a curious anecdote that has to do with all of this. We were in Venice making holograms thinking that when Venice was gone, at least we’d have these very high resolution three dimensional images of the Venice that used to be. And we were making holograms of some important sculptural pieces in Venice and one of these works, which was the polychrome wood carving of Saint John the Baptist by Donatello, we found that where the people in the gallery placed it when the Sirocco winds came up, rain started coming through the windows and rainwater was splashing on this priceless polychrome wood carving. So we called the conservator, what should we do? She came in and she covered the wood carving with plastic and then she said, “I really respect what you’re doing about saving the images of artworks, but why don’t you help me save the artworks themselves, the statues, the marble statues that were deteriorating.

Her name was Giulia Musumeci and she was employed by UNESCO and the Venice Imperil Fund, and she was trying to do what she could to save these marble statues of Venice. She pointed out to us that cleaning the statues was a major technological challenge. So she asked us if we would try our holographic laser on removing the crust from stone and everyone was amazed at how beautifully this worked. We had reinvented the laser eraser. The encrustation, the sulfates in Venice is black and it absorbs laser light and if you do it with short pulses you can cause the black encrustation to sublime and if that happens very rapidly there’s little if any heat that’s transferred to the stone itself. It worked perfectly.

So Giulia Musumeci located her mentor, Kenneth Heppell of the Victoria & Albert Museum, who was Sir Ashley Clark’s point man for saving Venice and it’s artworks. Ken Hepple was told about these initial results and he came over and we spent a day shooting different pieces of dirty stone that he had in his pocket. One pulse here, two pulses there, white stone, Portland limestone, istrian stone and so forth and at the end of the day he said, “This is the most spectacular advance in stone cleaning that I’ve seen in my lifetime.” We said “that’s great,” and we went back home to America and then we started receiving airmail packages and this is the answer to your question Jason. He would send us airmail monument stones from abandoned cemeteries in London. So we spent the first year back from Venice cleaning limestone, oolite, and other things from abandoned cemeteries in London and then airmailing them back to Ken Heppell. Then he started sending us pieces of cathedrals and I suppose the direct answer to your question Jason, is that he then began sending us some elements from the sculptural decorations on Wells Cathedral. These elements were all of oolite which is a very poorly consolidated limestone and it presents some unique problems in trying to clean it without damaging it. So we cleaned several elements from Wells Cathedral.

Then we were invited to the Royal Institute of Artistic Patrimony in Brussels. Rene Schnaers had heard about our work in Venice and he had us clean a sarcophagus that housed the remains of Erard de la Mark. This sarcophagus had been damaged during the French revolution. It hadn’t been properly cared for after that and so there was a great deal of external deterioration of that sarcophagus and I suppose strictly speaking, that sarcophagus, which I think was brought into Brussels from Liege, was the first major artifact that we used the laser on. From there, a month or so later, we went to Munich with our laser and Dr. Vokernaugle brought out a number of iron sculptures that had supposedly been the first major iron statues or sculptures created in northern Europe and we took what amounted to rust and corrosion off those iron sculptures. So I suppose those were the second things we had used lasers on that was actually useful and accomplished some conservation.

The first major project where lasers played a big role in major conservation efforts was in the city of Cremona, which of course is famous for stratovarian, guinarian , all the stringed instrument makers. In Cremona we did major parts of the facade of the Cremona Cathedral including marble reliefs of the four prophets at the front door, Isaiah and the others, and that was in 1989 and 1990. At that point we were cleaning many square meters of marble surfaces of intricate detail and that’s about the time that Costas Fotakis picked up this technology and really went with it.

Church: Now what kind of laser were you using?

Asmus: Well when we started our work, you didn’t have very much choice. In 1970, 1971 and 1972, there were really two major laser types that produced high powers in short pulses and these were neodymium glass lasers and ruby lasers. So the only way you could make pulse holography in 1970, 1971, 1972 was with a ruby laser because it’s wavelength matched the spectra responses spectroscopic photographic plates, the one used in holography. So we started out with a ruby laser and it was more suitable than neodymium glass lasers because glass has a poor thermal conductivity and you can’t really have a very high average power because you have to wait for the glass to cool down between pulses. So in the early seventies, there was really no choice other than ruby.

Now Neodymium YAG had been invented and had been turned into lasers but in the early seventies, neodymium glass rods were very problematical in trying to grow them to large sizes. Just about the time we were doing our work in Venice, the Lynton Corporation succeeded in making larger high quality Neodymium YAG rods.

So those became available in 1973, 1974 and so I think by 1975, everyone was switching to Neodymium YAG because it existed.

So I believe after about 1975, we and then all of our successors in this field, pretty much universally went to Neodymium YAG. Of course, in subsequent decades there have been a number of other lasers that have been developed that give you options for other wavelengths and of course the harmonic crystals for turning YAG infrared wavelengths into green and near ultraviolet have become available. So the stable of available lasers has broadened considerably.

At one time a very interesting laser type that emerged was the excimer laser using krypton fluoride and xenon fluoride. There was a period where we did quite a bit of laboratory investigation of using those types of lasers on artworks and it looked very promising, I suppose around 1980. But those lasers, those excimer lasers used gases and they’re complex and present reliability problems, at least then and about that time, picosecond and femtosecond lasers from a number of the solid state posts became available and I think those extremely short pulse lasers, picosecond and femtosecond have been so successful on some of the very fragile materials.

But I am not aware of anybody who’s proceeded with the excimer lasers to see what they can do. So I think between the standard Q-switched neodymium YAG lasers and the harmonic generation from those and a few of the offshoots is pretty much the range of lasers that you find using. Dye lasers hypothetically offer some possibilities because they’re so widely tunable but the dye lasers haven’t been that successful commercially at least to this point so I haven’t seen much activity with dye lasers.

Church: Sounds fascinating. I’ll look forward to it. Thank you for talking to us today Dr. Asmus. We hope to talk to you more in the future. Of course, you’ve given a great keynote here at the 2012 3D Digital Documentation Summit. We look forward to hearing more from you in the future.

Asmus: Well thanks, Jason and it’s been fun. I’ve met a whole new cast of characters associated with allied fields so I’ve made many friends, and I think maybe I’ve helped a little bit in exposing them to some of the experiences I’ve had over the last sixty years of this phase of my career.


More information about Dr. Asmus and the history of technology in conservation can be found at his keynote address for the 2012 3D Digital Documentation Summit.

]]> KeckCAVES, Immersive 3D Visualization System for Cultural Sites (Episode 41) ]]> Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/757B374E-DFBE-89DC-4DE121702C020EE8.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-75824CCB-0527-073C-3C4B334A55C21CC7 KeckCAVES, Immersive 3D Visualization System for Cultural Sites (Episode 41) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Marshall Millet, owner of MMars 4-D. Today they are talking about Millet’s work with U.C. Davis and the KeckCAVES visualization facility. 1011 no full 41

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Church: Marshall, I saw a poster presentation you did at the 3-D Digital Documentation Summit about doing LiDAR scans of sacred Native American sites. Can you tell us more about that project?

Millet: Absolutely. Thank you for having me here today and putting on the Summit. Altogether it’s just pretty much wrapped up and there’s been all these incredible places for input on 3-D data and what it means for archeology and preservation, all these ideas and then all these private institutions as well, so it’s been a phenomenal opportunity to meet and actually converse with people about where this is going in the future.

So for myself, I started exploring 3-D data a little while ago based on a couple of projects I had in the Sierra Nevadas and we just found these rock art sites on these granite cliffs and stuff. I’m from the southwest. I did a lot of archeology out there, and I knew there was abundant rock art in those regions but exploring the Sierra Nevadas has been really interesting because I’m finding out there’s actually pretty much rock art everywhere.

So the best methods for me as an archeologist, exploration of the best methods is really important to me and documenting the rock art and 3-D technologies became a part of that and became a huge interest. But as I did the research and tried to develop a research design to guide people for mitigation for these rock art sites, people knew about it but they weren’t doing it.

So that was my interest in general. I was also influenced, I’ve seen some of the work the Smithsonian has done, and I did the literature research and England has been ahead on all this stuff and so it motivated me to really pursue 3-D technology.

So that’s what this started out as was a pilot project, a local pilot project working with some of the tribal groups that I’ve developed these processes and been out in the field with. They knew me and we had a mutual interest in exploring mainly some of these ideas. I wanted to compare the technologies.

I wanted to learn about them and figure them out for myself because I wasn’t finding anyone who was doing it. So that’s how the project started but it very quickly turned, once I actually did that field work and I investigated with all of them, so we did stereo photometry of the site, we did laser scanning using, you know, total station 360 phase shifting LiDAR and then we also did white light scanning.

So my ultimate goal, one of the largest influences I have is what it actually means when you get on a site. There’s actually a presence that you feel when you’re recording a site and you’re identifying attributes and artifacts and you are defining constituents of it. But there’s also an experience that you get from an archeological site or a historic site and my goal with this was how do you convey that, because I’ve had this great opportunity, unique opportunity to be all over the country on projects, places I can never have access to again, and that concept is a problem that tribes face as well or even the general public.

They don’t have access to these sites. I was addressing that end of what 3-D digital documentation meant for access. Some of the goals of this, I was imagining ten years down the road, there would be a nice system of putting all this together in a cohesive way and then experiencing it.

So I was imagining somewhere in the future and through a couple of contacts that started getting interested in my project that was starting, they introduced me to a program at UC Davis in California and that was KeckCAVES. The KeckCAVES program is a collaborative effort of thirty or more geologists and earth scientists and hydrologists and computer programmers. Their goal was to create a visualization that allows scientists to access through data and use it as a tool. So Joe Dumit who’s there, he’s the Director of the Science & Technology Center at UC Davis. His goal, he’s an anthropologist, so he started connecting on these ideas of, you know, we had a similar background platform to work on, anthropology and his work is focused on how scientists access 3-D data and how to use it and what the benefit is.

So in that effort, the KeckCAVES folks, the Director is Louise Kellogg and then Oliver Kreylos is the computer programmer. They put these meetings together and collaboratively attacked how to make a visualization better so you can access the data. So they put together this project.

They were originally exploring fault lines and then they were investigating mudslides and stuff like that, and I came to them and I had these site environments and I said I just want to experience a site environment and they hadn’t really approached it from that as a cultural experience yet. So they were really interested in where I was coming with this and part of my goal was to work with the people that have been gracious enough and humble enough to put all this data together.

I was working with the Maidu Museum and historic site in Roseville, California. So they have there, it’s a very recently developed museum, but they have a trail and it has petroglyphs, but it’s also a sacred site and it’s also protected in that it’s a National Register site and it also has archeology there. But the tribe is very, they manage it and oversee it and are stewards of the site and they work with the museum and everyone.

They were the ones that graciously allowed me to do the 3-D project to begin with. But once I had this 3-D data, and we looked, at the Summit at all these amazing examples of people collecting 3-D data from an artifact level, a museum level or from a site environment or big object level, my goal was to completely facilitate context and environment over an archeological site and approach all the scales of collecting that data from a wide general tomography or topography in the surrounding area, then to site environment like trees and things. The setting that you really feel when you’re on that site and put in a virtualization room, which is KeckCAVES and see if there’s a value to experiencing the digital site environment separate from the real site.

So the KeckCAVES, to talk a little bit about it and the technology behind it, is everything as an open source project and you can actually check them out at www.keckCAVES.org and it’s a three-walled room about 10 X 10 X 10 feet and its three walls, front-projected, and it’s a floor that’s a mirror and excuse me, the three walls are rear-projected and the floor is front-projected below you. So you take off your shoes so you don’t scratch up the surface and you step in there in your socked feet and little slippers and it uses shutter glasses and it uses hand-held wireless remotes that you can hold and then it also employs head tracking.

So the question is what does that all mean? It’s hard to put together when you talk about it, and it’s hard to show it on a picture but the idea is that you are actually stepping into your data. So with the walls surrounding you and with the glasses and the 3-D projection, you literally, your data comes alive in front of you and now because of these interaction tools that UC Davis developed to have them interact, you’re in a virtual environment, a full visual virtual environment.

So I wanted to see what it meant for a tribal agency or an archeologist or a managing agency to experience that process. I guess once I had access to KeckCAVES and once they were gracious enough to move forward with the project and bring all this 3-D data in there, it affected me so dramatically, and I was convinced that there was a real value to this. It answered a big question that was on my mind, which was, what to do you with all this data? My original approach was for analytical, scientific, archeological purposes and I want to maintain those methods for that type of analysis because you can use the data to do it but now there is also an experience value. So we did that. We brought the tribes in. We had a couple of different sessions with both the museum and tribal folks and came in and played with the data and has experienced remotely this 3-D environment.

So what does that mean? I’ve been involved with programs and studied the idea of digital diaspora or diaspora in general but digital diaspora, because of our internet and our technology, now is able to connect cultural groups that have disseminated in different areas, and they can maintain a cultural identity through talking and getting ideas and food and all the things that define culture and doing that on the internet.

Well something like this can allow digital diaspora to continue to flourish and exist because now, if you can experience the location you can get location used to define culture. It’s a huge part of archeology and a cultural study or a historic background or a context, everything’s location dependent and as our world becomes more and more globalized that’s starting to change. With a digital world like this, it’s changing even more. So I saw a real shift, a cultural shift and I started believing that KeckCAVES or a visualized virtual environment is going to affect this.

So my research questions were what is the value, what does it mean for the tribes, how can they use it. So the next future of that or where the project is now going is to collect 3-D data at a few more sites. So that you can and we actually, I recently did this, we’ve been working with some wonderful folks at Tahoe National Forest and the DLM office, the Redding branch, trying to get a few more sample sites so the idea is you can remote access sites at a very wide distance apart. So now you can start comparing rock art or whatever archeological constituents that are out there, if it’s a historic building that is colonial in Massachusetts and maybe you have an early colonial piece here in the City of San Francisco, you can bring those environments together and you can start experiencing them independent of location. That is such a big idea that I want to continue going there. I think it has a huge utility and they had so many ideas too, because I had my own ideas as an archeologist, but as a people in this cultural, groups can come in there and they’re going to develop their own ideas of how it has a use and utility.

So there’s some pretty exciting ideas and a lot of them were actually based on artifacts. They like to see baskets in there, they like to visualize the basket weaving and the process and also artifacts that you can’t have people touch all the time can be properly scanned and a 3-D image made of them and then the public can interact. Kids can interact with it on an iPad and you actually get a sense of touch because you’re interacting with the screen. You can manipulate it. So there’s an idea of free exploration that allows people to get a valuable experience from that.

So that’s the next step. The Smithsonian and all the museums in the world have all these artifacts and collections that are out of their geophysical locations now. I would love to see a project develop where exploring and bringing artifacts that have been excavated fifty or seventy years ago, back into the context of their sites and even with CyArk we are obviously seeing some big developments, but if you scan an environment you can use appropriate historic data to give that site agency and even return it to an understanding of what the site was like maybe five hundred years ago or maybe a thousand years ago, bring some of these artifacts back in context and let people interact with it in a way that is hopefully very valuable and very compelling and gives a huge vision of the project in general.

That was however my pilot project turned into a few questions that turned into a different direction and output and then a larger, bigger idea that I hope to continue to work towards.

Church: I hope to hear from you in the future about how the project is going and you know, what gains you’ve made and what other areas it’s being used in. So we look forward to hearing from you again about the future of this project.

Millet: Yeah, thank you for having me. There are some great areas to explore and excavate and like you said putting that together and again, it’s just a tool to visualization as a way to give people access. I’m excited about where that can go as well. So thanks for everything you’ve put together for this week and the right people in the right place. It’s a really exciting time both for the technology and archeology in the field in general. So, thank you Jason.

Ammons: Thank you for listening to today’s show. If you would like more information check out our podcast show notes at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> Thin Section Petrography for Conservation (Episode 40) ]]> Sun, 13 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/7596BE4A-E083-C118-28251856EC3BA4D0.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-75A3C003-E9CA-D76A-12E31DD4ABF7307B Thin Section Petrography for Conservation (Episode 40) National Park Service Mary Striegel speaks with Chandra Reedy. Reedy serves as Director of the Laboratory for Analysis of Cultural Materials in the Center for Historic Architecture and Design at the University of Delaware. Today we are talking to Chandra about the importance of thin section petrography for conservation. 445 no full 40

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Striegel: Good afternoon Chandra. We’re coming today from the National Conservation Training Center. We would like to talk a little bit about the petrographic analysis course that just took place here. So tell me a little bit about your areas of research.

Reedy: Well, I do thin section petrography of stone and [?] materials, although lately I’ve been working mainly on projects with ceramic materials and working to modernize this technique by bringing in digital image analysis technologies.

Striegel: So, I know you use thin section petrography to study ceramics. Can you tell us what thin section petrography is and how you use it?

Reedy: Okay. For thin section petrography, you have to take a small solid sample from your material. If you have a stone sculpture, you might take a sample from the underside of the base where it’s not visible, and you would never sample a whole undamaged ceramic piece, but when you have shards, which in archeology we tend to have a lot of shards, it’s easy to take a sample as a small slice. Then you mount it in an epoxy resin on a glass slide and grind it down to exactly 30 microns thickness where you can then use the optical properties visible in minerals to identify the material that you have and to also look at different aspects of technology or deterioration.

Striegel: How difficult is it to learn this technique?

Reedy: It is a bit time consuming because you have to learn to identify [?] minerals and you have to be familiar with mineralogy so I learned this at UCLA when I was a graduate student taking geology courses. I took a one year sequence in mineralogy and another in different aspects of stone. But if you don’t have a course like that available, well you can learn on your own, especially if you’re working with a specific type of material. You can really study the components of that material and become an expert in that particular material type.

Striegel: Now I know you’ve received two grants from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. How have these grants helped you advance your work?

Reedy: Well the first one was comparing different image analysis packages in their application to cultural heritage issues and that was very helpful for me because I spent a year studying how we can use image analysis and looking at different types of packages and programs in software for image analysis and that helped me in developing that as a new research tool that I can use with thin section petrography.

The second grant was for helping to complete my book on thin section petrography of stone and ceramic cultural materials. It was very helpful in getting to that final completion stage for a book project that took about seven years from start to finish.

Editors Note: Grants; Digital Image Analysis of Petrographic Thin Sections in Conservation Research (2004-01) and Thin-Section Petrography of Cultural Materials: Comprehensive Resource and Training.

Striegel: Well, I’ve seen your book and it has beautiful images in it, and it’s really a useful tool when you’re using thin section petrography. Now what are some the most interesting observations that you have learned from looking at thin sections? What is perhaps maybe a favorite project you’ve worked on?

Reedy: Well, right now I think the one I’m working on right now is one of my favorites. I’m working with the Ancient Ceramic Technology Lab in Beijing at the Forbidden City and we’re collaborating on a project to look at the five great wares of the Sung Dynasty and Chinese ceramics are very, very interesting in general and Sung Dynasty period has some spectacularly interesting glaze technologies and ceramic production technologies, so I’m enjoying that project.

Striegel: Now how do different professions use thin section petrography? For example, how does an archeologist use the technique for say somebody who’s interested in historic architecture?

Reedy: Well, in historic architecture, somebody may be interested in looking at building materials or looking perhaps at deterioration and assessing the results of various conservation treatments to help in selecting the best treatment. Whereas, an archeologist may be more interested in what the technology of the ceramic material can tell you about the people who made and used them or about the different social systems and trade and exchange networks. They may be interested in stone or ceramics in trying to identify a provenance or a source of a material.

Striegel: Okay and how does digital imaging analysis help you with petrography or make petrography easier today?

Reedy: Well it gives you a mechanism for collecting quantitative data over a wide variety of types. You can look at the area percentage of different components and different shape characteristics and size characteristics.

You can get in apparently rapid manner, some quantitative data that is statistically valid because you can look at hundreds and hundreds of grains instantaneously. It can also help you in getting better qualitative data because you can use the image analysis to enhance some of the visual aspects that are harder to see just through typical thin section petrography methods.

Striegel: Well I know we’ve just finished up a two-day workshop here where we had ten participants and at the end of that workshop, you asked participants what they learned or enjoyed most about the workshop. Now, I’ll ask you what did you enjoy most about the workshop.

Reedy: Well, seeing people who had never done any thin section petrography before really get interested in it and to begin to see the potential of that technique in terms of the different types of research questions that you can address and understanding how you can get culturally relevant information if you ask the right research questions and go about it in the right way.

I didn’t know if people would actually be interested or if they would very soon find it boring or too much in range or just not comprehensible so it was good to see that coming in without much background, they were able to come away with a lot in just two days.

Striegel: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us and for being an instructor at this workshop and we look forward to working with you again.

Reedy: Thank you.

]]> Cultural Resources in the Wilderness (Episode 39) ]]> Mon, 17 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/0BB37C9E-060B-844C-A62C7B2069960E94.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-3B993E01-9A46-B620-5D8BEB1FB160198A Cultural Resources in the Wilderness (Episode 39) National Park Service Jenny Hay speaks with Jill Cowley, Historic Landscape Architect for the Intermountain Region of the National Park Service. 1030 no full 39

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Jenny Hay: Jill’s recent article with a number of colleagues in Park Science entitled “Integrating Cultural Resources and Wilderness Character” carefully considers the intersection of the cultural and the natural in the real world. Wilderness areas are untrammeled sites that are preserved and celebrated by our society, visited by millions of people each year, and protected by law from specific activities that might compromise the wilderness character.

For more information about Wilderness in the United States, please visit www.wilderness.net, a website full of information and educational resources on wilderness history, important and influential personalities, the values and benefits of wilderness, threats to wilderness, as well as resources geared toward professionals and federal agency staff involved in wilderness management.

Thanks for joining me today, Jill. I just have a few questions for you about wilderness. The idea of wilderness has been long debated in fields such as geography and environmental studies. How does the park service define wilderness?

Jill Cowley: The Wilderness Act of 1964 provides a definition of wilderness that is the basic reference for all federal land management agencies, including the National Park Service. And I’ll quote a couple of passages from Section 2(c) of the Wilderness Act where wilderness is defined. And this language is probably going to be familiar to many of your listeners: wilderness is “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain . . . an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence . . . affected primarily by the forces of nature . . . [with] outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation . . . at least five thousand acres of land . . and (and this is an important phrase for historic preservation) and may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value”. So, historical value is clearly stated as a possible value of wilderness.

A discussion of wilderness legislation and legislative history in the U.S. is included within the recent article in Park Science, “Integrating cultural resources and wilderness character”. For example, from that article, — according to Howard Zahniser, an early wilderness proponent, wilderness advocates and members of Congress who championed the Wilderness Act understood that wilderness included both the value of specific cultural features protected within a wilderness and the cultural significance of the overall environment of the wilderness.

[Jill notes that the Park Science article was very much a team effort, with five co-authors and numerous reviewers. Co-authors: Peter Landres (Ecologist, USFS Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute) , Melissa Memory (CR CHIEF Everglades), Doug Scott (Pew Trusts Wilderness Specialist), and Adrienne Lindholm (Wilderness Coordinator, Alaska Region)]

Jenny Hay: I see. Well, the organizational structure of the National Park Service separates ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ resources, so how do the two departments interact in the real world, such as park sites and wilderness areas?

Jill Cowley: This is a good and very broad question – I’ll respond somewhat specifically. At the Regional office level, where I work, and in the field, the separation between “natural” and “cultural” is still very alive in some ways, but is also being bridged in various ways. For example, the Servicewide Comprehensive Call for project funding is now more open to integrated natural and cultural projects.

Cultural landscapes projects address the integration of cultural and natural resources.

In wilderness management, a good example of cultural/natural integration is developing Minimum Requirements Analysis for proposed projects in wilderness that have potential to affect cultural or natural resources.

Jenny Hay: What kind of cultural values are evident in an area like wilderness? Why is it historically important to preserve these values?

Jill Cowley: Cultural values are an important part of the IDEA of wilderness, and an important part of ACTUAL wilderness areas. The idea of wilderness is itself a cultural construct – humankind has developed the concept of wilderness, and the Wilderness Act is the law developed within the U.S. which directs how to apply that concept.

Within actual wilderness areas, whether designated wilderness or areas that have been studied and proposed as wilderness, many kinds of cultural values can be present and evident within the wilderness landscape. The wilderness area may be ancestral homeland for American Indian tribes, with on-going meaning and value to those tribes.

Archeological resources within wilderness are evidence of past human habitation and use. Wilderness areas may contain evidence of historic trails and transportation routes, and activities related to settlement, agriculture, and mining.

This evidence may be in tangible, place-based form – for example, structures like early ranger cabins, cultural landscapes like homesteads and orchards, or landscape features like trails.

Evidence may be in tangible form but not located within wilderness – for example historical documents like oral history transcripts, written stories and other folklore that relate to wilderness. Or the evidence may be intangible – for instance unwritten stories, histories, and traditional ceremonies.

My work within the National Park Service’s Cultural Landscapes Program focuses primarily on tangible resources. From my perspective, wilderness areas are cultural landscapes that have been valued, used and in some areas modified by humans for thousands of years.

So part of your question was why is it important to preserve these cultural resources and values? As we know generally, The National Park Service and other federal agencies preserve tangible and intangible evidence of the past so the histories of all peoples can be remembered and valued, and so we can move into the future with an appreciation and understanding of our collective past.

Much of our collective past has been lived within what are now identified as wilderness. Agencies are directed by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 to identify, evaluate treatment options for, and to preserve our cultural heritage, and this includes heritage within wilderness areas as well as outside wilderness areas. National Park Service Management Policies are clear on the value of cultural resources within wilderness and the need to apply Sections 110 and 106 of the NHPA within wilderness.

Jenny Hay: Right – that leads me to a number of different questions. What value do cultural resources bring to wilderness areas? How does the presence of cultural resources affect treatment / maintenance of the wilderness landscape? And, how might the removal of cultural resources affect a wilderness area?

Jill Cowley: These are important and interrelated questions. All wilderness areas have a human history. In addition to preserving ecosystems, wilderness helps us understand human use and value of the land over time. Preserving and interpreting cultural resources that are within and part of wilderness is important to being able to understand that human history. It’s not so much a matter of what cultural resources bring to wilderness – cultural resources are part of the wilderness itself. We can’t necessarily remove cultural resources from wilderness – for example, archeological sites in wilderness are imbedded within and part of the landscape . . . traces of a traditional and/or historic transportation route, or remains of a nineteenth century settlement within wilderness, are part of the wilderness landscape.

While historic structures like ranger cabins built prior to wilderness designation could be removed from wilderness, this may go against the National Historic Preservation Act and may degrade the overall cultural meaning of an area within wilderness. Management of wilderness needs to respond to both the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. If cultural resources are removed from wilderness, part of the essence and meaning of the land is taken away.

The presence of cultural resources can affect wilderness management in various ways. Prescribed fire and vegetation management, for example, need to take into account potential effects on archeological and historic resources. Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is an example of a park where the wilderness area encompasses many, many archeological sites and resources, and where protection and preservation of these resources is part of overall wilderness management.

Jenny Hay: While it may seem straightforward for cultural resources professionals to include cultural resources inside wilderness landscape, some wilderness proponents define these spaces by the absence of human influence. Are there any similarities in their goals, and how can these divergent perspectives come to an agreement on an appropriate treatment?

Jill Cowley: That’s a really good question – this gets to the heart of some of the debates about the management of cultural aspects of wilderness. Varying professional and personal perspectives derive from a basic difference in belief about the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world – whether or not humans are a part of nature. Both perspectives, and the range of perspectives between the two, may share the goal of preserving wilderness values and character, but how these values and character are defined may differ.

Whatever our individual beliefs, we need to go back to law and policy to work together on appropriate treatments of wilderness cultural resources. The two primary laws are the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act. Neither law states that it trumps the other, so federal agencies must equally uphold both laws and the values they embody. The Wilderness Act requires the preservation of wilderness character.

The National Historic Preservation Act requires the identification and evaluation of all cultural resources, including those in wilderness, and a process through which potential effects of projects on cultural resources are evaluated. The National Park Service refers to the Secretary of the Interior Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties for guidance on treatment options.

Currently, guidance on how to define, describe, and preserve wilderness character is being prepared by the interagency Wilderness Character Integration Team. How wilderness character is defined and described can determine how wilderness management balances and integrates the various wilderness values, including historical value and cultural resources. The documents being prepared by the Wilderness Character Integration Team are based on the Wilderness Act, and incorporate the possibility of cultural resources being an integral part of the character of a specific wilderness. So, professionals who have widely divergent views on what wilderness character should be will be able to refer to these documents for a definition of wilderness character based on law and policy.

Jenny Hay: Excellent.You mentioned earlier, as well as in your article that the Minimum Requirements Analysis process can be a useful tool for determining necessary and appropriate action on cultural resources in wilderness areas. What is this Minimum Requirements Analysis, and how can it be used by cultural and natural resource specialists in tandem?

Jill Cowley: Minimum Requirements Analysis is a process for determining first whether an administrative action within wilderness is necessary and second, the minimum and least disturbing method or tools with which to carry out the action. The goal is to meet the intent of the Wilderness Act where it says that management actions in wilderness need to be avoided “except as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area…“, and to minimize impact to wilderness character. This analysis is ideally completed by a team including natural and cultural resource specialists. For more information on Minimum Requirements Analysis, and many other wilderness topics including cultural resources and wilderness, I recommend consulting the interagency wilderness website (www.wilderness.net). There’s a wealth of information on that website.

But let me give you an example. The Park Science article includes a section on Cultural Resources Management and Minimum Requirements Analysis. One example included in this section is the preservation of a historic stone cabin in the recommended wilderness at Arches National Park in Utah – this example shows how the Minimum Requirements Analysis process can address cultural and natural resources. Based on the Minimum Requirements Analysis for this project, access to the project area needed to be over a slickrock route, no backcountry camp was allowed, the work crew size was kept to a minimum, mortar soil was collected from multiple locations, and soil collection sites and footprints were raked out. So these requirements minimized impacts on natural and visual resources during a historic preservation project.

Jenny Hay: Wow. You also suggest that Traditional Ecological Knowledge held by many Native American tribes could be valuable to both preservationists and wilderness advocates. What is Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and why is it important to include Tribal leaders in the process of wilderness management?

Jill Cowley: Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK for short, is experienced-based knowledge of the interdependence between humans and their environment, and ecological effects of certain human actions, held by groups with long-held traditional associations with the land. Now that is not necessarily a technical or agency definition, that’s my understanding of what TEK is.

Jenny Hay: Ok.

Jill Cowley: An example is the knowledge of how low level and localized fire can be used to manage vegetation – for instance in improving habitat or forage for herd animals or wildlife, or to avoid catastrophic fires. It is important to involve Tribal leaders and representatives in wilderness management in order to ensure that tribal perspectives on wilderness are included. Many areas today identified as wilderness have been, and continue to be, important to the traditional beliefs and lifeways of tribes: for example, wilderness areas may serve as hunting areas, plant gathering areas, and places associated with ceremony and spiritual sustenance. Tribal concerns may relate to cultural or natural resources or a combination of both, and may include maintaining access to sacred sites and reburials within wilderness, and maintaining the ability to propagate and collect ceremonial resources, such as specific plant materials, within wilderness. Also, traditional ecological knowledge held by tribal members may assist management decisions. For more information and examples, I recommend consulting the National Park Service’s Indian Affairs and American Culture Program located in Denver, CO.

Jenny Hay: Great. Well, we’ll provide links to both the wilderness website and that National Park Service site you just mentioned on our website for listeners to access.

Jill Cowley: At this time, jenny, I’d just like to say a few words of conclusion.

Jenny Hay: Wonderful.

Jill Cowley: The key points are that wilderness managers need to address both the Wilderness Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, and that tools like the Minimum Requirements Analysis and guidance on wilderness character can help management with differing perspectives on wilderness reach agreement on treatment of cultural resources in wilderness. And also, I recommend consultation with the Regional Wilderness Coordinators for more guidance. Thank you.

Jenny Hay: Thank you very much.

]]> Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 2 (Episode 38) ]]> Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/3BF3D190-9017-EAF9-D877BF022F4BAE31.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-3C9EA03C-A3A1-300E-A30CCF6A775F6F99 Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 2 (Episode 38) National Park Service In Part 2, Jenny Hay continues the conversation with Cindy Brandimarte, Director of the Historic Sites & Structures Program in the State Parks Division of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. In the second and final installment of this two-part series, they’ll talk about Bastrop State Park, a National Historic Landmark in Texas that is the site of a 2012 NCPTT grant project. 509 no full 38

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Jenny Hay: Thank you for joining me again today, Cindy, to talk a little more about the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps, or CCC, in Texas State Parks. There’s one state park in Texas that stands out in particular for its CCC heritage, and that’s Bastrop State Park. What evidence of the CCC is still visible in the landscape there?

Cindy Brandimarte: Oh, from the first moment you get there – the entrance portals are terrific, the park road, you can see fencing and culverts and curbing. There are bridges, there are two scenic overlooks. Arthur Fehr was landscape architect and architect for that park. There are stone tables and fire pits and an amphitheatre. There’s a custodians’ dwelling and a refectory that will knock your socks off. There are twelve cabins that the public is lucky enough to be able to stay in, a swimming pool and a pool shelter and a bath house and a great, a workshop that was – that burned in the early ’40s but was rebuilt, helped to be rebuilt by the National Youth Administration, which was a successor in part to the CCC. So that maintenance building, is what we use it for now, and that is still in use. And we are very proud of that.

Jenny Hay: Wow.

Cindy Brandimarte: Bastrop is one of the few parks, state parks, in the whole nation that’s a National Historic Landmark because so many elements survive. And Ethan Carr, an architectural historian formerly with the National Park Service, wrote that excellent NHL nomination.

Jenny Hay: Ok. Well, part of the value of documentation and educational tools such as the websites that we’ve discussed is revealed when sites like Bastrop State Park are threatened. I understand that much of that park burned last year in the Bastrop County Complex fire, which was one of the most destructive wildfires in Texas history. What happened to the park’s CCC structures?

Cindy Brandimarte: We estimate that what we lost were a wooden roof on one of the overlooks. I tell you, our wildland fire team, which got the Governor’s Award for Historic Preservation this year, pulled out all the stops, absolutely worked day and night for many days throughout that week, that awful Labor Day weekend and into the week.

This wildland fire team was established at Parks & Wildlife in 2005, and if we hadn’t had it, those buildings would be gone. These men and women who have day jobs at Parks & Wildlife – some of them are clerks and office managers and park rangers and superintendents, were out there on the line.

And at first, the fire was so vicious and the water was so scarce, people had to wait until the fire got within x number of feet of the building before they could start fighting it. People were hosing down roofs. We had to get – the local water department was running out of water.

As houses burned, there were no water sources. So we had to truck in a lot of the water. And businesses chipped in so magnificently to help. So we had water tenders come in, and we just circled the buildings essentially. The photo that I sent you shows you just how close the fire got. You can see just a little circle of green around that cabin. And that’s, that’s what these men and women did for almost a week. And we’re talking 24 hours a day, when it was safe.

Jenny Hay: Right.

Cindy Brandimarte: They did that. And so we lost very little historic fabric there. And I know I sound like a Pollyanna, but there were some actual good things to come out of it, if one can be an optimist in times like those. We had archaeologists go in who were able to uncover some landscape features that had been pretty much lost. I mean, those pines drop leaves and needles, and they had gotten so buried – and now we can see what the CCC intention of water drainage was in that park. So we’ve tried to make the best of a terrible, terrible situation. The buildings survived, and we are assured by the ecologists that the forest will regenerate, so we’re hopeful. And we hope we’re around to see it!

Jenny Hay: Well, NCPTT just awarded the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department a grant in relation to that fire at Bastrop State Park. What are you hoping to learn?

Cindy Brandimarte: Yes, and we are very grateful and optimistic again, because we want to sample the building materials – what’s been out there, the wood, the sandstone, the mortar, and see what effect cleaning and any sort of remedial treatment has had. And we want to make even better, be better prepared should it happen again here or elsewhere. This time we felt kind of in the dark about what had happened to our buildings, and we don’t want to feel that way again. We want to be better prepared and possibly protect the historic resources anywhere but inside and outside the Texas State Parks System.

And I know our three conservators from the University of Texas and independent conservators, Fran Gayle, Casey Gallagher, and Miriam Tworek-Hoffstetter are very interested in learning the effects of fire retardents on the structures, and even to consider replacement materials if appropriate. And we’ll have a training session for our maintenance specialists all around the state as a result of their findings.

Jenny Hay: That sounds like a really worthwhile project.

Cindy Brandimarte: I think so.

Jenny Hay: Well thank you very much for talking with me today, Cindy!

Cindy Brandimarte: You’re very welcome. Thank you for having interest in the project, Texas State Parks, and the CCC.

]]> Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 1 (Episode 37) ]]> Wed, 17 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/40B925F7-C9F1-55F5-FC781686DFD1637C.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-40C08BF0-A6B5-5362-42D84F5E1BA12F45 Historic Landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Part 1 (Episode 37) National Park Service Jenny Hay speaks with Cindy Brandimarte, Director of the Historic Sites & Structures Program in the State Parks Division of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. In the first installment of this two-part series, they’ll talk about the iconic landscape of the Civilian Conservation Corps and their role in the development of the Texas State Park system. 733 no full 37

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Jenny Hay: Thank you for joining me here today, Cindy. I just want to start with a pretty general question. What is the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the CCC, and why is it important to the Texas State Park system?

Cindy Brandimarte Many people know that the CCC as abbreviated stands for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it was one of the key agencies that FDR created during, as part of his New Deal for America. And it was generally young men, although there were some veterans from WWI and even the Spanish-American War, who were part of it. And they were in general suffering the slings and arrows of the Great Depression, and it was a works program. And it became very important to Texas State Parks because they, we always say the Corps built the core of our system.

Jenny Hay: Wow – and what kind of work did they do in the parks?

Cindy Brandimarte Well, some of it, if you went, it would be invisible. They cleared brush, they planted trees – we can’t really see those kinds of things, except the mature trees. That’s kind of invisible – even road construction. But then there are these beautiful visible elements of the cultural landscape that get so much attention – or that got so much attention back in the 1930s. So much material, so much labor was invested in them. They are the refectories, which are also called combination buildings or concession buildings, they’re cabins, there are picnic tables galore, fire pits, shelters, that create just a masterful and beautiful landscape. Texas State Parks, and I’m sure other state park systems, are grateful – at least in Texas, before the CCC came here, we had convicts who were sent in to help fix up the parks. There were no master plans, there were no talented designers and architects, there was no large workforce that could be relied upon. And that took place from about 1923 to ’33, when the Civilian Conservation Corps first made its mark on our parks.

Jenny Hay: I see. And is there a distinctive CCC style?

Cindy Brandimarte Yes. In many, but not all of the parks, it is commonly referred to as ‘NPS Rustic.’ It’s distinctive in its – it’s been inspired by natural forms, local materials. For example, timber in East Texas, and stone in the Texas Hill Country, where these materials are plentiful. There’s a lot of handcrafted woodwork, they are set unobtrusively in the landscape. As Jim Steely, who was talking about Herbert Meyer, one of the architects in the National Park Service that helped design our parks, there was a horizontality about them and Meyer talks about the horizontal key. So they tend to be low to the ground, they’re not these vertical Victorian resorts of the 1870s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. That said, the NPS Rustic which is distinctive, the CCC was very conscious of the local setting in terms of cultural settings and local history. For example, in the Davis Mountains which is far West Texas, we have a pueblo style hotel: the Indian Lodge at the Davis Mountains State Park. It looks a little West, to New Mexican architecture, to Native American architecture. And we also have what’s called Goliad State Park and Historic Site which is a reconstructed 18th century mission that’s very much a part of the local history of South Texas. And then I would be remiss if I didn’t mention some of the more modern design that came in at the end of the CCC. We’re talking 1940, ’41, right before World War II. There’s an architect up in Northeast Texas by the name of Joe Lair, and he executed a really remarkable, modern design for Tyler State Park that was a clear break from the NPS Rustic. So we have a gamut, and we have some highly distinctive NPS Rustic architecture within our parks.

Jenny Hay: Yeah, that’s really fascinating – the wide variety of styles that you can see and yet the coherence that’s kind of woven through those parks. I’m going to bring us back up to today. The website “texascccparks.org” is an innovative website displaying the extensive documentation of the work of the CCC in the Texas State Park system. Can you tell me a little bit about the development of this resource?

Cindy Brandimarte Well we were quite fortunate, because there was something in the air in 2006 and 2007 that caused us all to look at earlier architectural models. Whether it was an awareness of sprawl, whether it was a sense of economic crisis soon to come – whatever it was, certainly at Parks & Wildlife and in more broad circles, the CCC was seen to be a good topic and a topical one. We started writing grants and we were so fortunate to get several Texas foundations, the Hillcrest Foundation and the Sturgis Foundation interested in our project. We wanted to help, we wanted to model what we imagined, what we believed is good design in these CCC parks, and have architects, architectural students wherever they might live, locally, globally, have access to these places – at least visually if not physically. And we wanted to do that by means of a website. We wanted to grow our base of advocates. We were very concerned that as these gentlemen who worked in the CCC died, they had passed along the torch I you will to their families, friends and colleagues. But there are people that come to the parks purely for recreation. And they don’t have this other story, and they don’t have this other personal connection. So wherever they were, we wanted the ability to reach them. And I think what really helped us so much in addition to these generous private foundations was that the National Endowment for the Arts was offering a new category on design. And this really seemed like the perfect fit. That if we could build this website and talk about the history and the good design and the cultural context in which it happened, then we could have people who love these parks for a variety of reasons and we might inspire some future designers to build on this human scale.

Jenny Hay: Are there other online resources that tell the story of the CCC in the Texas State Parks?

Cindy Brandimarte Well you named one, and that is one that the Interpretive Services group at Texas Parks & Wildlife did. Sarah Lisle was the “A New Deal for Texas,” and that was geared, that was funded by Humanities Texas, and it is geared to assist teachers of Texas history in the 4th and 7th grade to talk about the phenomenon of change in the 20th century. Teachers in Texas had, are stressed with teaching everything. The idea was that once you get to the 20th century, you don’t get to the present. You may get to WWII, but there’s a gap in what’s covered. The interpreters thought that this geared toward 4th and 7th grade school children in Texas who take Texas history would be attractive. And it has proven to be. There’s a lot of more national ones – if you’re interested, Living New Deal at Berkeley, it’s just one word strung together: https://livingnewdeal.org/.

There’s an individual by the name of Gray Brechin who’s trying to look at a lot – not just CCC parks but all New Deal infrastructure that is around us everywhere. And he’s done a really good job. And there’s another website you can go to: NewDealLegacy.org – it’s part of the New Deal Preservation Association. So I’d direct listeners to those.

Jenny Hay: Thank you for sharing those resources with us, Cindy. We’ll provide links to them for folks who are interested on our website. That’s all the questions I have for you this time – next time, I’ll ask you about Bastrop State Park and the work done to save its CCC heritage in the face of one of the worst wildfires in Texas history.

]]> Masonry, History, Integrity: Urban Conservation Primer (Episode 36) ]]> Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/418A7AAD-CE96-0F4E-34D8C5682B8B3112.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-42340E44-E253-C711-D1E1B3BF221D8B7F Masonry, History, Integrity: Urban Conservation Primer (Episode 36) National Park Service Stacey Urlacher speaks with Tom Russack, Masonry Preservation Instructor at the Abyssinian Development Corporation Workforce Development Youthbuild Program in Harlem, New York City, and Project Associate at Rand Engineering and Architecture. NCPTT awarded Mr. Russack a grant to compile a masonry conservation primer to introduce preservation trade, skills, and knowledge to inner city high school kids in Harlem, New York. 868 no full 36

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Stacey Urlacher: Thanks for being here today

Tom Russack: Well it’s my pleasure and an honor, thank you

Stacey Urlacher: You have written Masonry History Integrity: An Urban Conservation Primer, can you tell us more about this primer and the inspiration behind writing it?

Tom Russack: Well, I received a grant, and am very grateful for the opportunity to put my thoughts and experiences in teaching masonry conservation to inner city kids here in NY City into a book form. The inspiration is from the students, and the classes that I teach.

Stacey Urlacher: That sounds great, so it’s something that teaches kids at a younger high school age about conservation and hands on working. How is this primer organized and what kind of topics does it cover?

Tom Russack: Well, that’s a great question, because I have never written a book before, never written a textbook and that was part of the challenge. How do I get this huge amount of information palatable to a young mindset, and how do you make it interesting, and what aspects do you cover? That’s the challenge I have in class and that’s what I enjoy, is springing new ideas and new creations on them so that it’s not something disinteresting or stale. I want them to walk into class saying what are we going to do today, what is this?

So the book is filled with different activities from making homemade terra cotta clay, to making molds of hands, learning how to repoint mortar joints, and getting tools to carve stone. I think one of the basic needs we have today is to let kids explore what tools are. I mean, we give kids basketballs, baseballs; we send them off to gymnastic camps and swimming lessons, why don’t we give kids tools, and teach them how to fix things?

There are enough buildings out there that need restoration, let them go to work, and teach them how to do it correctly. The pride is in craftsmanship. When they are done, and in the process of doing this, let them look at what they have done, and feel that pride. That is one of the key goals to the book and the program.

Stacey Urlacher: Exactly, it really seemed when you read through it that it not only teaches these hands on skills, but it teaches history, a good work ethic, teamwork, and things like that that can really take you far after school.

So in creating this type of a resource for this age group, topic, and subject, what other kind of resources did you glean from and get inspiration from?

Tom Russack: Well, there is a wealth of information out there, and it is important and interesting. The students, they actually do appreciate finding out about buildings, and history. Unfortunately, I think a lot of the material isn’t as palatable to a younger audience, and I kind of had to reword it, and make it a little bit easier to understand and condense it in a way that they don’t get avalanched with so much information and dates.

Just give them a little snip-it to kind of say, wow that’s interesting, with the hope they will move on. The back has resources, websites mostly, because that is the most applicable and easiest to access. So they can not only revisit the things we discussed in class, but do some further research also.

Stacey Urlacher: That seems very important because this is such a good introduction to this subject. What is kind of the, next step after one learns about these different types of masonry, history, and skills like this in order to in hopes one day become a professional in the field?

Tom Russack: Very good question, the program I teach at here, in Harlem, is for inner city kids to get their high school equivalency, their GED, which is the main focus. This is a small portion of their understanding of some of the employment opportunities out there, some of the resources. It’s an investigation, it’s an experiment, it’s an exploration, and so if we get one out of ten who follows through and carries on in preservation or masonry then that’s ok, that’s a success.

We had one student accepted to the American College of Building Arts, we have had another student working for the Central Park Conservancy, we have had a couple of students working for a restoration masonry company, we have had one apprenticeship with Evergreene Architectural Arts, so these are success stories and we are incredibly proud of these students, even for those that haven’t gone on into careers or these studies.

I’m real excited when a student comes up to me and says Mr. Russack, here are some pictures I took with my phone of some plaster that I saw when I was in a theater the other day and it looked really interesting. So, if they can open their eyes, or look at brickwork and they say they tell their friends about the different bonds, an English bond, a Flemish bond, what a soldier course is. That’s the start of something, we are moving forward with something, it’s not just bricks and mortars, it’s their neighborhood, it’s something that somebody thought about, and put time and effort and energy into and they have stopped and noticed it.

Stacey Urlacher: It seems like it’s a great resource to help kids get excited about their surroundings, their context, and the built environment.

repair repair

Stacey Urlacher: One of the chapters in the primer was titled “Here Today, Green Tomorrow.” What do these students learn about in the primer and what is the mason’s role in encouraging a green ethics and a sustainable environment?

Tom Russack: It talks about buildings of the future and, I’m really big on green roofs and having green roofs on buildings. There is an example here, city hall in Chicago, with a great picture that was in National Geographic. It shows the fact that you could utilize a building that was constructed in 1911, and yet, a hundred years later with a green roof, make it useful and beautiful and something for generations to enjoy.

So, you’ve got tools, you’ve got buildings, you’ve got practices. One of the projects I have the students think about is: So, you’ve got a job, you are a contractor here in NY, and the owner of the building wants you to bid. You get the contract if you are greener than your competition. How can you be practicing green technology and get this job? What are you going to do?

So we talk about recycling of materials, we talk about not polluting when you are cutting mortar joints, when you are cleaning what do you do with the water runoff? So you take practical ways of work, and make sure they understand that by doing these, you have a better chance of getting the job, and you are helping the environment, and you are helping yourself. And this is what the future of restoration and construction looks like.

Stacey Urlacher: Well this has been great. Thank you for talking to me today and I look forward to hearing about what comes of this primer and resources like this in the future.

Tom Russack: Well I appreciate that, but I’m not going to let you off easy here. I end each one of my classes with this statement.

Nobody leaves the room until they can tell me something they learned in class that they didn’t know before they walked through those doors. So before we sign off here, can you tell me something you picked up on that you found of keen interest, that you would like to share with me after you have looked through the book?

Stacey Urlacher: Well, I really appreciated and learned about the tools. Each chapter covers tools that you would use to lay bricks or anything like that. As someone who studies preservation and I’ve even taken masonry courses, I have never learned about the tools that go into creating a masonry structure, and I found that to be very interesting.

Tom Russack: That’s very heartwarming, and very encouraging, and I appreciate that. Because what I’m hearing you say is, now that you have read about that, you can’t wait to get your hands on these things, and hopefully by following the instructions you’ll learn how to use these tools.

That’s dear to me, in the final chapter; I even have a special section on the maintenance of tools. I work for an architecture and engineering firm here at NY and I am inspecting buildings and checking out work on a daily basis. One thing that I do is, when I’m going up on this scaffolding, I’ll check the guys tools, because if the worker or mechanic takes care of his tools, then he is going to take care of his work. It shows a pride. The tools are an extension of your body and that means a lot. I am very appreciative that you picked up on the tools.

I don’t have a great closing to end this podcast, accept to say that, if you just teach masonry, and you teach history, there is going to be something missing.

You have to reach inside the individual to let them find within themselves, that which is important to bring out the pride in that work. Whether it is from a heritage, which I delve into a lot of African American history and Spanish Latino history, so people can sense that pride.

You have to put that into the mix, along with the history, and along with the skill training. So that you can look at something, be proud of it, and hopefully generations after will also be proud.

Stacey Urlacher: That is a very true statement, and thank you so much for all of this information and this discussion about the primer, it is a great resource.

Tom Russack: Thank you so much Stacey, it has been my pleasure.

]]> El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail (Episode 35) ]]> Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/44F52656-0941-2195-E7D2ED56E0B8E1F8.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-44F8203D-B325-8527-1744B98D8407FBC9 El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail (Episode 35) National Park Service Jenny Hay speaks with Steven Gonzales, Executive Director of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail Association. This National Historic Trail stretches from Natchitoches, Louisiana the home of NCPTT, west through Texas all the way to the Rio Grande on the Texas-Mexico border. Steven will tell us about the curriculum development and trail stewardship projects being supported by the “America’s Best Ideas” grant recently awarded to the Association by the National Parks Foundation. 632 no full 35

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Jenny Hay: Mr. Steven Gonzales, thank you so much for joining us today on this NCPTT podcast. Can you tell me a little about the history of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail?

Steven Gonzales: Sure. El Camino Real de los Tejas, in a nutshell, is what led to the founding of Texas. We would not be calling Texas ‘Texas’ without the trail today. Basically, in the mid 1680s, the first Spanish expeditions began over the Trail as they were searching for their French imperial rivals who had crashed here on the Texas coast. Eventually, they ended up finding a few of those survivors, and making the first trip out to east Texas to near present-day Mission Tejas State Park in far east Texas to establish Mission San Francisco de los Tejas, which was the first mission here in Texas. So the initial kind of expansion was all about colonial imperialism and battling for territory with the perceived French threat the Spanish saw here in their northern frontier of New Spain. The historic period of significance for the Trail is from 1680 to 1845, so well over 100 years later, after the initial entradas by the Spanish, you started having Anglo settlers come down from the East and heading down the road towards places like San Antonio and Austin. So it really is the trail that led to the founding of Texas and what it is today.

Jenny Hay: Wow, that’s quite a history. How did you become involved in preserving the historic landscape?

Steven Gonzales: Well, as an undergrad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I did a lot of study on Spanish missions and presidios on the northern frontier of New Spain. So I’ve had an interest in the history of the Spanish Colonial period for quite some time. Then I went to grad school at Texas State University-San Marcos a few years after that, and I took a class called ‘Theory of Parks and Protected Places.’ The instructor for that class was the president, the first president of our Association. His name is Andrew Samson. And so he was looking for a study to be done on the Trail, and Trail Associations, and those sorts of things. I thought it would just be an interesting way to continue my studies of Spanish Colonial history, and also to begin working on trails, because I’m fascinated – I’ve always enjoyed trails as well as cultural history. So it was just the perfect combination of being at the right place at the right time.

Jenny Hay: So the National Historic Trail was designated in 2004 – what was the process of designation like?

Steven Gonzales: Well, this was actually before my time with the Association. I came on in 2009 as Executive Director, but I can tell you some background I’ve come to understand about it. It was a little different than most trail designations that take place. Usually you have an advocacy group formed beforehand that’s petitioning for the designation of a National Historic Trial. This one was kind of the other way around, where there were Congressional Representatives from Texas really pushing for the designation of the Trail themselves, and they got the legislation passed. And so the Trail Association was formed after the fact, which is really unusual and different from most other trails.

Jenny Hay: Ok. Well, what’s happening today with the Trail?

Steven Gonzales: There’s all kinds of stuff going on with the trail nowadays. Some of the bigger things that are happening is last year, the Governor signed into law here in Texas some legislation that allows signage to be placed along the Trail here in Texas. Still to this day you cannot see one official National Park Service sign anywhere along the Trail. If you think about that, it’s been designated since 2004, here we are in 2012, and there’s still not one official sign on the Trail. So that legislation was a big step in allowing us to move toward getting signage on the road. The first places we’re going to have that are going to be in Milam County, which is about 50 miles, 60 miles east of Austin, at a place called the San Javier Mission Complex, and Victoria County, where some former sites, Mission Espíritu Santo and Presidio La Bahía, were at there in Victoria. So by the end of this year, we should see some of the first signage ever on the Trail in these two locations. We’re going to have big unveilings for that, particularly at Apache Pass where the first signs will go up. We’re really excited about that; we think that once signage is on the road it’s going to bring a lot more recognition to the Trail, because as with all National Historic Trails, it’s always a challenge to bring them into the eye of the public. And so this is a good way to help us to do that.

Jenny Hay: The National Parks Foundation just awarded the Association an “America’s Best Ideas” grant. What plans do you have for the implementation of this grant?

Steven Gonzales: Well this grant is going to allow us to create curriculum for 7th grade history students here in Texas. For the last couple of years we’ve done something called the Region 7 Educational Service Center Videoconference on the Trail. And so we’ve had over 1,000 students participate each year, and we’ve been very happy to see that this has happened from one end of the state to the other. But we’re hoping that through creating this educational curriculum, we’ll be able to have resources available for teachers to actually teach the Trail in classrooms, and get students out on the Trail for a stewardship project. And then they can turn around and present everything that they’ve learned and found out about the Trail, experienced about the Trail, during this Videoconference. It’s something we’re very excited about, and once these curriculum materials are developed, we’re going to be able to distribute them freely to any school that wants to participate in this program via websites such as ours, the National Park Service, or the Region 7 website. So we’re pretty excited about the whole project.

Jenny Hay: Sure! Why is service learning, like the stewardship project you mentioned, important for heritage education?

Steven Gonzales: I think it’s just hands-on learning, service learning, is just the best way to learn. I remember being a student, years ago, and some of the most meaningful and lasting studies that I ever did had some aspect of service learning to them. I think when you can learn about things in class and read materials on it, and then when you actually get out onto the landscape and you see it, you experience it firsthand – and then more so, do some sort of a stewardship project where you might help maintain to it or take care of it, it becomes more meaningful to you. It gives you, there’s just a longer lasting impression. I think people, the kids who are part of this educational program will take this with them for years to come and hopefully share the Trail with their kids so there’s this extended kind of care and stewardship that’s taking place for the Trail over the years because that’s going to need to happen.

Jenny Hay: Right. Well, what do you think the future holds for the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail?

Steven Gonzales: I think it’s a good future – we have a lot ahead of us to do. As one of the newest trails in the National Trails system, there’s a lot that needs to be done, both to protect it and to develop it at the same time. Those can seem like they’re different kinds of goals. But we have to do all kinds of research to still find out where great portions, substantial portions of this trail really are: different campsites, river crossings, and actual swales and ruts along the way.

Once we can figure out where those are, in turn we need to work with people, the landowners who actually have those parcels on their land so that we can help to protect them, and hopefully open them up to visitation by the public. Over 99% of this Trail is on private land, so we have a big challenge ahead of us.

But we can see through what’s going on nowadays that there are landowners out there who are interested and willing to share what they have with the public. And so it’s just very exciting to think about all the possibilities that are out there for the trail. It’s so new that there’s so much to do, and we look forward to all of it. It’s a great challenge that we’re very happy to be a part of.

Jenny Hay: Well we look forward to seeing how the Association grows. It’s been wonderful talking with you today, Mr. Gonzales.

Steven Gonzales: Thank you very much, I appreciate your time and talking with you too.

]]> Earthwork Stability Research at Poverty Point (Episode 34) ]]> Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/45077762-F67B-AF48-FEB0F17FEB461E63.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-450C4050-A3AD-46C1-0A577CE01E7D003F Earthwork Stability Research at Poverty Point (Episode 34) National Park Service Derek Linn speaks with Dr. Diana Greenlee, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and station archaeologist at the Poverty Point National Monument. NCPTT awarded ULM a grant for a research project that uses dendrogeomorphology to investigate earthwork stability at Poverty Point. 643 no full 34

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Derek Linn: Hello, and welcome to the podcast Dr. Greenlee; it’s great to be with you here at Poverty Point today. How long have you been involved in archaeology here, and how does your role at the University of Louisiana at Monroe relate to your work and research here at Poverty Point?

Diana Greenlee: I’ve been at Poverty Point for five years now as the station archaeologist. Even though I’m employed by ULM, I’m actually stationed here at the site; my job has to do with archaeological research and management here at the site.

Derek Linn: Dr. Greenlee, I know Poverty Point is an earthworks landscape recognized as both a Louisiana State Historic Site and a National Monument, and recently you mentioned you’ve been involved with the nomination of this site to the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. Could you introduce the listener and me to this place and also share a little bit on the significance of Poverty Point?

Diana Greenlee: Poverty Point is a very large archaeological site that dates from about 3700 to 3100 years ago during what we would call the late archaic period. It’s a monumental earthworks site.

There are four (4) mounds, six (6) earthen concentric ridges, and a large, flat plaza that all date to this time period; it’s a created landscape of mounds and ridges. What is so significant about Poverty Point is that it was constructed by hunter-gatherers. At the time that archaeologists first started working here, they didn’t believe that hunters and gatherers could carry out the work to build a monumental landscape like this. The existing model was that hunter-gatherers were barely making it from day to day, and that they didn’t have the time or energy to develop complex constructions like mound building. So Poverty Point really changed the way archaeologists and anthropologists looked at hunter-gatherers and what they could do. One other really interesting thing about Poverty Point is that literally tons of stone was brought here from throughout much of eastern North America: we get steatite from Georgia, chert from Ohio, and novaculite from Arkansas. There’s a large network where a lot of raw material was brought here to make tools and other items.

Derek Linn: And those materials may have been traded within this general area here or back in those original locations?

Diana Greenlee: They were redistributed among related sites around here. One of the interesting things is that when we go to those other places we don’t find items that indicate they were derived from Poverty Point. So we don’t know what the exchange mechanism was. It could have been an exchange of things that don’t preserve–like fish or other food items.

Derek Linn: NCPTT recently awarded a grant to ULM to investigate earthworks stability at Poverty Point State Historic Site. I was wondering if you could tell me what prompted your interest in this project and also some of the things you hope to learn from this study.

Diana Greenlee: Well the mounds here at Poverty Point were covered with trees, and they were an aging stand of trees; no young growth had been allowed to live and grow. So the trees were all mature: 60 to 130 years old, and they were beginning to die. They were falling over when we had good windstorms. And when they fall over and bring up a root ball coated with dirt, they disturb the archaeological resource. In the case of mounds where there is a steep slope, this can start an erosional sore that is hard to control.

Working with State Parks here, we decided maybe it was time to remove all the trees from the mounds–to have them cut down. When we were doing our research to help us decide if this was the way we should go, we found that the existing literature said mounds can be stable under grass, and they can be stable under trees if you don’t let them get too big. [The literature continued that] transforming groundcover from trees to grass or vice versa can be a very risky thing, but there wasn’t any real data to show us how risky it is or what could happen.

And so as we decided to go ahead and do this project, I decided it was a good opportunity to collect that kind of information. That way somebody else down the line who is trying to make a similar decision can look at our data and see if it’s the right step for them.

Derek Linn: I know that dendrogeomorphology is a big part of the project, and I recognized Dr. Stahle’s name; I was wondering if you could tell me about his role in the methodology of this research.

Diana Greenlee: He is playing a pretty important role. One of the things we want to do is contrast past erosion [which we had] under the treed regime with the erosion that happens as we make that transition [to grassland]. [We also want to look at future erosion] once it is under stable grassland. Dr. Stahle is looking at how much erosion happened over the life of the trees. One of the things he’s looking at are the roots that have been exposed due to erosion. He can identify how long ago that happened from the changes in the anatomy of the wood cells of the roots when they’re exposed to oxygen. So we can see during the lives of the trees when the roots became exposed. [We can look to see] whether it was a big episode of erosion or whether it was a slow, gradual process. He’s helping us understand how erosion has been over the last 80 to 100 years.

Derek Linn: And you said Dr. Stahle has taken some samples thus far, but he still has some more to collect and study.

Diana Greenlee: That’s correct. He made one trip down to collect some samples, and he’ll be back.

Derek Linn: Dr. Greenlee, how do you expect this research to build upon or differ from currently available earthworks management recommendations or standards?

Diana Greenlee: Well I think we’re going to build on the current literature, because it is one more situation where we have taken an earthwork and altered the groundcover. In this case it’s going to be different because we’re trying to quantify what the impact of that change will be–and to help us assess whether or not we made the right move, which I think we did.

Derek Linn: And do you think your findings here can be applicable to other earthworks sites as well?

Diana Greenlee: I would hope so. I would hope that we provide a product that will be useful to other people; we sure wish we had this information when we were starting.

Derek Linn: Well I just have one more general question for you. I was wondering what most excites you about the future of Poverty Point and with your role here at the station archaeology program.

Diana Greenlee: Over the next couple years I’m going to be working on our nomination to the World Heritage List, and so I’m pretty excited about that. I sure better be; it’s going to be a lot of work.

I sort of have to have tunnel vision as we complete that. I hope Poverty Point becomes a World Heritage Site and that we can continue to learn more about the landscape here.

Derek Linn: I wish you the best with your research, and Dr. Greenlee, thanks so much for taking time to speak with us today here at Poverty Point.

Diana Greenlee: Thank you.

]]> Historic Uses of Lime Mortar, and Its Continuing Importance Today (Episode 33) ]]> Mon, 05 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/4519B679-DC36-1AA0-B7EA5FBB7E8D091B.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-451E7AE0-9844-43D9-FB43D8D29EECF2FE Historic Uses of Lime Mortar, and Its Continuing Importance Today (Episode 33) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Andy DeGruchy of LimeWorks U.S. Andy will talk about the role of lime mortar and built heritage and why this material is still important today. 1402 no full 33

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Jeff Guin: Tell me about a few of the structures that you have worked on.

Andy DeGruchy: We’ve worked here in Pennsylvania with my other company, DeGruchy Masonry & Restoration, for the last 27 years we’ve been restoring brick and stone buildings. Some of those have included work at Hope Lodge, Daniel Boone’s Homestead, William Penn’s Homestead, James Hobin’s (architect of the White House) memorial in Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Washington DC.

Also, a myriad of historic Victorian homes, farmhouses in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I live and all sorts of accoutrements, smokehouses, and summer kitchens and basements–some not-so-glorious buildings, but just a lot of hard work in the maintenance using appropriate materials to fix these vintage structures.

Jeff Guin: So do you primarily work in the Pennsylvania area and the northeast or do you travel to other parts of the country as well?

Andy DeGrunchy Well we’ve concentrated our work within about an hour and a half driving radius of where I live and where my shop is in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. However, we’ve done work as far as Florida and consulting work on the use of our materials as far as Puerto Rico and Maine out to Oregon and all over.

Jeff Guin: …and to Nashville, I know, because that’s where I met you originally at the NCPTT Nationwide Cemetery Summit. Are cemeteries something you work on frequently?

Andy DeGrunchy We do not do a lot of cemetery work ourselves, although I did mention I restored the architect to the White Houses’ James Hobin and his memorial in Mt. Olivet Cemetery, and dotted throughout our history, there has been some work on statuary and memorials. But my connection with cemeteries has been at the prompting of a conservator and professor at Columbia who saw our laboratory and the work we are doing and said, “you know, you are the best kept secret, you really need to step up to the plate and tell the world that you are here,” and that is why we are even doing the radio interview now trying to get the word out that we have some great resources.

Jeff Guin: Taking that a step further, there is a lot of confusion around the terminology related to lime mortars and specifications. I wonder if you could break some of that down for me. Talk about the different types of lime and the differences between historically accurate lime as compared to the improved or modern types.

Andy DeGrunchy Yes, that’s a very good question, and it is a little bit of a peeve with me because, you know, really lime is lime is lime and has been the same raw material from the beginning of time until now. Nothing has changed, but a lot of smoke and mirrors and confusion puts the end user, building owners, architects, engineers, and masons in a state of confusion. Really, it is a very simple thing to understand: That is, lime has always fallen into two categories; it’s always been pure high calcium, 98% pure lime. When I say lime, I do mean the shells and bones of marine life that build up over millions of years without any impurities in it. If it was 98% pure, just comprised of that, then that is called high-calcium lime and then it falls into the second category, which is impure lime. Now we designate that into a breakdown of two areas. One would be dolomitic, which would have a smaller percentage of magnesium and then a magnesium lime which has a larger percentage of magnesium.

We look at ancient structures throughout the world, a lot of materials scientists will study them and say, “let’s not look at what is broken about this building, let’s look at what’s working so well that it is still here after 500 years.” They will find common denominators. And with the mortar, they find that the basic rule in masonry is, you never can fight water and win. Water will always win in the end. So, the mortars in these ancient buildings had a lime and sand composition that would help to process moisture out to the atmosphere again. It would not trap moisture. Had it trapped moisture, or reacted with sulphates and other negative reactions, then the demise of the structure would have been accelerated, and it would not be here 500 years later. But they found that when you use a lime that is a catalyst of processing water back to the atmosphere, now you have a symbiotic relationship with nature and with water. Therefore, you are now not in conflict with nature, but you are going to survive because you found a way to get along. The way that it does get along is that when the limestone, which could be a block of this sediment that I mentioned, is burned, it is the one stone that when you cook it for 48 hours, maintained at between 1,650 to 2,000 degrees, you will push off the carbon dioxide content in the stone. In doing that, after the stone has cooled, it weighs 44% lighter than it did when it went into the kiln. When you reintroduce water to it, it will violently take that water in what’s called slaking–like slake your thirst–and it will boil the water it sits in within a 10 minute period. However, a little known fact is that if you look at that same mortar now that has been made with that lime putty and sand has been added to this putty that has had the water reintroduced to the limestone, you can go with a future 10 years, 20 years and 30 years and the lime is always slowly converting back into a limestone again through carbonation. It violently draws carbon dioxide out of the slaking bath at first, and it is a young buck at that time. But 5 years later, 10 years later, 50 years later, it is still trying to convert back into a limestone and will always draw carbon dioxide out of the air. So that is the symbiotic relationship again with nature. When all these nor’easters and wind and water blow on buildings, they are delivering carbon dioxide and the lime mortar joints are hydrophilic. So these walls that get saturated actually give up their water towards the attracting lime mortar which then says, “can we have that carbon dioxide from you because we are still converting back into a stone” and then releases the rest of the vapor out to the atmosphere. So this dynamic that has been going on, which material scientists have come to understand, is something that has preserved historic fabric. Because no longer does the soft sandstones and bricks that had they had the wetting and drying cycles go through there, faces would have exfoliated and been damaged. Now the historic bricks and stones give up their moisture to the hydrophilic in attracting lime mortar.

When the Romans who were famous as architects and builders, they burned lime at this time-honored temperature to maintain the reactivity of the lime between 1,650 and 2,000 degrees, it had the ability to convert back into a limestone. However, today’s modern production dead burns lime and in many cases and overcooks it. When you say to the lime that you can get it at any hardware store available in the country today, and say well, I’m going to add water and sand to you, I’d like you to convert back into a limestone and become as hard as hopefully you were at one time as a stone: that inert dust can only be used for adding plasticity, a flowability to a cement mortar or controlling the setting time of a cement mortar. The majority of the available hydrated dolomitic Type S hydrated lime in the United States has just sand and water added to it as a stand-alone binder. It does not have the ability become as significant and durable as the historic mortars because of the burning temperature. So the problem–although there is only two kinds of lime in the world and always has been–the way the lime is cooked has been changed in that it is being sped up for the process of production because the key elements it’s only asked to do today is that plasticity and control of setting time of a cementitious mortar. We have personally not had any success with using a Type S hydrated lime and adding sand and water and then putting it into service as an exterior above grade mortar in extreme free stall cycles like the northeast, mid-Atlantic states where I am from.

The limes to reproduce historic mortar when we work at some local building, someone might say, “Are you going to go build a kiln and find local lime and reproduce every element as it originally was?” Well, the cost becomes a problem, so we import the natural occurring hydraulic lime, which is pure high calcium and evenly dispersed silica so that we know when we add certain percentages of sand, we are going to get a final result that is going to have a known value for liquid and vapor permeability, PSI strengths … So it is true that in the United States and Pennsylvania, maybe these historic structures were not built with French hydraulic lime but it is a suitable replacement that pound for pound and cost-wise, is reasonable and we are putting in an in-kind replacement that will do no harm.

Jeff Guin: Do you see lime being used just in historic applications or are there new applications for lime now?

Andy DeGrunchy We have a 100,000 bag order for a tropical resort that we are creating a lime for a green build. Because, as I mentioned, the mortars that we have used for historic restoration, our intent was only to use them to do an in-kind replacement like-to-like–instituting no material that was going to cause an associated damage to historic fabrics surrounding the stone or brick, you know, like the window frame or something expanding and damaging because of what we used. However, as I mentioned about people from the cemetery, conservators and fine arts finishing people–we’ve also found that it really meets the criteria for gold and platinum LEED credits. When you are trying to lower the embodied energy, the building of what has been used by reclaiming and recycling, you know, existing post consumer material and getting all sorts of energy advantages in improving indoor air quality, they find that the lime just to begin with–because there is 7,500 years of building history proving that it works, where modern cements although introduced in the 1870’s in the United States, in my opinion did not fully take hold until after WWII. So the window of time where cement absolutely dominated for all veneer mortars and building and stucco and everything, came like 1945 until now. But the embodied energy to create a pound of Portland cement, which is the binder for modern stuccos and brick laying mortar and stoneware is incredibly high. Matter-of-fact, I believe the efficiency is very low because there is more waste than there is usable product.

Jeff Guin: Now lime mortar does have to be re-applied occasionally because it does work with the environment. How often does that have to be done?

Andy DeGrunchy Well there are many historic structures that are in the United States that are only just receiving their first re-pointing. So, in the Philadelphia region, the area where I am from, we will see a historic building that you know, maybe was re-pointed in the name of preservation and maybe under the guidance of some government agencies and done only in the 1980’s, and yet it has to be re-re-pointed and it had a Type O or high lime content mortar with a little Portland cement added. Yet, the 200 year old buildings in this region (down the street from the one fixed in the name of preservation) we will find that sometimes these buildings are actually in better repair. What my goal was originally was to import lime from France and do the things that we were doing was kind of pursuing excellence and saying you know, if there is the concept of getting a 100-year fix because we see that these buildings are 100 – 200 years old and no one’ s re-pointing them. They did not have the budget to fix it and it is in better shape than the one they did have the budget to fix. Maybe we should try to mirror the properties of the original material. So, I would say that if a lime application is done appropriately, there is no reason–just like you see in Europe, old plaster over stone, brick and stone buildings or pointed buildings and no one is touching them for 100 years–there is no reason why you won’t get a 100 year life cycle if the project is done correctly.

Jeff Guin: Is using lime mortars and re-pointing something that everyday people can do or is it just something for the experts?

Andy DeGrunchy It’s all dependent upon the skill level of the individual. So, we’ve met homeowners who do better work than some masons that we know and then we know young masons that their skill level just comes right out. So what it comes down to, just what pointing is. It is not rocket science. It’s just binder and aggregate. It’s sand and lime and then it’s just placing that between bricks and stones but as you know and many who have observed historic buildings throughout the country, they will see blaring examples of bright white mortar that did not match the texture, the tooling, the color of the surrounding area and you have to wonder what were they thinking when they did that pointing job or built that wall like that and to this day, I still do not know what they are thinking but it is everywhere. So, I think it boils down to not that it is so hard to do, but is someone willing to take the time and care for the project. That being said, some of our best customers, the ones who we love to work with, who are just savvy homeowners who have done their own research, they concluded what they wanted, how to do it, they will take a class and then they will take the time if they are going to do point the whole home, they will commit themselves to: “I’m going to do maybe one square foot but I’m going to do it right.”

Jeff Guin: Tell me about Ian Cramb.

Andy DeGrunchy Ian Cramb is a great man, 83-year old Scottish stone mason who lives in Bangor, Pennsylvania. He and his family have been steeped in stone masonry since 1750 in Edinburgh, Scotland and along the way. I think the common denominator of all these craftsman and artisans is love for the trade, and that caused him to assemble a book back in 1992 called The Art Of The Stone Mason. What made it very popular was in it, you could see the love he had for the trade and just carefully sketching out details describing how to cut a stone or how to build a stone arch or naming parts of a wall. All these things were very popular with masons because it was a throwback to how masonry had historically been done and those details again that is a common denominator that is going to make the outcome of any project become excellent and last for the 100-year fix. So, he began to develop a following of people in stone masonry and I being one of them, bought his book years ago and then of course he is local and I touched base with him about some things and became friends with him. Next thing you know, he had to get all the information together for his second book, which is The Stone Mason’s Gospel According to Ian Cramb. As we drove along one day while on some projects we were building, he said, “You know, I can’t finish my second book and it’s all your fault,” and I said, “Well what you mean by that,” and he said, “You know, in all the conversations we have regarding the lime, you really have a better handle on the technical aspects and how to explain it than I do and I want to put that in this book.” So he asked me to edit and read through his book and understand what he is writing, then put some information that is going to clarify lime. So I helped him produce this second book with my computer science major son who is in college, to produce the book on the internet and we produced a few hundred copies and we have them now actually on our website for sale and that is The Stone Mason’s Gospel According to Ian Cramb.

Jeff Guin: So you kind of see it as part of your job, your responsibility, to pass the knowledge along; to make sure that people understand not just why it’s important but what the history of lime mortars is.

Andy DeGrunchy Yes, very much so. I think that there was a time when masons would of course hide the trade secrets. They had their mason marks and they would mark the stones that they produced and shaped and dressed and they got paid piecemeal that way and some of the ancient trade secrets that sort of trail off into the Masonic tradition of the non-operating masons. In today’s masonry, as we know, all our buildings are accelerating in degradation and as the buildings are getting older and older and fewer and fewer people are going into the trade, it has been my position to say there is no more time for trade secrets. If anybody wants to know a trade secret we are glad to share it because it just does not seem like anything that resembles close to actually doing physical hard work, is not getting much of an audience of young people wanting to get into it. However, those who do get into it, find it incredibly rewarding and then ask themselves, what was I thinking, I was going to go to college and I was going to be stuck in a cubicle somewhere, so I am very much in favor of disseminating knowledge, giving it away, but I see a lot of exploitation of historic resources for the sake of personal gain by keeping a patient sick and not getting in there and putting in a repair that would give a long service life, and so I am totally opposed to that and I want to blow the blinders off of that thing and I want to shed as much light on these subjects so that we can move on with the good and excellent conservation of our nation’s historic resources.

Jeff Guin: Andy thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Andy DeGrunchy I’m glad you could include me and hope that it was informative.

]]> Claire Turcotte on Campus Heritage Landscapes (Episode 32) ]]> Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/452AE652-B388-5FDA-1CFF1CFCDD7BBE67.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-452F33B9-CE7C-B3EA-271312B0F7912BB2 Claire Turcotte on Campus Heritage Landscapes (Episode 32) National Park Service Addy Smith-Reiman speaks with Dr. Claire L. Turcotte, Managing Editor for Planning for Higher Education, The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning, and Project Administrator and Researcher, Getty Foundation, Campus Heritage Initiative. 766 no full 32

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The Journal of the Society of College and University Planning recently produced a volume of essays highlighting campus heritage and preservation planning. The special themed edition Planning to ensure the preservation of campus heritage details the many complexities of balancing student trends, new technologies , living landscapes, adaptive re-use and nostalgia on America’s college and university campuses. Aimed at the stewardship of these campuses, this volume is the result of collaboration between SCUP and the Getty Foundation’s Campus Heritage Program.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Hello, and welcome to the podcast Claire. It’s great to speak with you today.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s wonderful to see you.

Addy Smith-Reiman: I’d love to start out with a history of the project and the role of the Getty Foundation.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well, the Getty Foundation initiated a Campus Heritage Initiative in 2002. It ended in 2007 and in the process, they, the Getty Foundation, gave away about thirteen and a half million dollars to eighty-six schools nationwide to develop preservation plans for their institutions.

This included historic buildings, campus sites, and cultural landscapes. So, it was a very comprehensive scope of work. What happened was, the Getty Foundation realized wisely, that there was a tremendous amount of information in these final reports that came back to the Foundation. At the same time, we began discussing this project with the Getty Foundation and applied for seed money in 2007 to organize a project here to analyze these reports and pull out the important information and then do something with it. We had not quite figured out exactly what.

So, we did receive a grant in 2007 to allow us to really organize and outline major tasks with this project. So for example, we interviewed people nationwide who are involved in preservation planning and our campuses across the country and asked them what they would like to have, whether it was a maintenance kind of manual or what. We kept hearing a searchable database, so that is what we have developed.

Addy Smith-Reiman: There is an impressive scope of work of the eighty-six institutions receiving grant funds, and I’m really intrigued by this forethought to develop the framework to disseminate the case studies to a broader audience of planners, managers, and preservationists who would continue the sharing of lessons learned and best practices. Can you explain how the collaboration materialized and how the database materialized.

Claire L. Turcotte: Well the first effort was to obtain these final reports. The Getty Foundation forwarded them to me and some of them I obtained directly from the schools. Oftentimes, this was a difficult task because the person in charge had moved or something. I remember getting an email one winter day saying, “Aloha Claire. I’m the person you’re looking for. I have the report, “and it was from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So I did obtain about eighty of the eighty-five reports. One school closed so the field was eighty-five and those reports are all on our website. Further, we developed a template, a one page summary, outlining the planning process that was used, the outcomes and so forth. That is useful for anyone doing research. Perhaps Addy, you’ve discovered this yourself. It was a tremendous amount of work but very rewarding as it is being used.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now I’m wondering, can this template be used by other universities and colleges if they start addressing their preservation needs?

Claire L. Turcotte: Well yes, and as a matter of fact, the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a professor there sent me a message saying she stumbled on this website, and her preservation planning senior level class was developing, as part of their class work, developing preservation plans in concert with the school itself, who were developing their own plans. They found, they identified twenty or so useful models for their school by virtue of either geographic location or size, and they could use the information in these reports as useful models. So it was key to their successful planning effort.

Addy Smith-Reiman: So there are really two components to the grant that you received from the Getty Foundation; one was the creation of the database which is accessible and online, and the other is this culmination of the essays that materialized in your Journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Exactly, but let me go into a little more detail about the website. It also is a network. We now have two hundred and seventy-one members. Anyone can join. It’s free and it also has a whole listing of resources and links to organizations such as yours for example, the National Park Service, AIA, and others. So it has a tremendous amount of resourceful material on the website. The Journal itself is a collection of some wonderful images. It’s all in color and on the inside, it does cover many aspects of preservation planning, the economic angles. There are several articles about the mid-century buildings that now are historic and many are in need of improvement and so on. So again, this is another major resource and the third thing that we are doing as another resource is we are developing a symposium. It’s kind of a culmination of all of our work as the grant winds down at the end of this year. The Journal was kind of a nice prelude to the symposium.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now this database will be accessible on the website in perpetuity. What are the plans in the future? Can people continue to add to this database or is it really just the project itself, the information is out there and it’s available for everyone to use.

Claire L. Turcotte: It’s available, it’s out there. We are planning to house it permanently. We have not quite decided, maybe internally, but it will be accessible to anyone over time.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now let’s talk a little bit more about the Journal. As you said earlier, there are articles ranging from the economics to cultural landscape preservation. All seem to embody the greater goal of the project on the whole, which is, how best to integrate change while maintaining campus character. Why don’t you talk a little about some of the articles that really address that on the whole that can be a great resource for anyone out there in preservation planning on heritage campuses or any campus.

Claire L. Turcotte: There are a great variety of wonderful articles here. One by David Newman from the University of Virginia that outlines a ranking system for example; how to prioritize, redevelopment, reuse, of some of the historic buildings and additionally the landscapes, which are sometimes a little more elusive because they are so dynamic. The University of Oregon developed a similar ranking system. Theirs was a matrix. The other important thing that we discovered in these reports and this is acknowledged in the Journal, is the idea of stewardship and in particular I think, the University of Kansas and the Cranbrook in Michigan, both of those reports address individual sites, individual gardens. The University of Kansas talks about view sheds and distances and avenues of site and the need to preserve these as the landscape changes. I have never been there but it sounds like a beautiful campus. It’s built on a ridge so the views are important. Individual gardens are important at Cranbrook. So each campus is significantly different from one another and the issues are quite different at many of these campuses. The importance of this grant initiative cannot be under estimated. There are benefits to the students as well, and the neighboring communities as they often were involved in the process. Mills College for example, comes to mind. They actually had classes for their students. The students were involved in inventorying their buildings. SCAD, the Savannah College of Art and Design included ninety something students in doing their inventory. So it was very beneficial to many groups and yes, the importance of the use of the US Department of Interior Standards and other guidelines by the reporting institutions and therefore; there was a common language that was useful. You know, integrated cultural landscape and so forth; this type of vocabulary. The required analysis and documentation to develop through preservation plans allows these plans to gain importance as standalone planning tools.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Now the symposium has many of the authors of the articles in the journal.

Claire L. Turcotte: Yes, that is true. David Newman is part of this from the University of Virginia. Frank Martin who is a landscape writer and historian, and Joan Weinstein from the Getty Foundation are attending. So yes, we will have Robert Melnick from the University of Oregon and others. So we are thrilled with the response that we are getting. It promises to be another excellent resource.

Addy Smith-Reiman: Well this is a huge resource for anyone involved in preservation planning at our nations’ colleges and universities. Thank you so much for sharing this with us today.

Claire L. Turcotte: You’re welcome. It was enjoyable.

]]> Cultural Heritage Recovery in Haiti (Episode 31) ]]> Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/351222B3-D5BF-539B-D01DAA4D91C8C85D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-3726CF4E-04AE-D67F-9C873EB2389FCA0E Cultural Heritage Recovery in Haiti (Episode 31) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Karen Pavelka, a lecturer in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Karen will talk about her experiences helping to setup a conservation lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 1016 no full 31

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Jason Church: As we all know, on Jan. 12, 2010 there was a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti that devastated the country and Karen, you’ve just come back from doing some work in Haiti. What exactly were you doing there?

Karen Pavelka: I was helping to setup the lab at the Cultural Recovery Center in Port-au-Prince. I went down with two other conservators, a painting’s conservator, David Goist and an objects conservator, Bev Perkins, and the center was just getting started at that point. We were bringing materials in and organizing. There was a delegation of potential donors coming through and one of the reasons they had us there was to talk to the potential donors and tell them about the importance of the project and explain what conservation could and couldn’t do down there , and to try to build support. So, mine was pretty much, a planning and organizational visit. I got to do a little bit of treatment but not so much. Mostly, I got to lead tours, participated in workshops, help stand in as a teacher in workshops, it’s a very unstructured environment.

Jason Church: Who were you training in these workshops?

Karen Pavelka: Everything in Haiti is chaotic as you might imagine, and you don’t exactly know what you’re going to be doing day to day, so one day I showed up at the Center and some people from the West Indies happened to show up and said that they were going to be teaching a workshop to librarians and archivists the next day showing basic preservation techniques. So, I got to talk to them about basic conservations techniques and what one can and can’t do in a small space. It was two conservators from the West Indies who were working with people from Haiti, teaching people from Haiti.

Jason Church: The Conservation Resource Center that they have established now that you helped establish there in Port-au-Prince, what is that like? How large is it, who is it going to service, who’s funding it, that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: It’s not what you’re used to when you think of a conservation lab. It’s in a building that used to be a suite of offices. The building had been inhabited by the U.N. and the reason the site was chosen was because the building is very structurally sound. It didn’t fall over in the earthquake and it doesn’t look like it’s likely to fall over if there is another earthquake. It also happens to have a large fence around it; I guess about and 8 or 10 foot fence and a post where you can have armed guards. So, it was chosen for security and probably proximity to other environments, but it wasn’t chosen as an ideal lab space. We set up tables and shelves where we could get them and there are three labs there, they’re calling them labs, each one of them has a large room or a couple of large rooms and then there will be a smaller room down the hall that has a sink, and they all have bathrooms next to them. There is no real area for wet treatment. You carry all the water in and out of the working space. There are big jugs of distilled water, but you know, it’s pretty much an office space. It’s very beautiful, it’s quite a beautiful country, and the space itself is lovely but more of an office suite than a lab.

Jason Church: Who do they plan to be doing the actual work there?

Karen Pavelka: The project is organized by the Smithsonian. They are the ones who are spearheading the project, and they’re working with a number of other institutions, AIC being a very prominent member. So far, most of the conservators who have gone down have been organized through AIC, the American Institute for Conservation. AIC has served as a sort of clearinghouse to accept applications from conservators and coordinate travel and send them down. Stephanie Hornbeck is an American Objects Conservator, and she’s the chief conservator on the project. She is organizing all the conservation efforts. She is going out and selecting the objects for treatment and talking to the people in the collections, make alliances with people in collections. The very first thing people had to do was to convince people that it was safe to send their objects to the Center. Everything in Haiti as you might imagine, is pretty chaotic right now. So people weren’t exactly willing to say, “Oh good, I’m going to give you my most valuable object” because there’s a certain amount of distrust. Stephanie and the other staff at the Cultural Recovery Center have been making friends with the community doing outreach and letting people know that they can send their objects here, setting up tours, showing them some work that’s been done.

Jason Church: Well, how are the objects chosen that are being treated?

Karen Pavelka: They will work on things that people bring them. They are not choosing the objects, they’re telling people and the arts community that they can bring objects to the Center and the Center will treat them. They have a huge backlog of paintings. Right now the paintings are, I think they’re still mostly from private galleries but the thought is that they’ll be working with museums as well. They’re being pretty democratic about the work that they take in. They’ll take in work from pretty much everyone.

Jason Church: As it pertains to cultural materials and resources, what are the conditions in Haiti right now?

K. P.: Horrible, absolutely horrible. There’s rubble everywhere. I saw one dump truck the entire time I was in Haiti. The streets haven’t been cleared, the electricity is sporadic, all of the hotels are running on generators. There is no central power or very little. The houses of the more well to do people, the hotels that we were staying in, for anyone who can afford it, are running generators to keep power and even they go out periodically, so you know the power is going to go off periodically while you’re there. As I said the streets are just filled with rubble, they’re still clearing collapsed buildings by hand. You see people digging through piles of rubble and pulling out the bricks and the rebar that they might be able to fashion into some sort of dwelling. All those pictures of houses that you see, the blue tents that people are living in, those seem to be the upper middle class ones. A lot of what you see on the street is much worse than that, and I was there before the rains really began in earnest. There was some rain but not tons of rain. The conditions are unbelievable.

Jason Church: When you were there in July and saw the conditions you saw, that was really before the hurricane seasonal rains that they are having, so I’m sure that works of art on paper and of course canvases and mold issues must be extravagant right now. I can’t imagine what they must be seeing at the Cultural Center as they bring in these works of art. Are they having a backlog of objects and if so, how are they, I know with electricity issues, are they having to freeze objects to withstand the mold and that sort of thing?

Karen Pavelka: Freezing probably isn’t so much of a possibility right now because of the electricity. After the earthquake, they did a lot of work to salvage as many things as they could and just get them in a dry situation, you know, to pull them out of the rubble and just put them somewhere where they would be safe. I’m sure that there will be a lot more mold when their rains come because I have no idea what condition some of the buildings are going to be in where the artifacts are housed, so I can’t say anything about whether or not they have leaky roofs or anything like that. I’d be surprised if they don’t but who knows. The Center does have a backlog of materials that they work on. They had a backlog when I was there, and I’m pretty sure it’s only increased since I got back. They’re storing them in the Center and that was one of the reasons that they picked the space that they did. It had enough room not only to work on objects, but to store things that people would work on later on.

Jason Church: How were you contacted originally to get involved?

Karen Pavelka: I’m a member of AIC-CERT, a team of conservators that was trained to respond to disasters and the first call for conservators to work in Haiti went out to AIC-CERT members. I looked at it and thought no, not going to apply, not going to go, not me, because people said it was going to be very rough conditions, living in tents with spotty electricity. I don’t camp. I think of camping as living hell and you know I’m spoiled. I’m an incredibly spoiled middle class person. I like electricity, so I looked at it as I’m not going to go, not a snowball’s chance in hell, and then no other paper conservators signed up to do it. So what are you going to do? So, I ended up having to think, “Oh what the hell, I can do this.”

Jason Church: Tell us a little bit more about the AIC-CERT team.

Karen Pavelka: AIC-CERT is a group of sixty-one trained people who have all gone through a similar set of training in the incident command system and then in protocols that are used for responding to and assessing disaster situations. Sixty-one of course, is not enough people. Fortunately, AIC just got another grant to train another cohort of CERT responders, so that’ll be coming up soon. If you’re interested, keep an eye out, we can use more people, especially from the areas of the country like the gulf coast and Alaska. As you might imagine, so far most of the people are on the east coast. So AIC-CERT is a group of people who are trained to respond to disasters, and I was in the initial cohort of that training.

Jason Church: Aside from the work that they’re doing in Haiti, if there are other disasters, how would people, or say institutions and local governments contact AIC-CERT?

Karen Pavelka: There’s a link to AIC-CERT on the AIC Homepage and actually the work in Haiti is somewhat outside of what we thought of as the original mission for AIC-CERT. The original thought was that the teams would respond to disasters in the United States and would only respond if we are invited into a situation. So, we don’t go unless were invited. People can look at the AIC Homepage and there is a link to AIC-CERT there. There is a 24-hour hotline where you can ask for assistance or you can just ask for advice. If you find something that is underwater, you can just call up someone on the hotline and say can you give me some advice here and we’re always happy to do that. So far, AIC-CERT has responded to the floods in the Midwest and to Galveston after Hurricane Ike. AIC-CERT was formed as a response to all of the damage that was caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We found that we weren’t really as well prepared as we needed to be, but we also found that AIC was the natural clearinghouse to get conservators into a situation.

Jason Church: Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your time in Haiti, any of the treatments you did, or any stories you want to share about your time there?

Karen Pavelka: I’m just really impressed with all of the work that people at the Center are doing there. They are working through amazing odds, absolutely amazing odds and they are doing it with grace, with dignity, and they’re doing good solid work. Stephanie Hornbeck is absolutely amazing. She coordinates the work, she works well with the staff, she’s setting up training and all of the staff at the center there. They are just amazing people. So I was just very proud and honored to be able to work with them. I was a tiny, tiny cog in the beginning of what I think will be a very impressive project in the end, and I was happy to be a tiny cog there.

Jason Church: Very good. Well Karen, thank you for talking to us today, and we appreciate the information you’ve been able to share with us, and we look forward to talking with you again in the future.

Karen Pavelka: Well you’re welcome and I’m very happy to talk to you and thank you for having me.

]]> Texas Dancehall Preservation and the Restoration of Hays Street Bridge (Episode 30) ]]> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/33BB2A76-B781-653B-3CD899BC1434D51F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-33BF3592-CD71-1EAB-B42526C3A2F2A77C Texas Dancehall Preservation and the Restoration of Hays Street Bridge (Episode 30) National Park Service Andy Ferrell speaks with Patrick Sparks, an engineer with Sparks Engineering Incorporated and also the President of Texas Dancehall Preservation Incorporated. Today they will discuss the restoration of the historic Hay Street Bridge in San Antonio, Texas, and the work of this unique preservation organization. 1155 no full 30

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Andy Ferrell: Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast Patrick.

Patrick Sparks: Thanks, Andy. Glad to be here.

Andy Ferrell: I’ve known you for some time, and I know that you are passionate about the engineering aspects of historic preservation. How did you get involved in preservation engineering?

Patrick Sparks: I was an aerospace engineer at the beginning of my career, and so when I was about 25, there was a time when I decided I needed to look a little bit differently at my career, and I thought well, does anybody ever study the problem of what do you do with all the stuff that we build–or have built. So, I got interested in that and then it occurred to me to go back to graduate school and I did. I met David Woodcock at Texas A&M. At the time he was head of the preservation program there, and he welcomed me with open arms as an engineer interested in studying preservation. What I found was that historic preservation was really the only discipline at the time–and really still now–that has a formal set of principles about how you take care of the built environment. So that’s really what appealed to me and going back to graduate school to a program like that was just the perfect thing. After that it took me awhile to build a career in this area, but it’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.

Andy Ferrell: You can’t ask for much more than that, I don’t think. So, in a nutshell Patrick, tell us what is the role of the engineer in preservation projects.

Patrick Sparks: For me it’s really about first, setting the diagnostic protocol. That is, figuring out or helping the team of professionals and contractors, to figure out how to know what’s wrong or right with the building or bridge.

Andy Ferrell: Funny you should mention bridges. I know that you’ve just been involved in this exciting Hay Street Bridge rehabilitation project. Can you give us some background? What have you been doing in that? What’s special about this bridge?

Patrick Sparks: Well, it’s a really a cool bridge. It’s called the Hay Street Bridge or viaduct, and it’s in San Antonio, Texas and it consists of two 1881 wrought iron truss spans that were relocated to San Antonio in 1910 to construct this really long viaduct over the railroad tracks. It was built at a time when there were more and more trains and of course there was more and more vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and so there was a conflict at the grade crossings. So the city compelled the railroad to build them a viaduct. The railroad chose to reuse these two old spans and then build the approaches, about 1000 linear feet of approaches, out of reinforced concrete. It’s really a pretty substantial structure and it connects a historic neighborhood with downtown San Antonio, across this very active railroad track.

Andy Ferrell: So how did you get involved in this project?

Patrick Sparks: Well about eight years ago, in 2002 or earlier, we were asked by the city of San Antonio to give them some background information on truss rehabilitation so we did that, because they were looking for grant money at the time, process of applying for the grant money, and so we took them and showed them another project of similar aged truss that we had rehabilitated and just talked over some of the options. Then later, when the request for qualifications came out, we submitted our qualifications and competed against other firms and were selected to be the consultants for rehabilitation design. That was in 2002 and we just now finished the project. So, it was a pretty long project although the construction, rehabilitation construction, only took about ten months.

Andy Ferrell: Now Patrick, in the beginning of this, did they ever consider continuing to use the bridge or reusing the bridge for vehicular traffic or was it always from the beginning of the rehabilitation, envisioned as a pedestrian bridge?

Patrick Sparks: Andy, early on, I think that there were some thoughts about that because the bridge actually wasn’t in vehicular service until 1980 approximately. So, there really wasn’t any reason from our point of view, that it couldn’t remain in vehicular service but by the time we got involved, the State Department of Transportation and the owner of the bridge, City of San Antonio, had agreed that it would be only a pedestrian and bicycle bridge. They did explore the options of relocating the historic truss spans and several other options during the feasibility study phase, but I honestly think that it certainly could have been a vehicular bridge again. I think generally if we just go back a little bit and talk about bridge rehabilitation in general, we want the bridges to remain in vehicular service if they can. In this case, we thought that they could, but it was a decision that we didn’t have full charge of, but it does make a very good bicycle and pedestrian bridge.

Andy Ferrell: We’ve talked a little bit about this before, and there are lots of historic bridges across the nation that find themselves sort of in the same circumstance. What lessons did you learn in this project that you would share with those folks involved in efforts to save their historic bridges?

Patrick Sparks: Be patient and keep trying. You know these trusses, well one of the trusses, there’s two, one of them is a Whipple, the larger of the two is a Whipple truss, which is a particular kind of truss that was fairly common in railroad and highway bridges in the late nineteenth century, but it is no longer common at all and there’s just a handful of them left in Texas and really not that many nationwide. In particular, this Whipple truss is made both of wrought iron for the main members and then cast iron for the joint blocks that connects those members.

It’s really rare, even in the United States as a whole, there’s just very few of those bridges left. So that truss has a very high level of significance. Now, I bring that up because an engineer, a fellow named Doug Stedman, who is very well known in Texas and is retired now, is the one that identified those trusses as being historically significant and really rallied the community and just the local citizenry and the engineering community to get behind this project as something that was very important. Doug’s perspective on it was these were engineering landmarks, and he was successful in getting them designated as such through the American Society of Engineers. So they are not only eligible for the National Register, they are also listed as civil engineering landmarks.

More importantly, it’s grass roots, people have got to want to keep their old bridges and that’s really the essence of keeping them and saving them even in the face of opposition from powerful entities like the state DOT’s or the Federal Highway Administration, or the municipalities, or the railroads; whoever is pretty determined to replace things. We see that in buildings also. It’s the same struggle preservation-minded people face but bridges get pretty much replaced or used to be replaced without anybody noticing it, and we’ve lost about half of our historic bridges in the United States over the last twenty years.

So, the heritage of historic bridges is at risk. It’s important for people to, somebody identify the resource, the historic bridge, and say, okay, this is important. Then if people can get behind it, then to stay with it, hang on, and follow the available process like the Section 106 or another one called 4F which applies to bridges, and for citizen involvement to get people heard about what’s important about the bridge. It’s not easy to save a bridge, in fact, I’d say it’s harder than saving a building because the use alternatives are pretty narrow. There are a few examples of doing something other than using a bridge as a bridge, but mostly they kind of like to be bridges.

Andy Ferrell: Sure.

Patrick Sparks: And that’s what I tell people. You know bridges want to carry people and cars and animals over some obstacle, whether it’s a waterway or road or railroad. That’s what a bridge wants to do and that’s what we really would like to keep them doing. So having to work with such a beautiful bridge and one that was made of wrought iron and cast iron, which is very durable, and you get to see the historic workmanship and the engineering genius that went into these things.

It’s really amazing to go back to how this one was saved, Doug Stedman, engineer retired, well known, identified the bridge and he said, “Well look, we need to save this,” so he worked tirelessly for over two years to save the bridge and raise monies, and he and a group of people in San Antonio, including the Conservation Society, raised about a quarter of a million dollars to help offset the cost of the project, the matching portion, and they were able to go and get a grant, to win a grant from the DOT.

Andy Ferrell: Patrick, I was just going to ask you, who were the other partners involved in this project?

Patrick Sparks: Well, there are quite a few, so at the grassroots level, Mr. Stedman and the entity of engineers in San Antonio and the San Antonio Conservation Society helped in raising money. The city is the owner of the bridge; the City of San Antonio owns the bridge. The Texas Department of Transportation is the funding agency. They provided the transportation enhancement grant, and they also provided some oversight to the project in terms of design review and construction inspection. Then as consultants, was my firm, Sparks Engineering was the prime consultant and structural engineer of the project. We also had landscape architect, Bender Wells Clark out of San Antonio, and Garcia and Wright, civil engineers, and Joshua Engineering Group, electrical engineering consultants. Then the bicycle community was really behind it and, this is very important, the neighbors were very involved. This is a very distressed historic neighborhood that has been badly impacted by things like warehouses, and the neighborhood is a historic neighborhood but it’s gone downhill. But, there are changes coming, and this bridge is part of that, so people are now moving back into the area and they’re fixing up the houses and there is some improvement. The bridge is part of that improvement to the area, and I think the bridge was very important as a symbol of the community and that the community really is still vital and the bridge is seen as a landmark in this neighborhood. I think that the community support was overwhelming and that really drove the project and drove a lot of the things that we did in terms of the choices we made. For example, the approaches which are made of concrete were not only deteriorated, they were built in 1910, and they were severely deteriorated and really could not be saved, but moreover, they were really right in front of the neighborhood houses. The approaches are just your big wide 30 foot concrete bridge approaches just descended right into these neighbors’ front yards basically. And so it was really an awful place created when the bridge was built in 1910 and consideration was not generally given to or being sensitive about what the neighborhood would be like after you built something. So really there were a lot of problems when the thing was done originally, and we had the opportunity to fix that. We made the approaches much narrower. Instead of 30 feet wide, we made them 15 feet wide, which is what we needed for pedestrians and bicycles. What that allowed us to do, because the approach spans are elevated; this allowed more light to come in, more space, more light and you don’t feel that the bridge is oppressive anymore, and it gave the neighbors a lot of room in front of their houses. Now that space in front of their houses is landscaped and it’s beautiful and people really respond to how narrow the bridge is. But we followed the basic profile and layout of the original bridge, and we found some ways to echo the theme, kind of the architectural theme of the 1910 concrete bridge in terms of its clean lines and rhythm and the little cantilevered brackets that stuck out in 1910, we replicated some of that or we interpreted some of that per our design so that we have a really nice rhythm in those approach structures, which that rhythm leads you right up to these historic iron trusses which are the centerpiece of the project.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. Well that sounds like a really great project Patrick, but I want to sort of do the lighter side of preservation now, because I know that historic bridges are not the only thing that you care about preservation wise. I want you to tell me a little bit about the Texas Dancehall Preservation, Inc.

Patrick Sparks: The dancehalls are my favorite thing and to anyone who’s listening, you really have to come to Texas if you want to understand what Texas is and who Texans are — you can go to the Alamo and the Stockyards and stuff like that but if you really want to know, you go to a dancehall. It happens that Texas has more traditional dancehalls than any place on earth. We think that there are probably, maybe 500 left out of a historic thousand or so that have existed in the past and the dancehalls I’m talking about are traditional community halls that were built by German, Czech, Polish, and other immigrants that came in the in nineteenth century and brought with them a heritage of social dancing. That nineteenth century heritage is still alive in many parts of our state. So a few years ago myself and a couple of other people realized that what we had was a really unique resource in these halls that still existed, though many of them are not used or only used rarely, but to a large extent the social and cultural vitality is still there. When you go to one, it is like going back a hundred years and there are young couples and little kids and grandma and granddad, the whole family is there dancing. So several of us got together and we said this is very important to save, so we set up a 501-C3 non-profit corporation called Texas Dancehall Preservation, Inc. with a mission of trying to save all of the traditional dancehalls in Texas. It’s a good time and we would like everybody to come down and go dancing.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. I’m ready to come myself. In fact, my next trip to Texas, I’m going to get in touch with you ahead of time. Well Patrick, it’s been a lot of fun talking to you today. Thank you very much.

Patrick Sparks: Thanks a lot Andy. It’s great talking to you.

]]> How We Are (and Are Not) Adaptively Reusing Whole Cities (Episode 29) ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/04A56701-B218-F11C-4467CA96D1D4D5F2.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-0525E7E9-052B-0AC1-DA1BA7090C2297CE How We Are (and Are Not) Adaptively Reusing Whole Cities (Episode 29) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Aaron Lubeck, a speaker at the twelfth annual historic preservation symposium at Texas A&M University. Lubeck will talk about his presentation about “How we are –and are not– adaptively reusing cities in America.” Lubeck is also author of the book “Green Restorations.” Looking at case studies from the past 100 years, we will begin to see that if we cannot adapt, we cannot reuse. In this sense, cities must be ‘elastic’, defined by market and policy. Our goal should be to re-use assets a 718 no full 29

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Jeff Guin: One of the things you talked about in your presentation was that the sustainable future actually looks a lot like what we have today…

Aaron Lubeck: That came out of a conversation I had about a month ago. I was up in D.C. talking to Carl Elefante and he had put forth that idea that I thought was really interesting and against conventional wisdom where we think, we all visualize this future that’s so physically different. Think of the Jetsons as an analogy. But if you just look at the demographics of America, we’re not going to grow as fast as we did last century. You know, my grandfather saw our population quadruple. So, of course we’ve had great building opportunity and great architecture opportunity for new construction. But in our lifetime, we might only grow by 100 million or 150 million and that means less building, that means more remodeling, that means that the future physically is going to look a lot like it does today–a lot more so than we think. So, New York and all the small towns, and Texas A & M, the campus, are going to look in 50 years very similar, and that’s a really good opportunity for folks interested and promoters of adaptive reuse because we’ll be restoring existing buildings.

JG: And one of the statements you made was that if you are going to adapt, that you have to reuse. What does that mean?

AL: Just the nature of real estate is that you have to have a use for it before you get financing to bring a project to fruition. So, it’s impossible to adapt something and not reuse it. Gary Kuerber in Durham and I were joking about it because he’s one of North Carolina’s leading preservationists, but now he is heading a development company that does a lot of reuse and adaptations. He said jokingly that he was still trying to figure out a way where he could just do cool things with buildings independent of leases and clients and so forth. It’s every preservationist’s dream but that’s just not possible. So, the term is a pleonism. Use the example, it sort of like “totally pregnant” or “cold ice,”–it’s redundant. So, adaptive architecture or adaptive development might be more accurate or at least less wasteful.

JG: And you used some major cities as case studies of different approaches that were successful, or not. Explain that.

AL: What I tried to do was sort of book in the argument of adaptive reuse with Detroit and Houston respectively. Detroit is a great example of, if you are not able to adapt on a city scale the purpose and mission of your city, then you risk economic decline, and in Detroit this has been severe. And when you have that, you’re going to severely limit, if not eliminate, your ability to adapt and reuse architecture. So the effect of that is stress titles, stress projects, stress owners, who leave buildings to decay and go back to the earth, and we see that all over Detroit. The town is literally half the population it was in 1950, and that means half the buildings are either gone or vacant. That’s a huge challenge for that city. Houston on the other side is a great example, a really interesting example, that just continues to sort of grow because the next patch of green land is cheaper than dealing with or rehabilitating the existing assets. So, its choosing to adapt economically and move from industry to industry and grow flexibly as markets demand, but in doing so, its real estate is always focused on newness. So, there really has been in my estimation, limited adaptive reuse in the Houston area. So, these are the two sort of extremes, and I think other cities across America are seeing flexible policy, flexible markets, that allow for people to go in and rehabilitate old buildings, so those are the ones we need to look to for examples.

JG: One of the terms that you mentioned after talking about your case studies was the concept of the “triple bottom line.” Explain what that concept is and how it relates to historic preservation.

AL: The triple bottom line is a philosophy that’s been growing in stature for the past 25 years or so. It’s really buzzing in business schools right now, and it essentially says that beyond the financial bottom line, which is the literal bottom line on an income statement or balance sheet, businesses need to also look at the environmental impacts of what they do, positive or negative as a company, and they also need to look at the social impacts of what they do as a company. There are some fair critiques of that concept but it’s interesting from a preservation standpoint. I’ve argued that you can make the case that preservation fits very well into all three parts of the bottom line. It’s most naturally a cultural benefit. Obviously, saving our buildings as a back drop and physical representation of who we are and where we came from is of cultural and social benefit. Certainly there is an environmental benefit of using existing assets and not taking up new green field and so on and so forth. And then there is an economic argument just from the tie in with both the environmental and social sides, but that it is just cheaper and it’s better and costs less long term, to reuse our existing assets and stay within the dense urban areas. Houston again, I put forth, as an example of an urban area that’s undeniably had economic success but it’s pretty easy to critique the other two. Not a lot people are putting forth Houston as the cultural center of the United States, although they’re making steps towards improving that and certainly the, you know, nobody is using Houston for environmental policy for sure, and part of this ties into the architecture. I think if Houston would start using some of its existing assets, they would improve in all aspects of the triple bottom line.

JG: Okay. You actually mentioned a third city as an example of your golden mean, and that’s your home town of Durham, North Carolina.

AL: Sure. Well I love Durham and I’ll admit, perhaps it sounds self-serving but you know, it’s not a perfect town, but I think it’s a great example of a town that has adapted very well towards market demands. This is a town that didn’t exist 110, 120 years ago, so it’s very young. Absolutely boomed because of tobacco. By 1910, the majority of the tobacco world came out of Durham, and all of the architecture that is now so amazing in Durham is rooted in that tobacco history. So, we have these great old tobacco mills from American Tobacco and the Chesterfield Building and so forth that came out of this era that are now being adapted. No tobacco today is made in Durham. The last cigarettes were rolled in about 1993, and that’s the sort of transformation that would kill most towns in America, but part of it is good policy and part of it is that we are blessed. We are sandwiched between Duke University and Research Triangle Park. There are a lot of creative class people, there’s a lot of really bright people who want to be there, who want to take advantage of the excellent architecture. Part of it is really good policy for historic preservation. We have substantial tax credits in North Carolina that have been a huge driver of urban renewal, for lack of a better word, urban rebirth let’s say, and that’s really helped Durham come from…even when I was younger, growing up in Chapel Hill, a relatively dangerous place to a place that is really the most desired city of the triangle now.

JG: Okay and what could other cities learn by its example?

AL: I think cities set their goals through policy and that comes from their governance. States do the same and a lot of North Carolina’s success, again, is coming from state level endorsement of historic tax credits. I think that’s the easiest way to encourage good historic use or reuse. The other aspects are a long term sustained effort to educate and grow the preservation community.

I think that there’s a lot of things that people can connect to about preservation as a means to teach history, to teach place, to teach even the harder sciences. I mean you can teach everything from physics to chemistry through our existing houses, and the more people that buy into that, it’s just going to help increase demand for the sorts of houses that need to be sustained to rehabilitate cities. I’m really fascinated with the grass roots part of it because we tend to talk about the cream of the crop projects, these huge commercial projects that are fantastic, gorgeous, multimillion dollar rehabilitations, but most preservation happens through the rehabilitation of a bungalow or a millhouse or a Victorian home. That’s where most of the opportunity is and these are just the layman buildings. These aren’t the ones that you’re going to read about in a textbook ever, but this is the way that everybody can participate.

Anybody who likes their community or architecture or just likes to buy into the concept of stewardship can do so in choosing where they rent or where they buy or where they choose to improve their own community. It’s maybe the easiest way somebody can participate in their current, cross the time spectrum, the past, the future of their community and immediately ingrain themselves in today’s world, is by working in an old house.

JG: Thanks for talking to me.

AL: Thanks.

]]> The Philosophy of In-use Musical Instrument Conservation (Episode 28) ]]> Sun, 23 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/053E459D-C1D9-2DD4-EFEFB8E02276D071.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-0544DB3A-B724-5744-B069BC2B17E41D7E The Philosophy of In-use Musical Instrument Conservation (Episode 28) National Park Service Anna Muto speaks with John Watson, Instruments Conservator and Associate Curator at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Today they will discuss the special considerations of conservation when artifacts remain in use. 925 no full 28

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Muto: Hello John, thank you for joining me today.

Watson: It’s my pleasure.

Muto: Why don’t you tell me a little about your background. How did you move from a music degree into instruments conservation?

Watson: Well, I got interested in harpsichords when I was in undergraduate school. And actually, by the time I graduated I was starting to make instruments and did so professionally. But my “apprenticeship”—quote –unquote—was actually from the historic instruments themselves. I was treating them as primary documents. They were showing me in all the surface evidence how they were made. So from the beginning, I really started to think of artifacts from the past as being mentors more than just old things needing repaired and used. So that, I think, has affected my whole career since then. I did, as an instrument maker, do some restoration. Unfortunately, conservators rarely really specialize in things like musical instruments and they need a kind of treatment that usually requires the expertise of instrument makers. And so it was really as an instrument maker that I was first approached by museums from time to time to do restoration work, including in 1985, Colonial Williamsburg. I restored an 1806 grand piano for them. A couple of years later a position opened up and I’ve been here ever since.

Muto: In addition to having the knowledge of the instrument, are there other specific advantages that your music background offers in your current work as both conservator and curator?

Watson: Although I’m responsible for a bit more than musical instruments—I also have responsibility for clocks and scientific instruments and so forth—the vast majority of my work is with musical instruments and therefore the constituency is musical instrument players and enthusiasts of various kinds. And I’m able to work with the musicians having some understanding of their world and their language and their perspective.

Muto: As you mentioned, you’ve work for Colonial Williamsburg for over twenty years. What are some artifacts that you especially enjoyed working with?

Watson: Well, during the first seven years of my time here, I was actually just half time at the museum and the other half time I was still an instrument maker. That allowed a really ideal kind of circumstance where an instrument that had never been restored but which we really wanted to hear—it was a situation where I could actually make a reproduction of it. And that’s an interesting act of conservation as far as I’m concerned, where the traditional alternative would be to restore the instrument to playing condition. And in the case of three instruments during that time period, we were able to leave the original instrument, with all of its original parts that normally would have to be replaced during a restoration. We were able to leave them in place and use that evidence to make a very accurate reproduction. So three of the instruments in our collection have reproductions that are also in our collection and getting daily use. And that’s particularly satisfying—not only speaking as an instrument maker, or former instrument maker, but also as a conservator. It’s a way of having your cake and eating it too: being able to do a virtual restoration through making a reproduction. And also never causing any kind of loss or wear and tear on original material.

Muto: That’s a very interesting approach. So John, we know each other because in 2009, I conducted a project researching tannic acid treatment for corroded iron in your instrument conservation lab. You mentioned sometimes conserving instruments and needing to replace or treat parts of them. How did the tannic acid research tie into your work as an instruments conservator?

Watson: Well that’s a good example. And I have to thank you once again for the work you did for us. One practical use for it, for me, has been: in a keyboard instrument you have tuning pins holding iron wire. The tuning pin, of course, is embedded in one end in wood. And the normal way of having to treat this would be to take the tuning pin out of the wood and unwrap the wire and do whatever the treatment is going to be and put it all back together. The problem with that is that there’s really preservation-worthy evidence, even in the way the wire’s coiled around the tuning pin. And by being able to leave it all together, even still in the wood, and treat it with something that is not damaging to the wood and doesn’t require a more intrusive cleaning of the tuning pin and string, we’re able to leave it all in situ and protect that workmanship. That’s a very practical use of tannic acid for us.

Muto: Take me briefly through the steps you follow when you’re conserving a historic instrument that comes into your lab.

Watson: Well, one of the first things we have to do is to make a determination whether it is an instrument that can or should be put in playing condition, or should it be left as made exhibitable, or as a third option, actually stabilized in its current condition which may not even be exhibitable but is worthy of the study collection. So those are really three very different levels of intervention. The next thing we look at is what in the instrument is at risk during restorative conservation. For example, I have in the lab right now a spinet, a member of the harpsichord family, from the early eighteenth century and it has a lot of original parts that if we restored the instrument, they would have to be replaced. They simply are not durable enough. They don’t represent their original state enough for the instrument to sound right. They would have to be replaced. But the instrument is much too important historically to be replacing parts like that. So that’s an example of an instrument that’s going to be stabilized in its current state and not restored.

Muto: You bring up the interesting kind of push-pull of conservation, especially for something like a musical instrument. And actually, your recent book Artifacts in Use addresses some interesting challenges in conservation using pipe organs as the case study. Tell me a little bit more about the special considerations that you take in conserving an artifact that may not be displayed in a museum, but instead may be in use after conservation.

Watson: The biggest problem in working with instruments of that kind is that the skill set needed for conservation and the skill set needed for making a pipe organ work are really very different. In fact, they’re almost mutually exclusive. Simply because for me to be a good conservator, that’s pretty much a full time, life-long endeavor to learn those skills. And a pipe organ maker—the same thing. For a person to have conservation skills and pipe organ making skills both is almost impossible.

And so the best option is, of course, a collaboration where these two very different specialists actually work together and combine their insights and their abilities. That’s the best hope for objects like pipe organs. The problem is these two groups are so very different in their worldview. And so the nature of those values, those different sets of values, have to be analyzed and the common ground explored. And that really was the point, and the goal, that I had in writing the book Artifacts in Use.

Muto: That sounds like a very valuable pursuit and the kind of dialogue that needs to be happening for these artifacts. What are examples of some other artifacts, other than the organ case study, that might find fuller meaning in continued use?

Watson: There are objects that many people, at least, believe should be used—even for their own sake, for the purposes of preservation. I think of, certainly, other types of musical instruments, stringed instruments especially. Also clocks and transportation vehicles—old cars, that sort of thing—are very often restored by people who feel that that is true preservation to put them back into use. But to some, even those should be preserved as historical documents and not subject to restorative alterations. And that’s our attitude here at Colonial Williamsburg, even about clocks. It’s not that old clocks should never be used, but it has a lot to do with what we see our role to be in society. Our responsibility is to preserve this historical evidence for the future.

Muto: That brings me to my next question. Are there risks in both restoring a historic instrument or a historic object, and are there risks in then using it?

Watson: The wear and tear is the main thing—not only in the using of the artifact, but in the maintenance of it and the restoration itself. Restoration itself causes us to lay hands on an object sometimes in a relatively intrusive way. And if you think of the surfaces as being a document, with not words, but physical evidence that can be read like words telling the history of its making and its early use, restoration itself erodes that evidence and so does use. But there are some artifacts, though—they have to be used. Otherwise, they’re totally not understandable. And one obvious one that I don’t think anyone would argue with is architecture. And even really paintings and some of the fine arts. Another interesting example is even to think of something like historic gardens. All of these things are part of the material legacy and they all demand a really kind of different approach to their preservation.

Muto: Going back a little bit to your particular area of expertise, instrument conservation, I know you mentioned that the surfaces of an instrument can contain valuable data—from tool marks left during manufacture to the subtle history left on the aged surfaces. You mentioned how restoration can somehow negatively affect that. Can the information actually be preserved through restoration? And if so, how?

Watson: Well that’s a really good question. I have become aware of restoration as being a kind of paradox. If you were to graph an artifact’s condition over time, its condition as the maker would judge it. Well over time, the thing deteriorates and it stops working as well and it doesn’t look like it was originally intended to look.

That’s a reduction of quality in its condition. So if you are graphing this, the restoration puts it back into a former state and the line that is mapping its condition would go up. The paradox is that if you think of the object as a primary document and you graph the condition as a primary document full of historical evidence, you get to that point of restoration and while the condition in the eyes of the original maker may go up, the line representing the preservation of historical evidence actually goes down. That’s the paradox of restoration. So your question is: is that necessarily true in restoration? Are there approaches to restoration that reduce the amount of loss of historical evidence?

And the answer is absolutely yes. There’s a great difference between conventional restoration that’s not particularly aware of or interested in evidence and in their pursuit of newness, conventional restorers tend to really wipe away that historical record. Restorative conservation, on the other hand, is an approach to restoration that’s really very careful to preserve worthy signs of age. It steps over the evidence and it respects the object as a historical document, not just a thing that looks a particular way or functions a particular way.

Muto: That’s very good to hear that that approach is being cultivated. What is your biggest challenge in preserving the historic materials in the instruments while also maintaining the utility of those that you choose to restore to playing condition?

Watson: Well I feel there are ways to merge the goals of conservation with the needs of users. In my case study, in the case of pipe organs, those would be organists and people who enjoy organ concerts and so forth. These two groups of people—conservators and museum professionals who are so interested in preserving things unchanged over time, and those that want to roll up their sleeves and engage and use the thing—are not necessarily incompatible.

There’s a common ground. The greatest challenge for these complex objects, like organs and other keyboard musical instruments just to use that example, has more to do with the difficulty of interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals who are so different in their outlook. But it is possible and it’s worth pursuing. That’s really what my book is about: helping professional conservators see the point of artifacts that are used, on the one hand.

And on the other hand, the organ restorers who have done it for hundreds of years and are not conservation professionals—to help them see the point of conservation values, be aware of the historical evidence and its importance and its preservation-worthiness and to see ways of stepping over that evidence, getting the restoration job done with the least loss of historical evidence. That’s really what restorative conservation is all about.

Muto: I thank you so much for joining me today.

Watson: It’s been my pleasure, Anna. Very good to talk to you again, and good luck to you and the folks at NCPTT.

]]> Conversations on Sustainability at the 2010 APT Conference (Episode 27) ]]> Mon, 15 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/0434F4F4-BA1D-10C7-E721DA34E30C8EED.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-046F5F5D-98C1-622B-AEE8A4C9B372AC5C Conversations on Sustainability at the 2010 APT Conference (Episode 27) National Park Service At the 2010 Association for Preservation Technology Conference in Denver, Jeff Guin speak with Jill Gotthelf, coordinator of an NCPTT-sponsored workshop at the conference, followed by an interview with John Anderson about implementing sustainability in preservation. 1482 no full 27

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Jill Gotthelf: I’m the Principal at Walter Sedovic Architects, and I am co-chair of the APT Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation, and I am a preservation architect.

Jeff Guin: Tell me a little bit more about that committee and why it chose to hold this particular session.

Jill Gotthelf: The Technical Committee on Sustainable Preservation began out of a Halifax Symposium, where we realized that there was a growing concern about sustainability and from a holistic perspective, not just energy and embodiment, but also community and social equity and how our heritage buildings played into this movement, and what we should and should not do, as well as the issues of climate change and the impact they are having on our buildings. It was really a very widespread look at our heritage buildings and issues of sustainability and environmentalism, and from that over the years, the committee has looked at addressing issues from rating systems to climate change, education, preservation programs in the schools, and they are addressing issues of sustainability. Now we also have moved into focus of policy and there was a symposium in Montreal that addressed theoretical issues, and over the last two years since that, we realized that we, at APT, have a specific expertise in technology and in the technical end of these issues, and looking at all the organizations that have been working on sustainability, there are other organizations who really are public policy organizations and addressing many of those concerns, and that we really needed to focus on some of the technical issues so we could offer our expertise to the entire field, addressing sustainability and with the coming out of all these new codes, especially the upcoming international green construction code, we realized that many of the concerns dealt with energy and our envelopes.

We, deep down in our hearts, know that historic buildings are not the energy hogs that they are made out to be, and the advantages of thermal lag, and that buildings built before WWII had to address environmental issues, because we could not design the environment out of our buildings and that they really did what most of these codes and LEED, and all of the rating systems were asking for already, and it is just that they have been maligned or they have been altered, the systems have been taken out, people do not understand how they work. So, one of the things we wanted to address is envelope modeling and monitoring and performance of our existing buildings to get real data that show how our buildings work. Modeling of new buildings, we are finding buildings are modeled and then they do not perform the way they are modeled to be. We, with historic buildings, have the advantage that we have real buildings that we can go out and actually do real models based on the performance testing. So, the decision was that now was the time for a two-day workshop to discuss what tests are available for historic buildings, what information can we get and show, and then how can that information be transferred into a model so that we can generate data that we can take to explain how our historic buildings work, what systems are in place, what happens once those originally designed systems are restored, how does the building perform by itself and now, what intervention really is necessary, and you will find that the designs of the systems vary greatly, when you really understand actual performance and then design an intervention rather than a model.

Jeff Guin: And you actually used a real world setting, a historic building, for part of the workshop.

Jill Gotthelf: Yes, we used the Central Presbyterian Church here in Denver. That was an ideal building because it is a historic masonry church with a 1960’s – 70’s cavity wall addition, and we were able to both model the cavity wall addition and the historic portion of the church and look at the differences in how the two performed and the different decisions that you would need to make based on the two different building construction types. There was a series of pre-testing that was done about a month ago so that we had a baseline testing, as well as, doing the hands-on testing at the workshop, so that we had a report of the testing to discuss at the workshop, as well as, to physically do the hands-on testing. This was a building where the original passive system had been closed up, and we looked at how the building was performing now with that and then discussed from our knowledge of how the system originally worked–this whole chimney fact and reopening of the passive ventilation system, what would be gained by restoring the original system and whether that is a better solution or newer intervention.

Jeff Guin: Okay. Well, what were your findings?

Jill Gotthelf: Well, interestingly enough, our findings were actually giving us real data for what we already knew about how thermal lag works, and based on modeling of looking at historic buildings and then modeling how the heat transferred through the building, we have actually started to look at putting insulation on as being a disadvantage, not just from what we already knew about creating dew points of moisture, but that it also did not allow that additional heat to transfer into the space.

It did not allow us to gain the advantage from the thermal lag that we had naturally, and so, it gave us a better understanding of what we already knew, how these buildings performed in a way that we then could bring it to our building stewards, and rather than just trusting us, they could actually see data.

Jeff Guin: Well stepping back a second, you mentioned that this was at least in part, a hands-on experience. Talk about that, what were the participants allowed to use the different types of equipment, etc.

Jill Gotthelf: In the church, we actually had a blower door set-up for the participants to work through, and they watched the set-up of the blower door, an explanation of the fans, how we pressurize or depressurize the building through turning the fans on, having the system work, and then walked through with smoke so that we were able to identify locations where there were drafts, as well then, there was equipment for doing thermal performance…

Jeff Guin: Was that the little handheld device? …

Jill Gotthelf: …That was it being passed around and everyone was able to see, yes. Being that this is in October, the results on that would not be as dramatic unless you were hitting part of the building that happened to have the heat on and steam, whereas, on a really cold day in the winter, you would see a greater differential, or a really hot day in the middle of the summer, you would see a greater thermal differential when we went and tested…all the walls, but I gave a relative understanding of the one surface to another surface and that has been a discussion throughout this workshop that all of our testing devices have reached a certain point of accuracy. You know, they will continually grow to become more accurate, and there is a certain amount of user failure and a certain amount of changes in levels of accuracy depending on the sophistication of the equipment in use, but everyone of them are good tools for relative performance and understanding, because if you are using the same tool in one place and in another place, your relative performance is still the same even if it’s actual physical number that it is meeting out is not.

Jeff Guin: Tell me about some of the other folks that were involved in helping instruct the workshop.

Jill Gotthelf: We have a range of instructors that include, our leader in the hands-on testing is with a company here in Denver that is lightly treading, and they go in and do energy audits and evaluation, and testing. They themselves are not trained architects and engineers in developing the new systems to make changes. They are very well versed in collecting the data and in analyzing the performance of the building and developing an instruction on key areas where efficiencies can be added.

We added to that several engineers, ranging from structural engineers, mechanical engineers, and engineers that are also working in the energy modeling field, who then have been able to show us how that information that we gathered can be put into models and analyzed, can make informed decisions in our evaluation of cost benefits and life cycle cost analysis, and then can also discuss the pros and cons of making those decisions, understanding holistically how the building systems work, making certain changes are going to have impacts on other decisions that you make. So we really had a nice range.

Jeff Guin: You recorded the workshop on video and you are going to do something with that as well …

Jill Gotthelf: Yes. This workshop is for CEU credits from the American Institute of Architects and the NEECES, which is the engineering and the Ontario architects, so it offered a full range of CEU credits. The entire workshop was videotaped from a grant from NCPTT, which we will take the two days and condense it into a one-hour learning module that we would like to then make available to outside of APT as a learning module that can basically be an on-the-road learning module.

Interview with John Anderson

John Anderson: Hi, my name is John Anderson. I am currently an instructional engineer at Robert Silman Associates in New York City. My background is focused on sustainable building, so I have done a Master’s Degree at UC Berkeley, where I focused on sustainable concrete technologies and then before that, I was a Fulbright Fellow in Berlin at the Technical University there, where I looked at the interlap between architecture sustainability engineering and how that forms sustainable design. So that is really where I am coming from.

Jeff Guin: Today you were speaking at the APT Conference in Denver about putting sustainability into preservation. Tell me a little bit about that.

John Anderson: Exactly. So the general idea with the preservation community currently is that preservation is sustainable. End of story. But what we are really trying to do is move sustainability into preservation so that preservationists can move from being a passive participant in this building design movement to really being leaders, and then by being leaders, we can illustrate that historic buildings, historic neighborhoods, have a lot to teach new buildings and have a lot to teach policy makers. So when policy members, administrations, think about they want to do green building, they will look to preservation for guidance.

Jeff Guin: One of the things that you have been involved with is the Pocantico Summit on Sustainability. Tell me about that experience and what came out of it.

John Anderson: Yes. The Picantico Proclamation was started by a group of 28 experts from different fields, from architects to engineers to business people, to environmentalists, anyone who is affected by green building and who has an interest in this. We really sat down and thought about how does preservation interlap and play a role with sustainability and then we also thought about where are some conflicts there and how can we address those conflicts.

Jeff Guin: Let’s talk about those. One of the things that you mentioned in your talk earlier was imperatives coming out of that. Tell me about those imperatives.

John Anderson: Exactly. So, the background in the argument that we are really forming to make this case, program design for sustainability, are the climate change imperative, the economic imperative, and to explain the climate change is pretty straight forward. The economic imperative is really changing to a green economy. So, moving away from resource dependent, non-renewable fuels and building practices, to renewable practices to a practice of conservation. The last one is equity. As we see the world transform in the last ten years and moving forward, we are seeing that more people have a higher standard of living and that’s requiring resources, so we need to think about, especially in the U.S., how can we get more from less.

Jeff Guin: And you also mentioned principles coming out of the initiative. Can you talk about the principles?

John Anderson: Yes. So actually the principles are really lessons that can be learned from preservation and applied to green building, so these examples foster a culture of reuse. We currently have a culture of new, of consumption. So, we can transfer to an idea of reusing something, valuing something, and seeing the bigger picture in something. One of the other big interesting things is to update the sustainability aspects of preservation. So, like we were saying before, that preservation really does not shy away from sustainability but really grabs onto it and takes the lead and leads the movement.

Jeff Guin: Following the Pocantico and the proclamation, there was a follow-up meeting as well called the National Challenge. Tell me a little bit about that experience.

John Anderson: Yes. So, the Pocantico laid out the essential principles and guidelines and the imperatives for integrating and assisting preservation. We took it another step and really refined it, and we said okay, we have all these sustainability concerns, economic, environmental, and social. Let’s focus on the most pressing right now and that is climate change. So it is not everything but we are just focusing on one task, and then the question really is, is how can preservation align with climate mitigation strategy. It is very definitive and very clear what the goal is and then what we are looking for is how can that come about, how can we realize this objective?

Jeff Guin: Have you made any progress in figuring that out?

John Anderson: Well, it is obviously a big challenge, but I think what we have been doing in…we are essentially an advisory board to other organizations and other organizations participate with us, what has come out of this is there has been legislation written that has been proposed to the House, in matters like this where the needs with the DOE, Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, so really taking our message to policymakers and saying, “Hey, look, preservation is a way to reduce climate change and we need to address this.”

Jeff Guin: Are you learning any lessons from the environmental movement and implementing policy?

John Anderson: Existing buildings emit 40 percent of the CO2 emissions in the U.S. Historic buildings, you know, buildings that are listed on the Landmark Registry are very small, it is one percent of New York City. So, if you have one percent, you cannot make a big change. But if the preservation movement went beyond museum type buildings, one-of-a-kind and historic buildings to really be the spoke person for all existing buildings, then we have really taken a big branch. We have said, we are the people that care for buildings, we know how to maintain buildings, we know how to increase longevity of buildings, and then we have a big area to contribute and then people come to us to say, can you help us with this problem.

Jeff Guin: Absolutely. You talked about the actions items and the steps that we go through to actually start influencing policy, tell me about those.

John Anderson: The big one that we have been thinking about and is a personal interest of mine is research, because I think a lot people that are enacting green initiatives, green goals, so anyone from the presidential administration to localities, such as New York City’s Michael Bloomberg, these people are interested in achieving these environmental goals. And I think what they do not have now that they could use, are tools to help them see that existing buildings are a key in that solution. I do not think people are excluding existing buildings right now, people just are not, they do not have the data available to show that these are the areas one should really be focusing on.

Jeff Guin: When you are talking about the actions items and research, you mentioned the Secretary of Interior standards, as well as, being a place to start to look at those again and figure out how to use what is existing, but also maybe change that a little bit…any ideas there?

John Anderson: So we only have two, two challenges. One is an external communication. The preservation community communicating with other people in green building and the second one is internal. How does the preservation community deal with challenges such as window replacement, operational energy improvement? These are really dealt with traditionally through the National Park Service standards and guidelines. And what we really see a need for is guidance from such an over arching body to really provide guidance on that so if a homeowner that is interested in preservation and interested in sustainability, can have someplace to go to and really get some knowledge from that perspective.

Jeff Guin: So, one of the things that I think I am hearing you say, is that communication is a big part of it and changing perceptions as you said, internally and externally and on a broader scale. How are some of the ways that we could do that?

John Anderson: Yes, these are great points, and I think a lot of it is just talking to people. So, I think it is moving beyond just preservationists talking to themselves. I gave a talk recently to the U.S. Green Building Council and there we were essentially saying that, you know, reusing a building is recycling a building, and one of my friends went to the talk and she is open to these ideas and she is green friendly and she said, “I had never thought about that.” And now essentially she is on board with us. So I think it is just presenting the idea to people in an objective, clear manner with data and research that shows that we are not just pushing a different agenda, but it is really the case at hand. I think that helps bring people on board.

Jeff Guin: What you are saying is that if we can explain exactly what is happening to these folks and meet them where they are, then we have a much better chance at having their support in influencing these policies.

John Anderson: Yes, and we can see this through examples. When you are thinking about urban planning, you think about the real goal now of the new urbanist movement is to build a livable, sustainable communities where you have grocery shops, mom and pop shops, you have restaurants, you can walk everywhere. Where are these ideas coming from? These ideas are coming from historic districts. Historic districts are doing them now, but the problem is that historic districts are not selling themselves or branding themselves in that manner, so it is really an idea of perspectives and really seeing where these new ideas are coming from and often we see they are coming from the past. So, the past is looking forward.

Jeff Guin: One of the things that I heard you mention is actually harnessing the power of the Web, in that we have the ability now to communicate to everyone in the world potentially with an internet connection and influence those folks too. What are some of the ways that you recommend?

John Anderson: Yes, I think that is great. I think that is really a useful dialog–communication. I think what we can do, we can get a lot of information out to people, you know, we can put something out about replacement windows, you know. We can have dialog and informed discussions online and then a lot of resources. You know, if somebody needs resources to make their case–if somebody is saying, “well, I think this old building has some value, and I want to go to talk to somebody that is in charge about this–how do I do that? How do I have the information to share this with other people without having to do a doctoral dissertation on embodied energy?

Jeff Guin: And just as important to that, besides just putting the information out, is to be able to interact about it and have a conversation about it rather than just saying these are the rules…follow them or else.

John Anderson: That is a good point. Preservation is really about the community and preserving the community and the community is made up of different people doing different actions and then that is what really creates the community around them, and I think that is what historic preservation tries to promote.

Jeff Guin: Absolutely. Just to follow up with the initiatives that you have been involved with in talking about Pocantico and the Nashville Challenge–there was a group that actually came out of this effort as well that you are a part of. Tell me about that.

John Anderson: Yes. So we, from national, we drafted an agenda, an action item agenda, and this became the sustained building preservation policy task force or SpitFire for short. This is essentially an advisory council to other organizations working on issues of sustainability and preservation. So, we provide guidance on implementing sustainability into preservation and also as a forum for feedback and holding organizations accountable. When we are saying we want to do these things, we really are there to help people achieve the goals and really move forward in the process.

Jeff Guin: What are some of the organizations that you have worked with to try to advise.

John Anderson: Yes. The National Trust for Historic Preservation from the start, Friends of NCPTT has been in form the start and also APT is involved, AIA is involved and we have the American Council for Historic Preservation, national SHPO’s, so everyone that is involved in preservation is getting this picture and this is really a place to come for assistance and guidance.

Jeff Guin: So if someone wants to find out more about SpitFire or the sustainability initiative, how can they get in touch?

John Anderson: Either on the NCPTT website or on the National Trust website.

Jeff Guin: John, thank you so much.

John Anderson: Thank you very much for the time.

]]> NCPTT, Southern Miss and Hybrid Plastics Collaborate to Study Stone Strengtheners (Episode 26) ]]> Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF21F859-9197-0D17-13D972786DBC7D02.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-0418EC9A-A22B-44C5-4D3CB705F03CCA2C NCPTT, Southern Miss and Hybrid Plastics Collaborate to Study Stone Strengtheners (Episode 26) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Derek Patton, Assistant Professor in the School of Polymers and High Performance Materials at The University of Southern Mississippi. NCPTT is partnering with USM and Hybrid Plastics on a National Science Foundation grant to advance the science of stone preservation. 698 no full 26

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Church: Derek, tell us a little bit more about your background as a polymer chemist.

Patton: I got my Ph.D. from the University of Houston and I spent two years in Gaithersburg, Maryland, as a post doc in the polymer’s division and that’s where I really learned to apply my background as a Polymer Synthetic Chemist and apply those skills in a way that you can look at the interaction of surfaces with polymers and vice-versa and so I developed a fundamental interest of studying the interaction of the interface of polymers and their underlying substrates. So most of what my group does is polymer synthesis at interfaces. We’re interested in developing synthetic methods to fundamentally change the way the surface interacts with its environment. Whether that’s in a protective coating or to change the way the chemistry reacts. This is the largest part of my background and the focus of my research.

Church: I hear you are a principal investigator of a newly awarded science foundation grant. What makes this NSF grant different than others?

Patton: Yeah absolutely. So we were recently awarded a grant under the Chemistry and Materials Research between science and art. For short they call it the SCIART program. So, with the SCIART award, the National Science Foundation really sought to enhance collaborative opportunities between conservation scientist and chemist or material scientist to address grand challenges in the field of science of conservation of cultural heritage. So that’s the unique feature of this particular grant. It’s one of the first instances where we’re taking a skill set of a physical or a material scientist and combining that with the skill of a conservationist.

Church: You said that this grant was a collaborative effort. Who are the partners on this grant and why were they chosen?

Patton: My co-principal investigators are Mary Striegel, at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training in Natchitoches, La., and Joe Lichtenhan at Hybrid Plastics and they’re located in Hattiesburg Mississippi. At the fundamental level we want to look at the interaction of new polymers with stone surfaces. So we’re interested in developing polymers that are modified by POSS, which are inorganic silica cages. And we’re interested in incorporating those silica cages into polymeric material that interact and enhance the interaction with stone surfaces as consolidants or as stone strengtheners.

Church: What part will each of these partners play in the research and final outcome of this grant?

Patton: NCPTT, as the only national preservation research and technology centers in the National Park Service, Mary and her staff will bring years of experience in conservation and preservation of cultural heritage items, specifically of stone and masonry on which is the focus of this NSF project. Being at the forefront of the preservation field, they have opportunities of interfacing with experts from industry government and academia. They will be instrumental in helping to identify and address grand challenges in preservation of America’s cultural heritage. Their role essentially, is to help facilitate the transfer of the technology development as a result of this grant to the end user and on the more experimental side they will be involved in analyzing the long-term effects of the stone treatments weathering, stability, of the treatments on the stone surfaces.

Hybrid on the other hand is more on the materials supply side. Hybrid is one of the world leaders in the commercial production of POSS materials. Hybrid has over the years demonstrated very innovative uses of POSS containing materials for a broad range of technologies. For example one related to the conservation of stone. They’ve used POSS materials to modify dental restoration so that you mimic the surfaces of the tooth by incorporating the silica into the formulation. So that’s one of the properties that we can use in terms of modifying stone surfaces or consolidation stone surfaces and taking advantage of the inherent properties of the POSS material in many ways mimics the properties of a stone surface being an inorganic material so many times you can match the refractive index and the modules properties by incorporating the various amounts of POSS into these polymer formulations.

Their role in the project is to synthesize and supply those POSS materials with specific functional groups that can be incorporated into a polymeric material. It also enhances the interaction with the stone surface and supply them to us in multi-gram quantities that really give us a large enough scale that we can actually do realistic size conservation efforts of stone surfaces.

From the university side, one of our fundamental goals is to produce students that are capable of entering the work place with a specific skill set and so one specific thing that this grant does because it is collaboration between academia and a conservation government laboratory and an industrial company like Hybrid Plastics. It gives us an opportunity to train students with a new skills set so that they come out thinking in a different way about using material science and how to apply that specific skill set with problems that are observed in the conservation of cultural heritage.

That’s one of our fundamental goals as a professor to train those students so that they’re capable of going out into a newly developing field where they’re having to address different problems. So if we can take the skill set that we as material scientists or as chemists know and apply those to the challenges conservationists face I think that we produce something that lasts far reaching into the future as a product from the academia side.

Church: Now, once the testing is established and you have an end result. What sort of cultural materials do you think you might be looking at treating with these POSS consolidants?

Patton: I guess we can take some examples from Natchitoches. During a recent visit to Natchitoches at NCPTT we actually went out into the field and learned how some of the traditional methods, traditional products that are on the market today, are being used to treat stone surfaces that are used to make gravestone markers. The U.S. is full of buildings of historical significance so treating those stone surfaces that were used to build those historic buildings is another example.

And then stone and sculpture would be another example, where new products with specific properties of consolidating the stone surfaces while one of the ultimate goals is to do no harm to the surface–those are areas where new products are needed and where we might in a collaborative effort develop those types of materials.

Church: I’ve toured your labs there at the University of Southern Mississippi and met some of your research group. How many of your students are working on this grant project and what types of facilities and what types of things are going to be used from your labs?

Patton: It’s funded through the NSF, National Science Foundation. Through that support we’re able to support two full-time graduate students and two part-time undergraduate students to work on the project. So those four students will be actively involved in the development of both the fundamental interactions of the polymers with stone surfaces all the way through going to Hybrid Plastics to develop the actual POSS materials and then on to NCPTT to do the testing on stone surfaces and actually doing field tests with some of the new materials once we get to that point.

At the university in my lab we’re actually going to focus more on the interaction with the materials of stone surface so we’re looking at things like microscopy and spectroscopy, things that are surface sensitive so that in a very detailed fashion we can probe the interface between the polymeric material and the stone surface so that we can do things like raising angle transform IR for instance to probe that interface and see how it’s actually interacting with the stone surface other things are quartz crystal microbalance.

We can measure the absorption of POSS materials in a very sensitive manner and learn how these materials interact with stone mimic surfaces like calcium carbonate for instance or silicone oxide. So those are two examples of things we’ll be doing in my lab, along with developing the chemistry that will incorporate POSS into polymeric materials.

Church: Well Derek, thank you for coming out today and we look forward to talking to you again.

]]> Barry Stiefel on the Sustainability of Historic Preservation (Episode 25) ]]> Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/03EFFC31-AD5E-3E42-D535FF39C0D09395.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-03F58F80-F277-1B51-0D2947E0D6DC122E Barry Stiefel on the Sustainability of Historic Preservation (Episode 25) National Park Service Kim Martin speaks with Barry Stiefel, Professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the College of Charleston and Clemson University. They discuss sustainability in preservation. 563 no full 25

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Kim Martin: Thank you Barry for joining me on the podcast.

Barry Stiefel: Well, you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Kim Martin: So, I understand that you teach a class on preservation and the environment. As you know preservationists have often been arguing that sustainability and preservation go hand-in-hand. How do you approach this in your class?

Barry Stiefel: First, I start off with the basics, you might say, and that is going over some of the major points that preservationists argue as being very environmentally sound, and also trying to clarify where there is sort of gray or fuzziness in this respect and sort of going with the students. You know how quite often you have to go by a case-by-case basis. That there really are no absolutes, and then sort of go on from there from what we consider bricks-and-mortar sustainable practices with preservation into things that might be considered more peripheral, but when looking at management and sort of planning for the long future, are other aspects to consider related to not just preservation but heritage and tangible aspects and the environment and sustainability.

Kim Martin: I noticed from your syllabus that you take a sort of reciprocal approach in one section with not only how preservation affects the environment but how the environment affects our buildings. Can you talk to me a little about that?

Barry Stiefel: We started looking at how coastal areas, which we have many historic cities on, are threatened or potentially threatened with rising sea levels. It’s also dealing with atmospheric conditions such as from acid rain or smog that causes or accelerates weathering on historic building materials and historic structures; looking at extremes in climate, because when we talk about climate change, we’re talking about, it’s not just the world getting hotter but it, it’s also dealing with colder extremes at the opposite end. So you know how this can also accelerate weatherization. So that’s the one aspect. Then looking back the other way, it’s sort of thinking of historic preservation, not just the sort of adaptive reuse of historic buildings structures and districts, but also looking at historic building practices and how that can reduce our ecological footprint and in a certain sense can mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Kim Martin: I noticed also that planning had a large part in your syllabus as well. How does a planner incorporate preservation, the environment, and all these aspects?

Barry Stiefel: I’d say that it’s not trying to incorporate all of them; it’s doing them all at the same time. Traditionally, we tend to break things up into categories, you know, this is just transportation planning, this is preservation planning, etc., and we really need to get back to the idea that everything is interrelated to each other and that these are components that we need to consider in all planning, particularly if you want to have a sustainable plan, a sustainable land use, and then all these approaches need to be considered because they all affect one another.

Kim Martin: Is there any really great examples that you can think of at this time?

Barry Stiefel: There are some interesting things going on right now in Boulder, Colo. They’ve also been dealing with an issue of, sort of those who are maybe being too extreme to one side or the other, being either, you know, environmentally speaking or “preservationally” speaking. And the thing is, to consider is that what is going to ultimately be successful is somewhere in the middle.

You know if one is too much of an advocate for preservation, you know, there are things that are important related to the environment or some other aspect of public welfare that maybe ignored and vice versa. I know they’ve been dealing with issues related to promoting LEED certified building and construction within their city, as well as dealing with the historic districts that they have and what they can do to bring those up to higher performance in terms of energy and resource use and so, I know that, at least that’s something that I’ve heard about that they have been grappling with.

One thing to keep in mind is that there is no sort of final end result where, you know, there you made it, that you’re done. It’s a continuous process. You know, you can always do better, you can always improve yourself. So, think of it more as the journey than the ultimate destination.

Kim Martin: Can you tell us what the greatest benefit of preservation is to sustainability?

Barry Stiefel: I would say that this is the greatest use of preservation, not just for sustainability but, sort of preservation at large and that is to improve quality of life. You know, if we lose sight of that then what are we doing it for.

Kim Martin: Why do you think there has been such a separation or perceived separation between people who want to preserve buildings and people who are in the sustainability camp or green building?

Barry Stiefel: I think it ultimately comes to how these two fields have developed particularly in the twentieth century, the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly in western thought we like to sort categorize things: this is preservation, this is environmental conservation, this is X, this is Y, this is Z. And we are, as a society, starting to learn that we can’t always do that.

And I think, you know, where people sort of have the “aha” moment, you know, it’s always been there. It’s just when is that the individual themselves actually recognize it. That’s sort of the issue that has to be dealt with. And ultimately it will have to come down to education and, you know a trickling down into also the college curriculum and hopefully, down into secondary and primary education opportunities.

Kim Martin: I haven’t heard a whole lot about this being taught in preservation schools. How did you come up with your curriculum?

Barry Stiefel: Well, you are correct. You know it’s just starting to change; something that we at least talk about in the joint College of Charleston/Clemson program, you know, these things were at least being talked about on the table initially, and our program wasn’t the only one where this is taking place. As for myself, I really have to sort of look at my experience, my college and university career. My undergraduate degree is a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Policy.

I was aware of preservation to a certain degree based on an architectural history class I took in high school, and then I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do at first for graduate school, and I ended up basically doing a Masters in Urban Planning but focusing in environmental planning. And based on an experience I had in a travel course in that program to Pittsburgh, seeing what they were doing with revitalization in some of the older neighborhoods, got turned onto the idea that adaptive reuse and historic preservation was a form of recycling. And I actually came into it from an environmental perspective and in a certain sense, by the time I was in my doctoral studies, I had sort of come full circle form where I started off when I was in high school.

Kim Martin: What are some things that you think we, as preservationists or just lovers of old buildings, can do to sort of help make ourselves more accessible environmentally or make our case better?

Barry Stiefel: Think holistically. You know, of course, you know, reach out to people — to those who aren’t quite aware of it. Often it’s just awareness. What is the perspective that the traditional environmentalist advocate is coming from? And of course, you know, learn their side and invite them to learn your side, because ultimately, when it comes down to it, we have the same sort of goals and objectives for the long term future.

Kim Martin: And how would you suggest that we make this relevant to just the general public?

Barry Stiefel: The key thing has to be education. You know there is definitely a great, sort of a green bandwagon going on and preservationists, I think, should definitely jump on that. But you know; whenever an opportunity affords to have sort of a preservation bandwagon, you know, definitely extend an invitation to those interested in the environment and sustainability.

Kim Martin: Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Barry Stiefel: You’re welcome and thank you for having me.

]]> Green Restorations and the Sustainability Movement in Preservation (Episode 24) ]]> Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF18E3C5-E0D1-28DE-9771CB82202D6171.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-03D7E09B-D23C-6AF6-70EA5C1B14C0B151 Green Restorations and the Sustainability Movement in Preservation (Episode 24) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Aaron Lubeck, author of the book, Green Restorations. Today, they will discuss his book and how it connects the sustainability movement with historic preservation. 863 no full 24

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Guin: Aaron, welcome to the podcast.

Lubeck: Thanks for having me. I Appreciate it.

Guin: Now you write on your website that our buildings define us. What do you mean by that?

Lubeck: I was reading a book recently by Paul Goldberger, the New York Times architectural critic, called “Why Architecture Matters,” and it’s a great book. He has buried in the book a fantastic quote that says, “Architecture is the ultimate symbol of a culture even more so than its flag.”

We’re really bombarded with the primary symbol of American culture as our flag but when we think about it our architecture is obviously much deeper and is a better articulation of who we are and where we came from and where we’re going, for that matter. You can look at it in historical perspective that old houses, which tended to be much more individualistic, built by individuals for individuals, where people making the decisions on design were closer to the actual house- and usually the owner- than they are today, where there are a lot of split incentives and principal agent problems that kind of take that identity away from the architect.

And so for better or for worse our buildings define us. I think that the attraction to old homes is that most of them were built during a time of American ascendancy and American idealism, and course now if we think our buildings define us we have a lot of track homes that are large and centrally planned, where the design decisions are out of the hands of the end user that are not very customized, and they define us in a negative sense as well.

Guin: How did you first become involved in sustainability and the green preservation movement?

Lubeck: A long evolution. I grew up in a family in St. Louis of early adopters of recycling. I remember driving pretty far to find the one place to recycle in the 70’s. Oddly I grew up in probably half a dozen or so what we think of as historic houses, just old houses. I knew I loved them and could identify with them though I never really knew why. And I’m not sure I actually heard of historic preservation until I was about 28 years old, and it was a movement that finally articulated the value of these old homes and somewhat why I had identified with them growing up.

But it was also frustrating to see like obviously so many people had lived in these old homes and relate to them and love them, for someone like me to not have heard about it until I was 28 was almost concerning that there’s almost a PR failure of the movement to spread and articulate those values. That historic preservation is not a household name, it’s never on the front pages. I found it has real negative repercussions for the preservation movement to meet its ultimate goals.

Guin: Well and when it is in the news it’s a conflict or a protest more than a group trying to be proactive.

Lubeck: That is absolutely right and that is historically a reactionary movement, and that has been I think a challenge at least locally here in Durham, N.C., where I live, is that traditionally the troops get rallied whenever there is a building to save but then there’s a movement to try to switch the efforts of preservation to be proactive, to label neighborhoods historic so people can use the huge incentives of historic tax credits to spread cultural tourism and heritage and so forth as a much more positive and far reaching mechanism and vessel for historic preservation to accomplish its goals, but that’s been a difficult change because at least 4 or 5 decades this movement has been reactionary.

Guin: Absolutely, well let’s talk about sustainability, and that is a huge buzz term right now. And it seems like every field of endeavor, historic preservation and otherwise, is adopting sustainable principles. How does this apply to historic preservation?

Lubeck: You do see sustainability and green everywhere. In some ways we’re seeing green fatigue. Because everybody just everywhere you go you’re kind of blind sighted by “greenness.” There is confusion where most people when thinking about your house associate sustainability with energy efficiency and energy efficiency alone; and if you look at the core root of the word sustainability its really tied more to longevity, and energy efficiency is just one of the inputs into that. Longevity and historic preservation are some what synonymous with each other, and you look at the four tenants of green building and its energy efficiency, indoor air quality, longevity and your environmental footprint.

Just working on an old house, whether you make it really efficient or not, has huge benefits to the sustainable equation. Old buildings, they don’t require new material loads so they’re more energy efficient. Old buildings were meant to operate without mechanical systems, so particularly if you have a wider comfort zone of temperature they’re more energy efficient to run.

Actually our mid century homes were less energy efficient than our old homes, that’s a common misconception. Indoor air quality is usually better in old homes than new because we don’t have the synthetics and the glues and the formaldehyde products that you see in the new homes.

Longevity, it speaks for itself when you’re working on a home that’s 100 years old, its already passed the test of longevity, and of course footprint when you’re working on homes that already have existing infrastructure, that already have their walls framed, that already have plaster and all of this embodied energy and intellectual capital and financial capital that went into them, to continue to reuse that really is the ultimate recycling. Ultimately my clientele, which is overwhelmingly academic, I work real close to Duke University here and folks were buying up old houses in Durham and were really interested in the sustainability movement.

Conversations start with, “Aaron, I’ve got an old house, I want to restore it in a green way, what do I do?” And there’s so much information to take in, both on the green building side there’s a wealth of information, and then you factor in all the complexities of historic preservation and all the opportunities of both movements does get a bit overwhelming and that’s where we saw the need for this book. There’s just not that much out there. We actually had one client Google the term “green restoration” and come up with virtually no hits, so I realized there is a void in the market place that the book could fill.

But they’re all sorts of questions that people ask when they’re working on an old house: How do you keep the character while upgrading to meet the needs of the next century? What systems are appropriate for an old home? What should I do with my windows. How do I keep the architectural integrity of the streetscape, should I unwrap the vinyl siding and restore the architecture? How do I insulate an old house? What are the debates you need to address when doing so?

Guin: We have the book in our library here at NCPTT. It’s a good primer and a very practical holistic approach to introducing everyday people, who are dealing with these historic preservation issues, to all the facets that go into maintaining a historic structure and updating it as well.

Lubeck: And that really is the intent is that contractors can read it, homeowners can read it, it can be read cover, or really a reference if you’re just remodeling your kitchen in an old house you can just read that chapter and so forth. So I’m sure It’ll serve a lot of different needs, but it is meant to kind of paint with a broad brush.

Guin: You make comparisons to the environmental movement and to the preservation movement. And there it’s both situations where people are very passionate about their beliefs, yet the environmental movement has been so much more successful in communicating what it’s trying to accomplish and in mobilizing its audience, and working together, collaborating, especially on the web. Why do you think they are successful?

Lubeck: Yeah it’s a great question, and there’s one of the best articulations of that answer is Stewart Brand wrote a book called “How Buildings Learn,” and he has a great chapter on preservation there and the history of the preservation movement. And he had noted that environmentalism really rose up to be on front pages, and that preservation suffered almost from a lack of charismatic leadership.

There was no big event, no big calling or no head of the movement that people could identify with. This ultimately made preservation sort of the little brother or little sister of environmentalism; it’s never gotten the same traction that it has. To me, I also think that the business benefit has not been pressed. Besides Donovan Rypkema, I have not really seen it articulated very well or forcefully or thoroughly. The green benefits of preservation, I think when I started thinking about this book even two or three years ago, they were still not pressed very much and now of course the preservation month, the theme was ‘Old is the New Green’.

Carl Elefante’s work of calling “the greenest building is the one that’s already built.” “Historic preservation is the ultimate recycling” actually has some more historical roots and the Preservation Magazine from the National Trust comes out with a green issue now every year. But all of these things happened in the last two or three years. And one of the other things I think that has not helped preservation get a larger foothold in America is that, to me, conservatives are notably lacking from the movement.

There’s a cultural preservation link and the protection of an architecture that represents American ideals of individualism, strength, ingenuity and pride should be very attractive to conservatives. But to me when I attend preservation events I find them notably lacking and that has, I think, slowed the movement as well.

Guin: I’ve been involved in the social web within heritage preservation for a few years, that it really wasn’t until last year that we had a breakthrough in that field. But it wasn’t the large preservation organizations that were leading the way on that. It was everyday folks and bloggers and the people who were having issues with their homes.

Lubeck: Yes, this has been a movement that is notoriously “IT phobic” and that has not helped either. I think that there’s a big switch to youth input into historic preservation that were really recognizing right now. The last five years I think, you go to the state preservation conferences, that there’s this whole group of folks in their 20s and 30s that are redefining the preservation movement, and I think that’s going to be a great thing. But we’re seeing blogs, fantastic blogs, pop up everywhere that are really digging into detail and amazing research and on local entities and using the Internet as a medium to articulate preservation in ways that were never possible before.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, and I think that will bring a lot more people to the movement as well. And I think the movement is wider than we think. There are more people out there that just love old houses than identify with historic preservation. I was one of those growing up. I think that there are a lot of folks out there. I even talked to someone last week that said, “I don’t know about historic preservation, but I just love old houses.” And I think there are a lot of people out there like that that just need to hear more information or just be talked to about some of the benefits of the policy of historic preservation and some of the businesses that are out there to rehab houses and protect our architectural history.

Guin: One of the things I really like to talk about is the context of a cultural resource. Including historic structures. I think historic buildings are great—nice to look at. But it’s the story that really attracts folks and makes us care about why this building should still exist.

Lubeck: I think we’re on the tip of an iceberg as well with seeing technology and mobile platforms being used. Someone’s going to recognize that buildings are the static medium through time. So people come and go, fads come and go, styles come and go, but for the most part buildings stay and they’re there for hundreds of years. And so we can use that to root these stories, to tie together how buildings came to be or how communities came to be; how the owner of a tobacco company lived in that house to move to there and that house burned down and they moved to there and had five kids that went on to start this company; or this person helped him start a business or do a development out on the edge of town–and we can start to piece together the story through our buildings. It’s the best medium to do that.

Guin: Well, lets go into some other first steps that the average homeowner can take to maintain their homes in a sustainable and a green way.

Lubeck: Every project’s different. One person may be painting a room while another may be doing a million dollar gut job so it really varies, but the one piece of advice that I’d give to folks who are starting out is to work with professionals or seek out professionals. Even if you don’t end up in a contractual engagement with an architect or a restoration contractor, picking their brain as much as you can or seeing their websites or just meeting people at green building tours and historic preservation tours, will help. Talk to the experts you’ll learn so much.

Guin: How can people get connected to what you’re doing, Aaron?

Lubeck: Definitely reading the book is a great start or going to the website as well, and I’ve got a Twitter account, so you could join my feed for up-to-the-minute thoughts as they come out as well.

Guin: Aaron, thanks for being on the podcast.

Lubeck: Thanks a lot Jeff, I appreciate it.

Outro: That was Jeff Guin with author Aaron Lubeck. If you would like to learn more about Lubeck’s book, Green Restorations, visit our podcast shownotes at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

]]> NCPTT Interns Talk About Their Summer Research (Episode 23) ]]> Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/03BE46CA-D1A4-57DF-4F97491D670A6193.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-03C50295-0E1E-767C-49EE0E01A9CC80CE NCPTT Interns Talk About Their Summer Research (Episode 23) National Park Service NCPTT summer interns discuss their summer research. 938 no full 23

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Muto: Hello, my name is Anna Muto, and I’m a recent graduate from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va. This summer I’m an intern for the materials research program at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. My particular research focuses on rust converters.

So, what happens is a rust converter is a product often based in tannic acid or phosphoric acid. And it reacts with the iron-oxide in rust, and together they make a whole new layer that is extremely protective and helps to prevent future corrosion on any objects. This project is particularly applicable in conservation, as there are so many different historic items and cultural items that we need to protect from rust and from corrosive damage.

During this project, I’m hoping to get a little bit more of an understanding of what it’s like to really work in a conservation lab. So far I’ve really enjoyed the chances that I’m getting to work with different instruments, with different chemical concepts and apply all of these to one simple problem in the bigger world of conservation. I’m also hoping to be able to contribute something in the long run to the work that NCPTT is doing for their particular projects, but also that apply to so many other projects in different firms and across the country.

So to accomplish these goals of my research project, we’re doing a couple different things. The three main parts are: We have these wonderful samples of rusty metal, and what we’re first doing is we’re documenting the metal through each of these different steps. So we do a lot of photography, we’re also doing some chemical documentation with laser profiling so we can get a nice map of the surface as well as using a Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer, which is a fancy way of saying we “zap” it get a reading and from the reading it should tell us what the primary chemicals are.

So we use these to document what is happening in the object, but then we also do a couple other tests. Tests for color, gloss, that again help us establish a base line for what is going on after we treat the objects. Once we put this rust converter on top and have the rust react with the tannic acid or the phosphoric acid. And so once we’ve done that, then we stick it in an instrument called a QUV weatherometer, which is a fancy way of saying something that artificially weathers an object. So instead of putting the metal outside for seven months, instead we’re going to put it in the QUV where its exposed alternately to UV light and then to a dark condensation cycle simulating what happens outside.

So we’re hoping that with our samples in the QUV, we’ll be able to chart how well these converters work over a long period of time. So we want to know, first of all, which one initially causes the most change to the rust, but then we also want to know which one is going to hold up the best over this whole period of time. So we’re hoping that the testing in the QUV will help us chart that. And we have, the samples going in for a total of 8,000 hours, which sounds like a lot.

But what’s going to happen actually is at different points we’re going to pull them out and run these documentation studies again. Simple things like, making a measurement of the color and the gloss, but then also using the FTIR and the laser profiling system, and we’re hoping using these methods to be able to actually chart the rate of failure or the rate of success for each of the five different converters that we’re studying.

This actually is a follow up of a study done by the Canadian Conservation Institute, way back in 1988, and at this point all of the converters that they studied aren’t commercially available. So you cant go to your local hardware store and pick up any of these. So we’re trying to update it. We have some more advanced analytical techniques that we can use, but then we also have rust converters that you can go and pick up at Lowe’s or at Home Hardware or where ever. So we’re trying to do a different variety, but also things that will be available not just for me in a lab but for someone who may have a local museum or own a historic home or just have a rusty chair that they want to fix up.

Oshida: Hi, my name is Caitlin Oshida, I’m from Fairfax, Va., and I graduated this past May from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. This summer I’m going to be working with Dr. Mary Striegel and Debbie Smith on a project to determine the effects of herbicide on stone and masonry. So far we have conducted a survey that was sent out to all National Park Service facility managers and Integrated Pest Management facility managers and to collect data on what type of herbicide they use, how often they use it, the concentration they use, and some of the historic features that they have in their park or there site area that comes in contact with herbicide.

The survey just closed, and we got a number of results back, 98, which is very nice. So now I’m in the process of designing experimental design that will take the data that we have collected and make an experiment, so we can actually see if herbicide has any physical and chemical effects on different building material.

So far we know that we’re gonna use “Round-up“, about over 50 percent of the park services that we got responses from use Round-up. The second herbicide we’re going to use is Garlon 4. And we’re not sure if we’re going to use the third, but we would like to try to and see what different chemicals and their active ingredient is and what it can do to the building materials. The building materials we’ve decided to use are brick, concrete and limestone. We might do granite if we have time, but otherwise we’re just going to use those three.

My job this year is just to design the experiment and do preliminary research, this involves like small testing to see if we’ll actually get results. Hopefully, within the next year the experiment will be conducted by someone else, but unfortunately I will not be here for that. But I look forward to seeing if my design works and see what the results are. The information that we’ll collect from this experiment will help not only historic sites, but day-to-day people in your community to protect their homes or their buildings or their features from herbicide and to know what the chemical effect is. We know what the chemical effect of herbicide is on plants and ecological effects of that, but we’re unsure of the building materials. So this will help determine, if like, if they’re spraying herbicide near their house and their foundation. Whether the foundation is in danger of being destroyed or damaged, degraded in anyway.

So my next step in this is going to be to do preliminary testing, like I said before, and that involves submerging completely small samples, core samples of brick, limestone and concrete in Round-up completely to just make sure that we’re actually gonna get results and see some discoloration. This is going to be totally different from the actual experiment where it’s going to be more realistic. Its going to be a controlled spray every few hours as determined by my design plan.

Martin: Hi, I’m Kim Martin and I just graduated from Clemson University in South Carolina, and I just got here in Natchitoches. I’m working on the paint remover study. We gathered historic and modern bricks, and then we cored the bricks to make them into round samples so that they fit into all of our machines. The bricks were weighed and put under the colorimeter so that they got a number assigned to the exact color that they are. That way it’s more scientific when you go back and test again, you can tell the difference in the number.

A colorimeter is this machine that you sit on top of the brick, and it measures saturation and a bunch of other factors. And then it’s a computerized thing, and then it assigns you a number. So after all this initial information was gathered on the samples, some of the samples were painted others were left unpainted as controls. The samples have a couple of different layer categories so that you can tell if there’s more layers. This particular type of remover might work better for you if there’s less, maybe you can go with a less stringent one.

So right now the samples are in the QUV, it’s an artificial weathering machine. It puts them under ultraviolet light, it exposes them to condensation and heat and that process is just really so that we can weather the paint, so that you can see if a particular type of remover works better on weathered paint rather than new paint. New paint is often easier to remove than weathered paint, and then the goal I think of the study is just to see how different types of removers work on historic or modern brick. Because historic brick tends to be more porous. It’s softer. It’s not heated to the same type of level as a modern brick because of the technology at the time. So these different chemicals may leach in deeper, they might change the surface color or any of these things so we’re just trying to figure out what’s most appropriate.

Hopefully a person would walk away knowing what type of remover to use on their building, obviously you’ll have to asses whether you have historic or modern brick. But if you came in with that information you would know, this may be the most appropriate thing for you to use.

Nelson: Hi, I’m Stephanie Nelson and I’m the historic landscapes intern. My projects are based on maintaining historic landscapes. I completed my undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, where I studied Environmental Studies and Spanish. I finished my degree of Master of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University this past spring and found my love for historic landscapes there.

This summer I will be working to find training items that people can use to learn how to maintain their historic landscapes, whether it be maintenance workers or individual home owners. Natchitoches is blessed with a whole bunch of old houses and old yards and older plants have different care requirements than newer ones. So hopefully through the video that I’ll be creating and other resources that we’ll be making available, home owners in Natchitoches will have better ideas and better be able to care for and prolong the life of their plants.

So far this summer, I’ve been working with the National Park Service offices to work to develop a maintenance training curriculum that can be taken by maintenance workers at historic sites so they can learn how to better take care of their landscapes. I’ve also been looking for different documents or videos, websites, publications that speak of how to care for historic landscapes. So those are kind of few and far between, so this work is really important so that people can preserve and prolong the life of their older plants instead of having to replace new ones. Especially historic trees, if you get rid of a live oak, it really changes a place. So there is a lot that can be done to keep a tree healthy, so that it can live longer so we will be presenting some of that information.

I’ll be presenting a training video for landscape maintenance workers at Preservation in Your Community. We are working with maintenance staff at Cane River Creole National Heritage Area to address some of their concerns. When new maintenance workers come on who may be more familiar with working in modern landscapes, there are some challenges that are presented when switching to working on a historic property. Like you need to be more sensitive of where you’re mowing to make sure that you don’t knock into historic buildings or damage trees because the older materials are a little weaker and it’s easier to do damage. So it’ll present information to new workers in those landscapes to educate them about why maintaining a cultural resource, like Oakland Plantation, requires different scales than like maintaining a corporate campus. So our hope is to have people become a little bit more sensitive and more knowledgeable about why things are done differently, and why they should take a little bit more time, like with mowing lawns, to protect whats there and help us keep great resources, like Oakland Plantation, looking as they are and having that historic feel and character to them.

At NCPTT, I’m learning a lot about historic landscapes and cultural landscapes, I didn’t have any formal training in it, so its a great opportunity for me to learn more about this branch of resource protection within the National Park Service and outside of it as well. So I hope to bring my background in studies in Louisiana to NCPTT to help more with local resources also. The South has a lot of unique plants and characteristics that aren’t found in the rest of the country, and so I hope to be able to bring some of that knowledge into NCPTT’s research and materials, and then also within the whole National Park Service.

]]> Folk Art Conservation and the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India (Episode 22) ]]> Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/03AB790B-FC54-09AF-3A0E939681DCDC65.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-03B1FAA9-B6AF-315E-BCE965F4DDAF0833 Folk Art Conservation and the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India (Episode 22) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Tony Rajer. He is an Art Conservator with the Nek Chand Foundation and a conservation professor at the University of Wisconsin. Today they will discuss Rajer’s interest in folk art and his work with the Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India. 702 no full 22

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Church: I have a couple of questions for you, Tony. I know you have quite the reputation out in the profession of the conservation of folk art. And the thing I wanted to ask you today while I got you captive is how did you get into folk art? What started your interest in conservation, but particularly the conservation of folk art?

Rajer: Well, I was born and raised in rural Wisconsin, and our neighbor was a folk artist. That is, he was a self-taught visionary artist who build concrete sculpture in his yard and carved wooden sculpture for the interior of their logged cabin, which was next to our house. He also happened to attend the same church as I did, and he was also in rosary club with my parents. So, I knew Mr. Talen as a child and was exposed to people making things and making art. My family, who also came from that kind of background, were my grandfather was a furniture maker.

Church: Now Mr. Talen, other than his own folk art there for himself, did he ever sell of has his work ever gotten out?

Rajer: He never sold his work. He only made it for the community. He’d make it for church members, and you could go to him and specifically asking for a work of art that he made and he would accommodate people and make pieces for the congregation. But apart from that, not really.

Now as an young adult, I was exposed to more examples of folk are with my travels along the United States. And in college, by chance, I took a course on popular American culture, and then I was exposed to this broader vision of what visionary art is, art environments like what Mr. Talen lived in, as well as people decorating the interiors of their homes.

Church: As a conservation professional, as a conservator, what made you decide that’s what you wanted to work on?

Rajer: One of my specialties is dealing with folk art and helping to preserve folk art, and you know Jason, I made that decision to have a focal point with folk art because I had met so many folk artists also in my own travels and in my own interest in popular American culture. And I knew that this was not only unique to the United States, it’s found in other countries also, but what was unique was this relationship of meeting the artist in their home environment and the sense of humility so many of them exhibit because the vast majority of them are self-taught artists, but have this compulsion or this desire to embellish their environment.

Church: Recently you’ve been doing a lot of work with the Nek Chand Foundation in India. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Rajer: Nek Chand is a self-taught artist. He was a road inspector, and he began building a part in Chandigarh, India, that’s at the foothills of the Himalayas. Back in the 1950s it was unfortunately on government land, the government eventually discovered it, and the government bureaucrat decided to let it be open as a public park. And since then, the garden has grown to 25 acres, we’ve got over 3,000 pieces of sculpture, and I help to coordinate Americans who wish to spend one month residences living in the rock garden and making art with Mr. Nek Chand in his art garden. And our foundation is based in London, and I am the US representative for that foundation. And I have recently just returned from India where we have placed six foreigners from three different countries for a period of two months making mosaic art all out of recycled materials.

Church: So if you wanted to find more about this artist and residence program, where would you get information about that?

Rajer: NekChand.org, and Nek Chand is spelled: N-E-K C-H-A-N-D, dot org. And you will see our website as well as our various programs for promoting the completion of the rock garden, the preservation of the rock garden and the dissemination of the rock garden in Chandigarh, India.

Church: So Mr. Chand is still actively an artist himself?

Rajer: Yes. He’s at the garden everyday.

Church: I know he started in the 50s, what is his age now?

Rajer: He is 85, and he is active. He goes to the garden everyday. He supervises the work. He no longer makes the sculptures, but he has people trained under him who not only make the sculptures but maintain the garden and are involved in preservation and operation of the water fountains, the waterfalls, etc.

Church: Now you didn’t mention the completion of the garden. Is there a vision for the end of the work?

Rajer: There is a vision for the end, Jason, and it has to do with Mr. Nek Chand’s desire to not only finish the last of the building, there are only a few more left to be finished, but his general overall plan. He doesn’t work with specific details, but he has conveyed his vision to his immediate staff, and they have an idea of what he wants to see accomplished not only in his lifetime, but after he’s gone. And basically, the Nek Chand foundation supports the idea that after Mr. Nek Chand is gone from the garden, that it would go into a preservation mode of maintaining the garden, that is the sculptures etc, and also holding onto this vision that he had.

Church: Now you mentioned before that he is originally a road inspector, so we know that he is not an originally trained artist. What gave him that vision? What made him start building this environment?

Rajer: We know that as a child, in the period, in the British period of India, that he made sculptures out of sand along the river banks in that part of the Punjab that he lived. And he began by collecting oddly shaped rocks that he felt had a spirit and setting them up on little Earthen terraces that he encountered. And later, as a road inspector it was his job to supervise the crew to collect river rocks, to smash them and to turn them into gravel. And he found that some of the rocks had a particular quality to them, an ascetic quality, so he refused to smash them into gravel, and he began setting them up on these terraces and that eventually turned into and evolved into the Rock Garden where we have over 3,000 visitors a day. And by the way, because the Rock Garden is a self-contained park under the Chandigarh administration, the admission is 10 cents per person. It’s an income generator, and with that money that comes into the garden, we actually have enough money to maintain the garden and to bring it to fruition.

Church: Now one thing that you and I have talked about before. I know you as a conservator go there as a professional, you have the artist in residence, Mr. Chand is working there, but you also hire locals to do both the construction and the preservation.

Rajer: Exactly. And they are hired, we have a permanent staff of approximately 10 cleaners that maintain the garden, pick up the leaves of the garden, etc. And then on a craftural (8:04) basis, we have another 10 workers that make the sculptures and who help in the development of the garden.

Church: The people that do the cleaning and the construction, they are trained there on site by Mr. Chand?

Rajer: Right. They are trained onsite by Mr. Chand and his overseers, and will help us with the pick up of the recyclable materials along the city of Chandigarh. That is the broken plates from hotels, restaurants, etc.; rags, which are recycled into soft sculptures made into the garden, and the other various projects that he’s got going. For example, there is a small nursery there for growing plants, etc. None of it is for sale, but it can be loaned out for exhibition.

Church: Now this is the first time I have heard about the soft sculptures. Are they out in the environment along with the concrete sculptures?

Rajer: No. The soft sculptures, that is the rag sculptures, they are kept indoors either under a canopy or actually in a structure because otherwise they would rot.

Church: Well, very good. What do we think the overall time frame for completion is?

Rajer: We are probably looking at within the next five years. The new art museum is well underway, and that will be finished within the next 12 months. Then it will have to be decorated. And then the next phase of phase three, that is the terrace of the horse and the terrace of the camels, that’s nearly finished. So, this huge 25-acre park, which has a boundary wall around it, will be set and open to the public–all of it–and the fortunate thing for the foreigners, like myself, Mr. Nek Chand has built guest quarters within the garden where we can stay as part of our work-project making the mosaics with his laborers.

Church: So you can find out more information on the website that you mentioned early on NekChand.org, and photographs of the completion as it comes around and photographs of the project. Once that wraps up, what do you think you will be working on next.

Rajer: Well, I will continue to work with Nek Chand foundation, and as I said early, we will go into a preservation mode. So we will work on the documents needed for the preservation to keep up this vision and this dream that was Mr. Nek Chand’s in recycling way back in the 50s before there was even a word for it.

Church: So he is really an innovator of recycling and sustainability.

Rajer: Oh most definitely Jason.

Church: Very good. Well thank you for talking with us today Mr. Rajer, and we look forward to keep up with you and hear how the foundation is going and how the rock garden is going.

Rajer: Please come and visit us in Chandigarh, India. Thank you.

]]> The Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Landscapes (Episode 21) ]]> Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/DC59A59F-B0C3-E5DE-F7BC0AA351FEEE94.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-DC5FD3FD-EA62-0B12-731DF543CC660298 The Impact of Climate Change on Cultural Landscapes (Episode 21) National Park Service Debbie Smith speaks with Robert Melnick, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon and author of “Climate Change and Landscape Preservation: A Twenty-first-century Conundrum,” which appeared in a 2010 volume of the APT Bulletin. Today they will discuss topics addressed in the article. 557 no full 21

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Smith: Welcome to the podcast, Robert. Could you begin by telling us how you would define a cultural landscape?

Melnick: Sure Debbie. It’s great to be here.

I think the first thing to think about is that you’ve got to think about not just cultural landscapes, but historically significant cultural landscapes. If you think about many old buildings that are not truly historically significant is the same issue with cultural landscapes. So for me, a cultural landscape is really, any landscape that’s been modified by people.

That doesn’t mean that it’s a significant cultural landscape. And that’s really where, I think some of the confusion comes in, and where it is important to differentiate between just a “landscape,” a “cultural landscape” and a “significant cultural landscape.”

That’s why we go through the national register process, documents like Bulletin 30 for the National Register. So that we are sure that we are really looking at what’s important about that landscape, not just that it exists. From a geographer’s point of view, you might say that every landscape is a cultural landscape.

Smith: That’s a very good distinction. That really helps in understanding, especially for someone who maybe isn’t familiar with what a cultural landscape is. And how would you describe the difference between preserving a cultural landscape, and how is that different than an historic building?

Melnick: Well, I think all resources are dynamic, and buildings are clearing dynamic. But landscapes are dynamic at a rate and at a pace that is dramatically different than buildings. You can actually, in your lifetime under normal conditions, you can see that landscape change. Whereas for an historic building if it is well taken care of, you really can’t.

The other differentiation is that a landscape, by definition, will change. An important issue here is that you in fact want a landscape to change. And that goes very much against, what I like to call, very traditional, and now rather old-fashioned, preservation dogma, which basically describes a goal of preservation as arresting all change. So for a landscape, you want it to change. You just want to manage that change and have it change within certain boundaries and within certain limits.

Smith: And so, in terms of climate change on cultural landscapes, what do you see as some of the potential impacts?

Melnick: Well I think there are many, many impacts that we are already seeing and certainly that I think unless some major changes happen in our global systems they will happen more. So just here are a couple of them. One is rising sea levels, which will undoubtedly effect coastline landscapes. Another is the change in rainfall, whether more or less, that will affect plant communities. Another is the change in temperature that can also affect plant communities. So just things like that, that you would associate with change to the natural systems that we’re understanding, are being impacted by climate change. The same kind of changes will take place for cultural landscapes.

Smith: How might this affect the zones that plants grow in today?

Melnick: Well, I think it’s already affecting them. Certainly here in the west coast we are finding that certain grape varieties are growing further to the north than they were 50 years ago, and they are not able to grow as far south as they were. So, very slowly, very, very incrementally those plant zones are moving.

Now the other piece of this, which I have to mention here, is that even though it’s a global problem, we do understand that climate change affects different landscapes in different ways. So it’s a global problem that impacts landscapes at a very local level. So you may in fact have some values here in Oregon, some landscapes, which are minimally or perhaps not at all effected by climate change. Maybe perhaps eventually they will be many, many years from now, whereas other landscapes are being affected right now by that. So even though we think of it as a global problem, it impacts landscapes at a very local level.

Smith: Well, could you give us an example of perhaps a recognized cultural landscape or a landscape feature that could potentially be impacted by climate change?

Melnick: Well sure. Just take the Kentucky bluegrass for example, which is a great example. That landscape, really over centuries, has thrived in a climate and an environment that is slowly changing over time. So it’s very possible, and again I don’t know this yet but I can envision it, it’s very possible that that ecological system will change so much that the basic quality of it, which is the blue grass and all the associated ecological components of that, will no longer thrive in that larger climate. And therefore it will have an impact not only on the turf itself and literally the bluegrass itself, but you’ll have an impact on walls, on stone walls, on wooden fences, it will have an impact on the architecture that’s there over time.

Another example I could give you is Hanalei Valley on the north shore in Hawaii, which is a very prime taro growing area. And although Hawaii, we believe, is being less effected by climate change than other areas. Eventually, unless major changes happen, it will be. And then the kind of wet-land environment that taro thrives in, may in fact start to dry up. Or it may in fact get wetter. Climate change isn’t always climate warming. Sometimes it can be increased precipitation or it can be decreased precipitation.

Smith: What do you see is some possible actions in response to these potential impacts.

Melnick: Well, I think the first thing we have to do is support a broader, global understanding that climate change is really happening. And as you know, there are a lot of people out there who say, “No, it’s not happening.” I am not a scientist, as you know, but I believe that in fact a climate change is happening. Many scientists believe it too. So the first thing to do is to increase the level of education.

The second thing to do is to increase attention to that on the part of governments nationally to try and turn the course on those actions that are increasing climate change. So those are kind of global, and they apply to both natural and cultural systems. In terms of cultural landscapes, I think in our lifetime we are going to have to think about redefining what we mean by character-defining features. We may have to say, you know that feature that was character defining, really no longer exists and therefore we have to think about it differently. We may also have to think about what we mean by appropriate treatment. So now if an alleé of oak trees dies on a very significant landscape, the preferred treatment is to replace the oak trees, but if the oak trees are dying because the climate has changed so much that they can no longer thrive, it’s sort of silly to replant the same oak trees. So you may have to think about what we mean by “character defining.” Is it the larger characteristic of the landscape or is it the actual physical feature.

And finally, for a third example, I think that we may have to practice what I’ve been calling landscape triage. We may in fact have to say, if it comes to this, that there are certain landscapes we really cannot save because it is beyond our ability, but we want to record them, we want to make sure we know what they are and we want to keep good records of them so we understand their importance in the culture history of our country and of the world.

Smith: Thanks Robert for talking with me today.

Melnick: Thank you very much Debbie. It’s been my pleasure.

]]> Digital Preservation of Documents at the Library of Congress (Episode 20) ]]> Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF0C45E0-A41A-91E1-EE4B0A342C0795D6.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-03944250-E82D-D067-3A52D886000B80E1 Digital Preservation of Documents at the Library of Congress (Episode 20) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Kit Arrington, digital library specialist at the Library of Congress. They will discuss how the Library of Congress digitizes and shares documents online for long-term public access. 986 no full 20

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Guin: Kit, thanks for being on the podcast.

Arrington: Thank you for inviting me.

Guin: I wanted to start by asking you how long have you been with the Library of Congress, and what got you interested in the field digital preservation?

Arrington: I’ve been at the Library for 15 years now. I came in with what was then the National Digital Library Pilot Project. And I’m working now on what has become standard Library practice -having digital elements of everyday work. My interest in digital preservation developed along with the Library’s digital growth and is a natural part of one of our mission mandates – preservation – which extends to the digital formats under our care.

Guin: You coordinate the digital aspects of preparing the very popular HABS, HAER, and HALS data and documentation for online presentation. These are very popular programs. Tell me a little about what they are and what that process is for actually getting the files online.

Arrington: With the HABS/HAER/HALS, nothing can be described quickly ever there. They are just such rich and wonderful treasures of ours. They are unique holdings for us because they are active programs and the collections are always growing, and they are absolutely one of our most popular collections, and always have been. Now that they are online, it is just wonderful the new audiences we are reaching. They are being used by students, historians, life-long learners — everyone. Our collaborative relationship and the high level of cooperation that we enjoy with the office of the National Park Service that oversees these programs and creates the documentation is very special and unique. As many of your listeners might know, the Historic American Buildings Survey began over 75 years ago. They were a Works Progress Administration effort to put out-of-work architects to work and document historic properties. And the Library and the Department of the Interior were a part of that from the beginning. And it’s continued to this day.

The Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) was created in 1969, and the Historic American Landscapes Survey began in 2000. Between those three collections, there are now over 39,000 surveys, which contain over 500,000 measured drawings, photographs and written history pages. The digital conversion process for these materials began in 1996. And I have been working on them and with them since that time.

When we worked with the National Park Service in 1996 to map their collections management database — they had a database they just used for tracking their own work. And we took that database and mapped the records into a bibliographic format that fit in with the electronic access to our other collections that was being developed for the World Wide Web. The next year in 1997, we began a five-year project to scan the collections that we had on-site, including the new material being added quarterly each year and continues to be added quarterly each year.

For maximizing the efficiency of the digital conversion of a collection this large — because the requirements for scanning a typed page and an original medium format b&w negative are very different — we had separate projects to scan the text history pages, the architectural drawings, and the original negatives. This included the nitrate negatives from the 1930’s. By 2001, we had scanned and processed everything that was at the Library. During that time the HABS/HAER/HALS division of the National Park Service completely revamped their database and have worked to add additional information, such as subject terms, which has enriched the records, as well as transforming their workflow to include digital images of the drawings and histories as part of what they transmit to the Library, which allows for faster access online. We’re moving toward NPS providing all of the digital images, though we are not yet accepting born-digital photographs as part of the archival documentation, though we have begun discussions on it in response to the realities of the decreasing availability of large format film technology. So that’s where we stand to day.

It’s all online and available now.

Guin: How do you share your digital files online so that the largest possible audience can actually use these files?

Arrington: The digital files of the Prints & Photograph Division collections are made available online through our online catalog, which you can find at www.loc.gov/pictures. We have item and group level records and thumbnail images available for almost all of our digitized collections, which includes photographs, posters, architectural drawings, political cartoons, stereographs, glass negatives – many things. For a variety of reasons, different rights issues being the most common, for some items, the larger digital images are not available offsite, though you can access them if you are here at the Library. Because it is in the public domain, all of the images in the HABS/HAER/HALS collections are available on the Web – from a thumbnail image to the highest resolution, uncompressed TIFF image.

We’re also exploring reaching out through other venues, including our collaboration with Flickr where we are now posting some of our collections.

Guin: How do people are actually using this information?

Arrington: In Flickr it is very fun. All the kinds of Flickr groups where you will have “oh we like public signs” or any variety of people who have huge specialized images that they are interested in. They include a lot of the collections that we put up. You’ll see many, many of our images used in Wikipedia when people are illustrating what they are posting as an entry in Wikipedia. They’ll come to the library to find their images to illustrate it.

People post our images on their Websites, they use them in documentaries, publications, school projects, research projects, commercial projects. One of my favorite uses of the HABS/HAER/HALS materials is a web site that offers “Free Drawings and Plans” and under categories such as “Build your own Barn” they’ve downloaded the architectural drawings from surveys of barns and made them available, fully crediting the Library as their source.

Guin: How do you analyze the way your images are being accessed and used? Have those analytics changed your process for digitizing or sharing these files in any way?

Arrington: The examples that we’re aware of are actually are mostly for our own research, things that we’ve come across or users that are contacting us with questions. It is really sort of anecdotal for our own experience.

This is not my area of expertise, but I understand that the Library is exploring more now the use of statistics software for gathering information on how our website is being accessed and utilized. At this point, in P&P we’ve only tracked very rough and general statistics for the number of folks coming to the P&P online catalog and collections, and we’ve seen these numbers grow exponentially through time, not unsurprisingly. We don’t currently explore those numbers at the image level, of course we also currently have over 1.5 million digital images available through our P&P online catalog, which are a fraction of the over 14 million items in our collections.

Guin: The Library of Congress plays an important role, worldwide, in making sure that its digital content will be accessible for future generations. How do you determine archival formats?

Arrington: In the Prints & Photographs Division when we began our conversion projects with an RFP in 1995, we selected the TIFF file format as our archival format. We continue monitoring changes through time, for example we’ve been keeping our eye on JP2 – which some institutions are beginning to adopt as their archival format — currently TIFF remains the most widely used and supported file format for archival images. The Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program Web site: www.digitalpreservation.gov contains an analysis of file formats for the Library’s use that analyzes their sustainability.

Guin: How is your role changing as more content is born digital?

Arrington: We’re taking the same principles for collection, preservation and access that we’ve always followed and are applying them to the realm of born digital. In the same way that we’ve had to research how best to care for a film negative, we’re doing the same for born digital – though it’s a much more active and constantly changing process. On our own, and taking advantage of the work and efforts of others, such as professional photography associations such as the ASMP, or in the work of the Federal Digitization Guidelines Initiative we’re monitoring the changing file formats through time. At this point we haven’t actually accepted a large number of born digital items into our collections, but only because at this point in time we have not had any significant submissions of modern works. But we’ve had enough to begin to explore and establish workflows for accepting, storing and providing access to them. A group of photo-journalist photographs that we collected following 9/11 was one of our first significant born digital acquisitions. In another area we are studying the developing “Best Practices” for preserving vector file formats, like AutoCAD, in anticipation of the eventual inclusion of those kinds of items in our architectural and engineering collections. It is now the rare architect who draws by hand.

Of course in other parts of the library, we have a website preservation program with different events through time and major elections or the Olympics that are preserving websites. We worked collaboratively with the Internet Archive in the early days for the work they are doing preserving websites. So there are issues that we’re aware of and collecting as an institution and sorting out as we go along and as they change themselves.

Guin: How can the smaller heritage preservation organizations–or conscientious individuals–make sure their data is saved in archival format?

Arrington: At this point in time awareness of the importance of digital preservation has permeated the consciousness of most preservation organizations, and an increasing number of individuals. For cultural organizations in particular, with very little effort it is easy to find a number of excellent “Best Practice” guidelines to follow in your area of expertise for becoming knowledgeable about the issues to consider to best create, collect, and preserve their digital objects – whether they are text, or images, or sound files. In addition to being a resource for private, public and government organizations and institutions, the Library’s NDIIP program is offering a new resource to help individuals be more aware of how to preserve their personal digital items. It is a work in progress, but if the Library hopes to collect, for example, important photos in the future, we need to help folks understand now what they should be doing to save them!

Guin: On a personal level, you have an interest in other aspects of hands-on historic preservation. Tell me about that, and does it affect your view of the documents and files your are introducing to the virtual world?

Arrington: My mother had an anthropology background and worked in museums, then owned a used bookstore, and I fully credit her love and appreciation for what objects can teach us with my own appreciation of being able to live and learn from the past within the present.

For that reason, I will say that I’ve always maintained a healthy skepticism of the longevity of digital objects – photographs being a perfect example. I have boxes of wonderful family photos that are intact and have just moved through time with our family despite years of not being touched or accessed. And they are treasures.

The digital equivalent of family histories being created today will require a much greater attention through time to be accessible to future generations. But because of my joy in accessing these “old things” today, I want to be sure that will be true for future generations who want to access the digital files of today.

I’m also always questioning the preservation issues – Are our file specifications good enough to move through time? How are we backing these up? How are we tracking them? Using another photo example, just as color photo prints have fragile preservation issues, the color management of a digital file to maintain accurate color representation through time (or amongst various hardware and software) is tricky.

Really, these are the same old issues that we’ve always addressed in caring for our collections. And following the same preservation and access principles that have always guided us, we will make the best choices that we can with digital items to hold and care for them too.

Guin: Kit, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Arrington: Thank you very much Jeff.

]]> The Role of HTPC in the National Park Service (Episode 19) ]]> Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/037DAE2E-BF37-AAE8-7109C682F0F398AB.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-038489C5-B028-707B-B1808EF2017F1D2F The Role of HTPC in the National Park Service (Episode 19) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Moss Rudley, an exhibit specialist with the masonry division at the Historic Preservation Training Center. They will discuss the role of HTPC in the National Park Service including work they are doing with the historic building material bousillage. 548 no full 19

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Church: Well Moss, the first question I have for you is what is the Historic Preservation Training Center?

Rudley: The Historic Preservation Training Center is a division of the National Parks Service, part of the learning development portion of the National Parks Service, and we train maintenance workers, preservation specialists, facility managers in the proper way to deal with historic structures from the variety of different stand points. One, being craft training, teaching crafts people, maintenance workers within parks how to do their job properly working on historic structures. Two, is to train park managers on how to properly manage the historic resources within their park, how to issue contracts that have specifications in them that are relevant to historic structures. Finally, the other way is actually doing project management, overseeing construction projects dealing with historic properties within the National Parks Service.

Church: So not only do you the training for people, but you also do the actual work on the sites.

Rudley: Yes and our main avenue for training is through day labor preservation projects. We have permanent crews that bring trainees into their crew and train them via preservation projects that we take on all over the country.

Church: I know that your crew specializes in historic masonry. Does HPTC only do masonry or do they have other divisions?

Rudley: No we have three other divisions besides our masonry division. We have a woodcraft division, and their specialty is historic windows, doors, and architectural wood elements within historic structures. They do take on some other projects such as roof repairs, but all on a limited scale.

Our other division is the carpentry division. Their specialty is timber frame structures, log structures, slate roofs, wood- shingle roofs, kind of more on the heavy carpentry, and where the wood crafting division is more on the finish carpentry angle.

Church: Wow, you guys are like a one stop shop for preservation.

Rudley: Pretty much, yes.

Church: I know you do a lot with the Park Service and you’re in the National Park Service. Could the curator of a historic state structure or a non-profit organization contract HPTC for training or just to do the hands on work?

Rudley: Yes, they could. HPTC is not a base funded operation through Congress, so all of our operations are funded through our projects, and our mandate allows us to take on projects for not only the National Projects but other Federal agencies, non-profits, state, local and all the way down to even city governments. As long it’s a government entity or a non-profit, we can do the work and provide training for them.

Church: Wow. How would they go about doing this, say a non-profit or state organization?

Rudley: They would likely look at our website, find one of our supervisors, exhibit specialists, or our superintendent, contact them with either their request for a training event or their request for a site visit to look at a project. We get a lot of calls from different entities just looking for guidance on a, where to find contractors, what type of specifications, materials, to use so in a way we’re kind of, being able to provide assistance on that end of business.

Church: Okay, good. I didn’t know you provided so many services. So we’re here in Natchitoches today out in Oakland Plantation. What brings your crew here to Natchitoches?

Rudley: We were contacted by Cane River Creole National Historic Park about the possibility of us doing some bousillage and lime wash repairs. They had, apparently, put this out to contract. The contractor that was awarded the bid, once he came to look at the project, the park felt that he was incompetent to do the work.

While he was awarded the bid, afterwards they felt that he would damage their structure so in looking to expand their funds within the time requirements, they contacted us. We made a site visit about a month ago, and then we took on the project.

Church: Now you say you are here doing bousillage. What is that?

Rudley: Bousillage is an earthen construction, which is native here to Louisiana. It is a loamy soil that is mixed with lime, Spanish moss, sometimes hay as a binder and is in-filled between wooden members of the structures here as insulation, and also, in most cases, wall coverings. It was limed-washed over.

Church: Okay, so it’s very similar to waddle and daub in other areas.

Rudley: Exactly. Waddle and daub, knogging, that are in various areas, it’s very similar, even to dobbing on log cabins. It’s a very similar process just kind of the local materials are slightly different.

Church: Okay. Are you going to finish your work here or are you traveling back to do more work later?

Rudley: We are doing the bousillage repairs this week. We need to allow enough time to cure, approximately a month at which time we’re going to return to do the lime-wash portion of this project.

]]> Preservation of Mount Vernon National Historic Landmark (Episode 18) ]]> Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CE041C08-AA4E-CB14-031D29B0B3BCF66E.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D1557751-95EB-F5B8-A0EFE14EE7B62636 Preservation of Mount Vernon National Historic Landmark (Episode 18) National Park Service Josh Springer speaks with Dennis Pogue at Mount Vernon about the restoration and grounds at Mount Vernon. 599 no full 18

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Springer: Mount Vernon has been restored over the years, but this does not just include the mansion. How has the restoration dealt with all the other buildings and the landscape in addition to the mansion?

Pogue: Mount Vernon was one of the first historic preservation programs in the country. The Mt. Vernon Ladies Association acquired it from the Washingtons in 1858, so it has been over 150 years that the project has been ongoing. Early on there wasn’t much in the way of models to guide how they were going to do this.

They were operating under the belief that it should be preserved as Washington knew the property, and that was kind of all there was. There were a lot of people that actually advised early on that the only important thing here was the mansion and the tomb where Washington’s body was kept and that all the other outbuildings, frankly, just weren’t that important and that maybe it would be better to just not deal with them.

And thankfully the ladies early on disregarded that advice and decided that they were going to look at not just the mansion, but all the other buildings and gardens and grounds. And fortunate for us, because we now have the largest collection of surviving 18th century plantation outbuildings anywhere in the country, and so it is due to their foresight that those buildings are still here.

Springer: Like most historic houses, Mount Vernon has original furnishings in a space that was not designed to be a museum. How do you balance the needs of the house verses to those of the collections?

Pogue: That really is one of the major issues facing folks who work in historic house museums, that the house itself is of course the biggest artifact that we have, and you can argue the most important one. Over the years, the ladies have been very assiduous in bringing back original objects to the house because the goal here is to make the place look as much as it did when George Washington lived here. So that means that you’re bringing 200-year-old priceless objects back into an historic building that was, of course, never intended to be a museum. So that’s a real balancing act. And one of the main things is the climate in the building and certainly museum objects — museum curators want them to be in a stable an environment as they possibly can be, and historic houses without insulation and all the other things that modern houses have, it’s really difficult to accomplish that. So we did install an HVAC system, a climate system about 12 or 13 years ago now, and it was a real challenge to get it into the building without doing lots of damage to the structure, and then most importantly the goal behind that is very limited. Instead of trying to achieve the very narrow climatic conditions that a museum curator would like, but which could have problems for the building, we have a system that reduces the range of variation, makes the climate better for the objects, but is something we think is still conducive for the health of the building.

Springer: Dennis, what is the greatest challenge that you face at Mount Vernon in attempting to keep the mansion and grounds restored, but also beautiful for the public?

Pogue: Well it is the public. And on the one hand we’re obviously very fortunate in that last year we had over a million visitors come to Mount Vernon, and I’m sure we’ll have that number again this year. We’re are the most visited historic site in the country. Of course that is wonderful and we love that so many people come and see the place, learn the story and experience all of this, but a million people walking through a 250-year-old building that wasn’t meant for that kind of traffic, obviously is a challenge. So there have been structural things that we have had to do to the mansion to bolster the framing of the buildings. The staircase, for example, we’ve done work on that numerous times over the years because that is where everybody walks. So you have two million feet walking up and down that staircase every year. And then because they are in there, they touch things and if one person touches a wall, that’s not a big deal, but after a million people have touched it, then the paint is going to be gone. And so every year, it is the same places over and over again that we have to come back in and do that kind of basic maintenance. In addition, we are open 365 days a year and heavily visited. So it is not as if we have lots of down time where we can work on the building. When we do projects, we do them when people are actually in the building. So that’s a real challenge as well.

Springer: As time goes by, new technologies develop and provide restoration options that have not been previously available. Are there any examples of new technologies that have recently been developed that have helped save or preserve artifacts at Mount Vernon?

Pogue: You know, I think that the preservation field is just a track record of growing sophistication in techniques, but also perspectives, the kinds of things that we are interested in doing and learning about and telling people is different than what it was 100 years ago. And fortunately, we do have new advancements that are being made all the time. Possibly the best example at Mount Vernon is modern paint study, and, back 30 years ago now, Mount Vernon, the association was one of the first sites to embark on a systematic analysis on all the painted surfaces inside the mansion, the goal was, again, to show the mansion as it was when Washington was here, and so that extends to the paint colors. And some of these rooms had been painted 25 or 30 times between the years that George Washington had been here and the paint colors had changed dramatically following the fashions of the day. So the goal was to find out what was the color of the paint in 1799 and then if we could find that to replicate it as closely as we possibly could. So all the paint colors throughout the mansion now are based on that initial survey that was done in the late ’70’s and early ’80’s, and then more recently in my time here over the last 10 years or so, we have had the opportunity to reinvestigate some of those areas and of course, techniques have continued to evolve and improve, and so we have been able to actually make some changes to the colors that we think are even more accurate than when they were done 30 years ago.

So that is one example, but there are a number. Dendrochronology, tree ring dating, we have actually done Dendrochronology at a number of the buildings at Mount Vernon where we had questions about when they were actually built. And that we have been very fortunate, the evidence has been very good, so we have been able to more tightly date a number of these buildings. Photogrammetry, of course, laser technology, all those things are beginning to weigh in, and they are all particularly helpful in recording things. So now we can actually record the conditions much more accurately now that we have these new techniques. So a variety of ways, and it’s really changed during my career, really made some major strides forward.

Springer: I have noticed that Mount Vernon has a very active archeology program. What is the role of archeology in the restoration of Mount Vernon?

Pogue: Well we do, and in fact, I am a trained archeologist. When I came here 22 years ago, it was to run their archeology program. And then a number of years back, I was put in charge of all the historic buildings and the preservation of the entire site. But archeology has a very important role here, and on the one hand its research, its learning more about the estate. We have studied a number of sites here, black smith shop, dung repository, slave quarter, a whole variety of 18th century buildings that no longer survive, and have found those sites and studied them and based on the archeology primarily, we’ve actually been able to reconstruct several of those buildings. So we have been able to bring them back as part of the landscape, as part of what people see here. And the other side of it is cultural resource management, which is that Mount Vernon is a 424-acre site. The 60-acre core of it is the historic area, but then in the outlying areas we have restaurants and facilities and parking lots to support a million visitors a year, and so we do archeology in advance of any ground-disturbing project anywhere on the estate to make sure that nothing is being disturbed as part of that work. So it’s really two sides: It’s pure research on the one side, aimed at learning more about the plantation to help us interpret it. And then on the other side it is just doing due diligence to ensure that we don’t disturb things that are important because of the archeology.

Springer: Well thank you Dennis for talking with me today. I’ve learned quite a bit.

Pogue: Well thank you Josh, it was a pleasure.

]]> Preservation of Iron and Steel in Bridges and Metal Structures (Episode 17) ]]> Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CDCD4A80-9061-4B30-C3CC64CA35AFF65D.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CDD209FC-AD2A-7E56-B2A1A609D6FE82B6 Preservation of Iron and Steel in Bridges and Metal Structures (Episode 17) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Vern Mesler, adjunct professor at Lansing Community College. They will discuss the “Preservation of Iron and Steel and Bridges and Other Metal Structures Workshop,” which was funded by a grant from the National Center. 846 no full 17

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Church: The real reason we are talking today Vern is because we have just finished up here in Lansing, Mich. “The Preservation of Iron and Steel in Bridges and Other Metal Structures Workshop,” which you are the organizer and host. How did this come about?

Mesler: I’ve been in the restoration of historic bridges for over 10 years. And what I’ve discovered as I’m restoring the bridges for the Calvin County Historic Bridge Park, is first of all, there is a real lack of appreciation of the original material of an historic bridge. And what I wanted to see was more awareness of the bridges and also how to repair them. There’s been so much or lack of knowledge in the restoration of historic bridges. And the other thing I’ve expanded this to the restoration of historic metals, not just for historic bridges but you’ve got historic bridges, riveted, there’s a whole range of structures that are riveted, and it would be great if we could develop processes and procedures and methods to repair those and not destroy some of that stuff.

So the other thing, and what’s important to me and what I think has been overlooked in this preservation of historic metals or historic bridges, is the craftsman’s participation. To give you an example, I attended a conference for preservation of historic bridges, and we had a moderator that was, first of all, who started out saying, “Anyone who is an engineer, raise your hand.” And they raised their hands. “Everybody that’s an architect, raise your hand.” “All the students raise your hand.” But not a single word about a craftsman. And so I think that the craftsman’s been left out too often. And so my goal is to make engineers and people aware of the fact that craftsman were involved in these bridges.

And the other thing I discovered that the parts of a bridge, there’s a real lack of understanding of how things things were even manufactured. How they were built or the techniques used. And a lot of times, you can only find out that information by looking at the piece. The piece, the material, the original material can tell you the history, can tell you how that part was manufactured. Well, you’ve destroyed it. It is gone. You replace it with new steel. Or you replace it with some other configuration of material as long as it looks old. And a lot of times, “well it looks old,” is the only standard. Well, what I’m after is to try to save as much of the original material as possible and so I was told about NCPTT’s grant and I think David Simmons in Ohio had suggested years ago that I apply for this grant.

So I was able to work with Lansing Community College, and Lansing Community College said that they would support it. And I had outstanding support from Lansing Community College, even from the president and the faculty from Lansing Community College. And when I bring proposals or projects, they never ask, “how much are they going to make,” it is always, “well, what do we gotta do?” And so we were successful and I feel this workshop has been highly successful because of their work and their willingness to put forth the extra to make this thing successful.

And from the comments going around, people are pretty excited about it. They want to continue this, and again, the idea is to develop restoration procedures to restore the original material and to train people. It is not to really train craftsman, but to make engineers and preservationists, those people that make the decision on restoration of bridges or historic structures, those people that have to make those decisions is to give them confidence to recommend to use this process or put it in part of their plans or put it in part of their standards or put it in part of their restoration prints. And the one way I can think to do it, it is to have a lot of Lincoln Electric do work for me. And the reason for it, I can weld it up and I can tell people this is how I do it, but they want to know, “Who is Vern Mesler?”

But if I say Lincoln does it, even if Lincoln is doing the same thing I do, they might say, “Well, Lincoln Electric, the world’s main manufacture of welding equipment has approved it or tested it, well that holds a lot of water.” Well, the same things here. I got some good leads today from universities that are willing to participate in testing material after I repaired it and restored it, and so when an engineer has an option to restore an original piece, they can always say, “Look, here’s evidence. Here’s research that was done that proves you can do this by a major university.” It’s going to be a lot better than just saying, “Well, Vern said it could be done.”

Church: I can say that this was a fantastic workshop. How many people were in attendance?

Mesler: When I first organized this, what I did was organize it so people could sign up for all three days or people could sign up for one day. And the reason for that, the one day the auditorium holds 80 people. And we could only accommodate 40 people in the welding facility. So I decided I wanted to take advantage of the capacity of the first day, I didn’t want to turn anyone away.

And as it turns out, we had 13 people sign up for that first day in addition to the 35 people for the 3 days. And then we had 5 students, we had scholarships set up so that students could sign up. Whoever was awarded these scholarships, it paid their expenses here, the cost of the workshop was covered, and so we had all 5 students, we had students from Ferris University, a student from MSU, a student from the University of Michigan, another from the Detroit area.

I was real happy to see that because the idea is that we want young engineers to recognize, we want to start them off on the right foot. We want them to start off well with the restoration of historic metals. We want to make sure they have that in mind, that this can be done. We don’t want them to get into this mode where they are going to do off-the-shelf procedures. Or off-the-shelf standards where they are willing to look at restoring bridges, historic metals.

Church: Well I think one of the things that made this workshop so successful, not only the facilities and the organization and the variety of instructors, but was really the variety of participants. Now they came from states from all over the union and from Canada, but I met bridge designers, department of transportation people, conservators, engineers, constructional engineers. There was really a wide variety. Was that something that you were looking for to bring in?

Mesler: That’s exactly what I was looking for because nobody has done this. I don’t know anyone who has done this. And the idea was to bring craftsman and engineers and preservationists together. And I didn’t want to set this up specifically to train craftsmen because craftsmen, you can spend most of this process, I can train them in a day’s time on how to do this. But it’s not going to do any good to train them if they are not going to be allowed to do it. And so I need to have the engineers and the transportation department to recognize that this can be done and then to be able to recommend it. Like riveting. So often you will hear, “Well, riveting is the lost art.”

Like it’s been buried in the pyramids in the last 2000 years. Well, it’s not a lost art. And you can still buy rivets and every size rivet that was available 100 years ago and by the ton if you want to. And we had riveting equipment. And today we had Michigan Pneumatic come in with all their equipment. And they have been outstanding working with me over the years. And I have recommended them for when I train people to rivet. And so riveting is not that difficult. It is really an insult to tell any industrial person that’s been in the industry or handled industrial equipment, it’s really an insult to tell them they can’t rivet because it certainly isn’t that difficult.

And one of the things I want some of these people to do is grab the rivet handle and drive some rivets. And we had that I’m really happy to see that grabbed this rivet hammer and understood how it worked. And one lady in the group, one that’s worked in historic preservation around the country, and she said, “I’m dangerous now.” She was so excited about doing this hands-on, grab a rivet hammer, grab tools. She was probably the only mechanical things she’s ever worked were a can opener. And now, she’s dangerous now. She’s ganna go and tell them, “you can do this.” So that’s been exciting.

Church: Yeah, not only the riveting. The application of rivets, the removal of rivets, you guys carried a lot of information to us about how rivets are formed, and learned how the rivets actually work. And it’s something I don’t think many of us have ever thought about how they actually go in, how they are made, how they are processed. Also, all the welding techniques that we’ve covered in the third day of the workshop, that was a huge variety.

Mesler: One of the things, I try to get through these myths. A good example is, there are two camps in the preservation community. There’s the group that has never replaced a rivet with a rivet, that’s going to replace a bolt. If they are going to replace a rivet, it is going to be with high-strength tension control bolts. And then there’s another camp that says, yes you can use rivets. But I think that there are more that want to replace rivets with tension-control bolts, but the impressions I get through the communications I have is that the engineers have the, I almost get the feeling that there’s no cost involved with putting tension-control bolts.

You’ve got an iron worker that has a special wand that comes in and is going to pop these rivets in magically. Well it doesn’t. It costs a lot of time, and there’s procedure you have to follow, special equipment. And so what I’m trying to prove is that you can compete with that. Now I’m not trying to bring rivets back to industrial and new buildings and new vehicles or to compete with welding because it’s not going to happen.

And even if you could prove that it’s cheaper than bolts or weld. And more than likely, it is just not going to happen. So my focus is just to, we’ve got enough historical metal around, even the 1950’s, that’s historic metal. There’s a welding procedure for the restoration of historic buildings in the 40’s and the 30’s. So it’s not just 1890 bridges or 1880 bridges, it’s even 1930’s, 1940’s and so there is still a need for that. Cast iron, that’s another. We need more training, more understanding, more people trained to do that. So that’s another option.

Church: Well, I know as a conservator myself, back to the rivets. I always want to replace with in-kind. I want to replace original material that’s failed with like material. But I heard all the arguments with the DOT people that were here and the M-Dot people talking about how it is really going to take a mindset change to get these bridges restored that are going to be continued on the federal highway systems and state highway systems.

So I think that’s one of the things you really succeeded with with this workshop, is to start the ball rolling to change the mindset. Because there’s preservation because we want to save bridges, but do we want to save them as foot bridges in parks or do we want to save them like on the highways. And I think that is one of the things that came out of this. To get some of the people that can make those decisions thinking about that it is OK to use the original materials, the original techniques to save these bridges in current use.

We look forward to hearing more bridge work from you and more workshops in the future. Thanks for talking to us today.

Mesler: You bet.

]]> 3D Scanning, Rome Reborn and Virtual Ancient Worlds on Google Earth (Episode 16) ]]> Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD993C52-F7B3-6346-E9F53290724C1415.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD9E2CA6-E38D-ED6F-EB33A6D60A01EA1A 3D Scanning, Rome Reborn and Virtual Ancient Worlds on Google Earth (Episode 16) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Bernard Frischer of Frischer Consulting. They will discuss 3D digital documentation of historic resources and the project, “Rome Reborn.” 961 no full 16

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Guin: I’ve heard the term “Born Digital.” Could you explain what that means for me?

Frischer: Born digital means that the product came into life by means of digital technology, and it didn’t exist before. So we might have a document that we scanned and we ended up with a digital file, well that is not born digital. I like to call that “re-born digital” that started life as an analog document. On the other hand, if we make a computer model of the Colosseum, and we use CAD software to do that, we may be inputing measurements that we’ve taken from the Colosseum, but we are not re-creating digitally a previously existing analog product, like a model. So that is what I would call something that is born digital.

Guin: That brings us into a very high-profile project that you’ve been working with called Rome Reborn. Tell us about how that started and where it is today.

Frischer: I always say that Rome Reborn started in the 15th century–of course my own involvement happened a few years later, starting in the mid-1970s. But seriously, in the mid-15th century, the vision occurred to people in Rome, actually some papal secretaries, especially one named Flavio Biondo to reconstruct ancient Rome. It was largely in ruins but there were enough ruins around to inspire people to study them and to learn from them to reconstruct modern Rome. And so this vision of reconstructing Rome started.

I saw a physical model of ancient Rome made from 1933-1973 when I was a young Ph.D. starting a post-doc in Rome in archeology, and I was blown away by this physical model. It was called the “Physical Model of Ancient Rome.” And I thought, coming from a background in photography and electronic music and other technologies, but also from a background in humanities in archeology that there ought to be some technology to get this wonderful, physical model out of this one obscure museum in Rome and into the hands of the people in the world. And that’s really where Rome Reborn started as far as I’m concerned.

Guin: Tell me more about the technologies themselves.

Frischer: It started out as something very exotic and expensive that mainly was available through the manufacturers of hardware and software who produced the equipment you needed to do 3D, and this started in the 1970s. And through a lowering of the price in the 1990s, and especially in the last 10 years, the technology has become ubiquitous in fields like architectural history, archeology–any field in which you are documenting a 3D object. That’s the kind of economic history. In terms of the more technological history of 3D technology, you could say that 3D technology started really divided into two branches right from the beginning. A branch that had to do with 3D data capture, and that resulted early on in the development of the 3D laser scanner and then other kinds of scanners: structured light, time-of-flight, and so on. And that’s how you can capture an object that fully exists in the real world.

And the other branch is CAD, or computer-aided design, and a subdivision of that is 3D modeling. We have on the CAD side standard software that people use is AutoCAD made by AutoDesk. The 3D modeling side, we have a package such as 3D Studio Max or Maya 3D, also published by AutoDesk, that we use when the object we want to capture can only be captured from our imagination. There’s nothing to scan because it is very damaged or it doesn’t exist anymore. We may only know about it from old photographs, records, memories of people or archeological excavations. So over time, these two different branches, of 3D scanning and hand modeling, have come together. And in our project, we have a really good example of a hybrid way in which the two approaches to 3D have been merged, I think in a very useful way. And what we are doing with Rome Reborn is something, I think, most people now, working with 3D in the cultural heritage sphere are doing more and more of–combining these two different branches as they have developed over the last 20 years.

Guin: What has been the nature of the relationship between these technologies and actually using them in cultural heritage?

Frischer: The cultural heritage application is one of the more recent and latest applications of this technology. I mentioned that it started out being very exotic and expensive. Before it was even used by industry, like oil and gas exploration more commonly, it was used by the military. And it was really thanks to the military that we even have this technology. In the 1970s, the early 3D companies were involved in producing flight simulators to train jet pilots for the military. Then that was civilianized and was used to train civilian aviators. As time has gone on, industry has continued to play a very big role in pushing this technology forward. And today, the largest impetus is coming from the game industry. And we have to really thank all of our children for being such fanatics of gaming because that’s pouring billions of dollars of development into the hardware and software that we need in cultural heritage. The cultural heritage use goes back to the late 1980s. As far as I know, the pioneering application of 3D technology to heritage was a show put on by IBM in London in 1989-90, and it was dedicated to Pompeii. And I found that show very inspirational.

A couple of companies then sprung up around the world to try to commercialize this more generally in cultural heritage. They didn’t do too well in the 1990s because prices were still too high. By the mid to late 1990s, scholars started to be able to afford and started to play with this new technology. It was still fairly expensive. We had a supercomputer at UCLA, an SGI-Onyx that cost a million dollars. I now have much more computing power in my $1,500 Sager gaming computer than we had in that million-dollar SGI that we purchased in about 1996-7. But as the prices have come down and the technology has become more and more powerful, the cultural heritage applications have proliferated, and now there are probably one-to-two thousand architectural historians and archeologists around the world who are really working full time with this technology and starting to turn out a pretty big archive of material for us to use and study.

Guin: You’re actually involved with an initiative now to archive that so that people in the future can actually access that data and use it. Tell me about that.

Frischer: The initiative is called SAVE, which stands for Serving and Archiving Virtual Environments. The initiative has an archival goal, and the name, SAVE, pertains very nicely to that goal of saving the stuff were are creating for the future, for future generations. Ironically, a lot of us in virtual heritage are helping to save and transmit and re-interpret the heritage of the past, but we are not paying enough attention to the fact that what we are doing, in so doing, will be of interest to people in the future. And we’re creating a new kind of heritage that needs to be preserved. But the other part of SAVE, besides archiving, is dissemination. That’s the S: “serving” an archival environment. Another big problem of the current day isn’t that we aren’t worried about saving our work for the future, but that we are not able to get it out to our fellow professionals and to the general public to students and scholars around the world. There is no online peer-reviewed journal where people can read about and use these 3D models. The purpose of the journal, SAVE, will be to publish the models so they can be used in real time by people on the Internet, and related monographs and articles, documentation, bibliography and metadata so that the models can be understood. And we are working on major commercial publishers to actually get SAVE implemented over the next 12 to 18 months.

Guin: What does this mean to the common person? And what’s it gong to mean to them in the future?

Frisher: We know from Aristotle and we know from contemporary cognitive psychologist and psychologists of perception that man or humans are visual animals. We learn through the senses. And of all the senses, as Aristotle said, vision is perhaps the most powerful and to us the most useful. So what will it mean when this enormous heritage legacy of mankind is available to us on the Internet in its original 3D form, easily accessible at little or no cost? I think it will mean, for the common man first of all, an even greater interest in cultural heritage. We already know that the Metropolitan Museum gets more guests every year than all of Major League Baseball. So we know that people love cultural heritage and so we don’t have to worry about building up an audience for cultural heritage, but we do have to worry about making cultural heritage more accessible and understandable. Since we are primarily visual people and these are visual objects, the easiest way for someone to understand a 3D object is to see a 3D object. Not to read about it. Not to see a 2D–especially abstract representation of it like an architectural plan section or elevation. But to actually see the 3D thing in all its glory and even to be able to seemingly walk through it and experience it.

We’re working now, through SAVE, with ways to make that available to the public on the Internet, but we are also, more interestingly, working with companies to make it available on smart phones as an application on say, an iPhone. So as you are walking around Rome, you’ve downloaded the program, you can see on your iPhone–or other app phone–a representation of the city as it looked at some early phase in its development, say in antiquity. And you can get along with that image, some information describing what you’re seeing. I think that this will enhance and enrich tourism and probably make tourism an even greater growth industry in the 21st century than it was in the 20th century, which is saying quite a lot. And it will mean tourists will go more and more off the beaten track because they won’t need guides and preparation, they will be able to get the information delivered just when they need it. So it will be “just on time” information.

Guin: And you have actually already started down that trail … and there is something people can get to now, which is your collaboration with Google Earth.

Frischer: Yes. We have a very good relationship with Google Earth. We published the Rome model in simplified form in Google Earth. They call it “Ancient Rome 3D.” And it is a featured layer in Google Earth that all 500 million-plus subscribers can view for free. Google would ask us to add more historic cities to Google Earth. It doesn’t make sense for them to just have Rome. Once they start on this path, they need to cover the whole planet in a rather consistent way.

If your listeners have a good model of any significant cultural heritage site, please let us know. [Contact information in the audio or the Frischer Consulting website]

Guin: And what projects are you working on right now?

Frischer: Beside the SAVE initiative, we are doing a prototype with a new NSF grant, for which we are very grateful. We are working on a model of Hadrian’s Villa. And the purpose of that project to model this world heritage site, is to experiment with virtual world software. Virtual world software: the most famous is Second Life. We have some problems with Second Life. We don’t like the fact that it’s not open source and we don’t like the fact that there are no loaders for standard 3D file formats.

So we made our model of Hadrian’s Villa using AutoCAD, and when we bring it in to a virtual world, we don’t want to have to completely rebuild it from scratch as we would have to do in Second Life. So we found an open-source equivalent called Open Simulator, and we’re working with IBM, which is one of the prime movers and developers behind Open Simulator, to bring Hadrian’s Villa into a virtual world software environment.

And we’re doing that in order to test of out some ideas of a young scholar in Rome who has recently published a book about the site, about how the six groups of people who used the villa when it was new in the 130s A.D. interacted–from the emperor down to the slaves. And you really need to have bots and avatars–3,000 of them by the way–moving around this 250-acre complex to test out her ideas, refine them and make them better. And she is working with us to do that by the way. And so we’re looking at virtual world technology as a medium for scholarly investigation, expression and communication.

We’re also very interested in scanning and publishing to the Internet with secure remote rendering, very detailed models, very high-resolution models of sculpture. Sculpture is something that has been neglected by virtual archeologists today, probably because a sculpture is typically a very organic form. And in order to model it, you need to create a model with many, many polygons. And this is very hard for the computer to process in real time, so I think scholars have tended to shy away from it. But working with David Koller, my post-doc, who came to us from the computer science department at Stanford, where he worked on the famous Digital Michelangelo project with his professor, Mark Lavoy, in the 1990s.

We’ve been really going great-guns with sculpture, and we think that the scanning of sculpture has a great future and is very important in cultural heritage. What we can do with sculpture, once we have a digital model, is what we used to do with casts. So we think of the digital model of a statue as pretty much being the equivalent to the old cast version of a statue. We can use it to represent different hypotheses of reconstruction—put the arms on and put them in different positions, which we are doing with the Laocoön in the Vatican. We can also restore polychrome. We can restore the color if it’s been lost, which we used to do with casts, of course we don’t want to do that with the original. We can easily do that with the digital model. And of course we can, as with casts, make copies. But we can make digital copies and transmit them on the Internet much much more easily than we can even with casts.

]]> How the Internet Saved an Historic Tree (Episode 15) ]]> Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD6BF142-AEA3-D30D-AA3F3CB8F3926320.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD6E0B93-F772-0C1C-84DB5FA802FF2F4E How the Internet Saved an Historic Tree (Episode 15) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Guy Sternberg, a certified arborist and retired landscape architect. Guy spearheaded an Internet-based campaign to save an historic tree in Kewanee, Illinois. 781 no full 15

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Guin: Guy, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if you could just start by telling us how you first found out about this tree.

An Osage Orange Tree (courtesy of Wikipedia) An Osage Orange Tree (courtesy of Wikipedia)

Sternberg: I am on the State’s Big Tree committee with a few other people. One of the other people, who is from Kewanee sent me an email. And he said, well, looks like they are going to cut the old hedge tree down in Kewanee because it is leaning over the highway and think it’s leaning a bit more. And this has been a tree that I’ve taken tour groups to. We do big tree tours around the state. It was one of the last original surviving hedge trees in Illinois and happened to be an osage orange. And these were planted due to the impetus of Professor Jonathan Turner, who was a professor at Illinois College, which was the first and is the oldest college in Illinois.

Guin: Well, this is obviously an important part of the city’s history. What did you do to mobilize efforts to save the tree?

Sternberg: This was Friday night when I got the message. The city offices were closed for the weekend, and they had already made plans to cut this tree down the following Tuesday. So, dropping a billion other things that were already in my lap, I went through my address book for about three hours and handpicked 250 people who I thought might take an interest in this, and sent them out a short email expressing what I had heard and if you feel up to it could contact the city and ask them for a little bit more time so that we could evaluate this thing and see if there are other opportunities available. And of the 250, I think at least 50 of them did contact the city from as far away as Europe and all over the states and so forth.

Guin: How did the city react to all the attention?

Sternberg: I got a call from the mayor, and I talked with him and I talked with the city manager, and explained to them that we had done a lot of things like this in the past. I worked with other people involved in trying to save our monumental historic trees. And they said, OK, we’ve got it set up for Tuesday, what should we do? I suggested, well, I’d seen the tree–I had photographs of it I had taken before, I knew it was leaning over the state highway. I said if you could remove those two lower limbs that are cantilevered way out over the highway, for now, that would take some of the pressure off it. And we could set up a meeting up there as soon as possible with some other people who can evaluate this and determine what methods could be used to preserve it. The city knew it was historic. It pre-dated the city there. It was planted there when the whole city was just one farm. And they were aware of that. The county historical society was aware of it, but they were just concerned for public safety–obviously as they should be.

Guin: So you were at least temporarily able to keep the tree from being cut. Tell us a little bit more about this particular species of tree and how that contributed to what happened next.

Sternberg: Being an osage orange tree, we also knew that there were a lot of options open to us that wouldn’t be open with almost any other species of tree. First of all, it’s just totally decay-immune. You can have osage orange heartwood that has been made into fence posts back in the depression that are just as solid as a rock with no treatment of any kind. It’s very tough wood. It has latent buds that will allow it to re-sprout from anywhere on the tree. If you cut it, it will re-sprout and grow again. And that’s one of the reasons it was selected for hedging back in the 1840s. It’s typically a thorny tree, and professor Turner realized after looking at this that if you plant a bunch of these seedlings in a fence row, let them grow a couple of years and cut them back, they will re-sprout and re-sprout more vigorously and thorny than ever. Then you can trim those thorny re-sprouts into a hedge that will stop livestock. This was a time when the Midwest economy was changing from open range to farming, and they had to have something that would fence in and fence out livestock. And as you get further west in Kansas, Nebraska and so forth, they didn’t have many trees that you could use to make fences out of. You could cut a cottonwood down and build a fence, but by the time you got to the north end of the fence, the south end has already decayed away–it just won’t last outdoors. But these living fences would last.

So we knew that. I’d seen osage orange trees that had been cut back every year since the early 1930s. There was one that was growing under where they’re putting a new rural electric light in 1930-whatever, in the Dust Bowl days, and the farmer didn’t want to cut his tree down, so he just and the electric company cut the top half of it and then every year when it re-sprouted, he would trim the sprouts back into a nice little round gum ball. And this tree has just been going just fine ever since then and still is.

Guin: So at this point you’ve got global support for the preservation of this tree and you’ve got the city’s cooperation, so what were the next steps as far as actually preserving the tree?

Sternberg: Well, they went ahead and did the pruning. They had to have a permit and a crane and everything on site anyway because they were planning on taking the tree down, and had blocked off the state highway in the process. And so instead of taking the whole tree down, they did as I asked and took about two tons of wood off the down-lean side, if you will, to give the tree better balance. The whole tree is still balanced over the street, but not nearly as badly as it was. And then we got together a couple of weeks later with a couple of arborists and city council members and the local newspaper guy and a couple of other people who had an interest in this for one reason or another, and a few other people who said I can’t come to the meeting but here’s what I think and let me know what you come up with and give us some photos and measurements and so forth. And these were expert arborists from all over the country, there was an engineering firm involved and several people who just wanted to help raise money or make awareness of the tree their local cause. We had a radio station in Chicago that was doing interviews with me and with the mayor about the tree. The Home Grown Tomatoes Show on Justin TV in Alabama has put it on their show and they actually set up a Facebook page [since inactive] for the tree and the ways to donate money. The city has worked with the chamber of commerce and the local bank to set up a dedicated bank account for the tree. And no money can be taken out of that account unless it is countersigned by both the city and either the bank or the chamber, and restricted strictly to the Kewanee hedge tree. People are able to send their contributions there and those will be used to stabilize the tree, to provide interpretive signing for the tree. They have to raise and relocate a sidewalk that is over the root system. We need to provide a vertical beam and some dynamic cabling to ensure that the tree will be stable even in a severe wind or ice storms because of its lean. So these are the types of things the money is used to fund for.

Osage orange tree after initial pruning to reduce lean.

Guin: Excellent, what do you see as your role, personally, in this process?

Sternberg: It involves giving the tree a personality, making people aware of why it is important, and giving them a way to contribute either monetarily or with volunteer work. And it can work surprisingly well and it is working in this case. We plan to go back once the city gets permission from the adjacent landowner to place this beam on their property via an easement. The beam will be placed like a big vertical post. And then from the top of that post, across the sidewalk to the main limbs of the tree there will be dynamic cabling put in and installed with big eye-bolts. And professional arborists will be doing that in July. They will take a break out from their International Society of Arboriculture meeting in July, which is in Chicago and make the two-hour drive west to Kewanee and a team of volunteer arborists will be doing the instillation then. So we will sort of be working together on it.

Guin: When you sent that first email, did you have any idea what the reaction would be?

Sternberg: I kind of did because, like I have said, we have been doing this for years with other trees mostly in our home county. We have more than 20 trees that we’ve monumented and some of them we have worked on and cabled and put lighting protection on and so forth. And of course the people in my address book are not just ordinary folks, they are people that I associate with because we have similar interests. And so a lot of these people are doing the same thing I’m doing elsewhere in the world or elsewhere in the country. So I knew that some of them at least would write the city and say, “hey let’s give the tree a reprieve, let’s look at this and let’s see if we can help you find a solution that would keep your people safe but also keep the tree going.” And yeah, I expected it and that’s what we got. And I was nonetheless very gratified to see that so many people came out of the woodworks so fast because we only had two days before the tree was gone. And also I need to commend the city because the mayor, the city council members, and the city manager — all were really sad that that tree supposedly had to go but they didn’t know another solution because they just hadn’t dealt with something like this before. And now that they are doing it and they have some help, they are going out and recruiting help. They’ve recruited someone to donate all the beams that are necessary. They are taking every step they can to work with all of us in saving what is their natural and historical heritage as well.

Guin: You mentioned something earlier about the tree actually having its own Facebook fan page. Is this the first time, that you’re aware of, that social media has played a part in a campaign like this?

Sternberg: Yes it is. I’ve used the internet in the past and have memberships in various green organizations to just get emails to people, but I am not very literate in terms of social media and some of these other people are. And I think the younger you are, the more involved with media, then the better you are at it. So the same person who is doing the Justin.tv stream program on the tree said I’ll set up a Facebook page if you get the city to it operated.

So he set it all up, put a way for people to donate, you know click through PayPal, gave it to the city and the city is running it now. And it’s the same fund, it all goes to the dedicated fund for the tree. And if we don’t spend all of it in this initial go around, we’ll be coming back every few years to do some trimming and inspecting and tweaking on the tree to make sure that it is around basically forever.

Guin: What can other historic landscape professionals learn from your experience?

Sternberg: Well, from this one, you might say it is an anomaly, but I have done this type of thing before, and if you are willing to drop your other work and jump on an emergency like this, it would be better if you could do it before it was an emergency, but then you don’t have the motivation of people.

People aren’t willing to do something until the cat is almost out of the door. And the question is if I waited two days later, the tree would be laying on the ground. So timing is critical first of all. It has to be urgent, but it has to be doable. The other thing is that I think you need to get the right people involved and the right mix of people, who number one are altruistic and have these interests, and number two, have something that they can contribute in terms of knowledge or equipment or whatever.

I think that in any case, and each situation is unique, but if someone has an historic landscape or an historic tree in their community–if possible, get out there in advance and inventory its condition and the situation and its legal status and so on so that you know something about the tree. Take the measurements, do the legwork, take a GPS reading, so if you want to send the tree’s location to someone else remote so they can get on Google Earth or something and get a view of the tree, they can do that. Take those steps in advance and sort of adopt that tree. Work with the landowner and make sure they are aware of how important this tree is and the things that you should or shouldn’t do with an old tree to keep it going. Try to work with local groups, who might be interested in interpretive signing or in doing tours that involved the tree. Doing specials in the newspaper, maybe seasonal specials. And while people are doing that, they are going to start looking at the birds that are in the tree and the shrubs that are in the woods around the tree, they are going to get out instead of sitting in front of their TV watching baseball and hopefully they will get more involved with everything that makes their world tick.

]]> Technologies for Drying Archeological Wood from Shipwrecks (Episode 14) ]]> Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CD37B75F-CB70-AC60-FAE84645ACE62EE3.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CD3D7D2B-A19F-2A10-91684BDECD0C5B69 Technologies for Drying Archeological Wood from Shipwrecks (Episode 14) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Eric Schindelholz, a conservator in private practice who specializes in metals and marine archaeological materials. Eric was the principal investigator for a PTT Grant Project that examined methods to dry waterlogged archaeological wood. 880 no full 14

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Jeff Guin: Eric, welcome to the podcast. How did you get involved with the science of conservation?

Eric Schindelholz: Hi Jeff. Thanks for having me.

First off, I became aware of conservation as an undergraduate archeology student and went on my first excavation in Israel and met a conservator for the first time and realized there is more to archeology than digging up stuff. There is also the preservation aspect. So the science of preservation along with the interest in archeology is kind of what steered me into conservation to begin with.

As an undergrad, I took some chemistry courses and more archeology courses, and then went on to obtain a Master’s in conservation. My first job out of conservation school for my Master’s was on a shipwreck project called the U.S.S. Monitor. Just a little background on the U.S.S. Monitor project: It was, at that time, one of the largest conservation projects dealing with iron shipwrecks in the world. There’s about 250 tons of material from this Civil War shipwreck that had been recovered. Our team was in charge of preserving. So that lent to some major challenges in dealing with the volume of the material that we had, and also the variety of different types of material. We had lots of iron, but we also had lots of waterlogged wood and organic artifacts. So it’s kind of through this project where we started working a lot with material scientists and other scientists outside the field of conservation to start doing some research and design where it could tackle these challenges that aren’t usually brought up in the normal conservation lab. So that’s kind of how I became interested and started in the science of conservation.

So that project led into the research that we’re talking about today, which is the NCPTT grant. Is that correct?

That is correct. During that project, I mentioned that we had a number of these wood artifacts. We had gun tools that they used to maintain and fire the guns with. We also had some personal effects, furniture details and pieces, all of which were fairly degraded and covered with rust. Some of which also had iron pieces attached to them. So these were complicated artifacts and we had a lot of them.

So then our task was to then find sort of the best treatment method that we could use for these artifacts, and we looked at some of the typical types of conservation treatments, but we also looked into this fairly new conservation treatment that had been recently developed, and that was in the 90’s, by St. Andrew’s University called supercritical drying.

OK, well explain what supercritical drying is.

Supercritical drying is basically, well, the method that we used in this study, is basically soaking a waterlogged organic artifact, in our case wood, in a series of organic solvents like acetone and ethanol to replace the water in the wood with the solvent. And then taking that solvent-soaked artifact and placing it in kind of loosely described as a “pressure cooker” and pumping in carbon dioxide, bringing the heat and pressure up in this vessel to create supercritical carbon dioxide.

Supercritical carbon dioxide is a form of matter, or supercritical fluid actually is a form of matter, that is neither a liquid nor gas, but displays kind of the properties of both liquids and gases. And so we are all familiar with our three most common states of matter, which would be solid, liquid and gas. So there are a couple of other types of these phases, one of them being the supercritical. So at this elevated temperature and pressure, you have this fluid that has the solvent properties of a liquid, but the diffusivity of a gas—meaning, when we put the solvent-soaked artifact in our loosely-termed “pressure cooker” and remove that solvent with the carbon dioxide, it does it so very quickly because it is like a gas. But it also does it without liquid surface tension. And liquid surface tension is pretty important when drying any type of artifact.

You can find this phenomenon very simply at your home with the drying of a sponge. The liquid-surface tension is basically the force put on an object the by a drying liquid, which causes stress on it and in the form of a sponge, which has a very weak cell structure (very similar to water-logged wood), that sponge shrinks up.

So back to case-and-point here in our pressure cooker with the supercritical carbon dioxide and by removing all this liquid solvent and replacing it with this gas-like substance that doesn’t have a liquid-surface tension, you’re avoiding that shrinkage from occurring. And after you go through this process, which can take a number of hours to a few days, what happens is you just depressurize the vessel and you are left with this artifact filled with carbon dioxide. And we know at room temperature and at standard pressure that carbon dioxide is a gas. So you are essentially left with just a piece of wood filled with air.

Tell us about the history of this method, or this concept, for drying.

Supercritical fluids in general have been around for more than a hundred years, and they were first observed in the 1800s. And by the mid-1900s, they were being used in a lot of industrial processes. Some processes using aerospace to dry different types of materials and as solvents, and now-a-days they are used quite a bit in industry and commercial applications down to even dry cleaning your clothes. If you ever go to one of these “green” drycleaners, what they are using is basically supercritical carbon dioxide. So as a whole supercritical fluids have been around for quite a while. The folks, as I mentioned earlier from St. Andrew’s University, adapted a kind of a method and developed their own spin on the drying method using organic solvents for waterlogged wood. What we did then was to evaluate their method against common types of treatment methods for waterlogged wood.

What came out of the project? What were your findings?

Well our research was concerned with evaluating the process that those at St. Andrews University developed against polyethylene glycol and freeze-drying process, which is just essentially putting a synthetic wax in the wood and freeze-drying it–much in the way that some taxidermy is done nowadays and that also prevents shrinkage from occurring. And we also evaluated this method against just plain air drying. And what were looking for was the shrinkage of the wood. The goal was to have the least amount of shrinkage possible, and also is any cracking occurred and some of the qualitative kind of aesthetic appearance of the wood as well. What we found were many of the things we suspected or hypothesized. First, that the waterlogged wood that we used and just let sit out on the lab bench and air dry shrunk up like a sponge — no surprise there. But also the current popular method of filling this thing up with synthetic wax or polyethylene glycol by freeze-drying gave very good results and little shrinkage. Some amount of shrinkage occurred from the supercritical process we were using. But really it is fairly negligible compared to some other types of treatment techniques out there and also to just air drying in general. So we had fairly good results.

We had some pieces of wood where the degradation was very high and the supercritical fluid wasn’t able to prevent some of the shrinkage that occurred on that wood and also caused cracking. That was an unexpected result that we had.

We found that the supercritical process presented us with good results, but kind of on par with the current technique of synthetic wax and freeze-drying. There are some advantages to this technique, and this is why we kind of looked at it, and it can still be applied in many cases, and that it doesn’t leave material in the wood. You are left with the natural piece of wood at the end, instead of a piece of wood that was soaked with synthetic wax or other materials. It is also much faster than current techniques. The freeze-drying technique that I had explained can take on the order of a few months to a few years depending on the type of artifact, whereas the process of using supercritical fluid cuts that time down to a few days to a few weeks. So from a cost-wise perspective and time and resources, supercritical fluid could be more advantageous for large projects than the traditional techniques.

Are there other applications for supercritical drying?

There are other applications for supercritical drying, not just with wood, but also with other types of waterlogged artifacts. And that has been explored by St. Andrew’s University and Clemson University, who were some of our co-investigators on the project, are using this type of technique to dry waterlogged corks from their Hunley submarine shipwreck.

So there are different things that can be done with drying, but also supercritical fluids in general can be applied to the field of conservation in many different ways. I had mentioned that commonly now you find these drycleaners that use supercritical carbon dioxide to clean things. This could be applied to museum textiles, probably with fairly good results, and to other fairly fragile materials such as cleaning feathers, which is obviously a problem in conservation. So there are a number of different applications out there. It just takes the time and the money to really look into this.

You mentioned the pressure-cooker concept. Does it require specialized equipment or a dedicated laboratory to execute this type of method for drying?

Supercritical fluids for drying require fairly high pressures, sometimes on the order of scuba tank pressures, so thousands of psi. Ours was below 1,000 psi, but at the same time, you need to have specially constructed vessels that are well engineered and safety checked because as you can imagine, with such high pressures, when something goes wrong you may end up with a lack of a laboratory or artifact or personal effects afterward. So, it does require some specialized equipment, but not necessarily specialized laboratories. I mean, just like a freeze dryer that someone can be specialized on or someone trained on, so can a supercritical fluid chamber.

Where currently can supercritical drying be performed?

There are only a few laboratories in the world that are really looking into cupercritical drying. I had mentioned St. Andrew’s University. They had a supercritical chamber, which they carried out waterlogged wood conservation. I’m not sure what the status is at this moment. Also Clemson University, one of our co-investigators, has a supercritical chamber and are working on developing different techniques using this type of methodology. I know there are a few others … but I’m not sure off the top of my head where they are.

So where do you see this research going in the future?

I think we’ve now established from this research and the research at St. Andrews that this is a fairly viable technique. We carried out our experiments on a very small scale.

Our chamber that we used was on the order of a few liters in capacity. At this point, I think there has been enough research that has been conducted so that one could scale up the process and maybe start treating larger artifacts and look at some of the effects that we have observed such as this cracking phenomena, and trying to figure out some of the mechanisms behind that and figure out some of the optimum treatment methods that are out there.

Eric, thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you.

]]> 3D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation (Episode 13) ]]> Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/CF02813F-CDA7-CFA8-F2180CFCD8C22E0A.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-CCF421DD-F39B-FE16-9972FAE66343972B 3D Digital Rock Art Documentation and Preservation (Episode 13) National Park Service Jeff Guin speaks with Carla Schroer of Cultural Heritage Imaging. The non-profit organization recently used a PTT Grant to hold a workshop on 3D digital rock art documentation and preservation. 913 no full 13

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Guin: Carla, Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Why don’t you just start by telling us about your organization, Cultural Heritage Imaging.

Schroer: Cultural Heritage Imaging is a non-profit organization that’s based in San Francisco, and we drive both the development and the adoption of practical digital imaging solutions for people that are passionate about saving humanity’s legacy. And so we do that by working with museums and archeologists and sites to help them develop imaging technology. And we also collaborate with technical organizations to help develop technology and methodology.

Guin: What are some of the other organizations you work with?

Schroer: So we collaborate with a lot of people in all of our projects, and for this particular project, we just had a tremendous group of collaborators. We worked with the National Museum of the American Indian, which is part of the Smithsonian, the Presidio Archeology Program and a couple of archeologists from U.C. Berkeley — Meg Conkey and Ruth Tringham. And on the technology side, we had support from one of the senior researchers at Hewlett Packard Labs, computer graphic researchers at Princeton University, and also the University of California Santa Cruz. So that was our primary group of folks and then the number-one group I want to bring out, who co-taught the workshop with us, were photogrammetry experts at the Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center in Denver. And that is Tom Nobel and Neffra Matthews, who have been doing photogrammetry for a very long time. It was great to have their expertise on the project as well.

Guin: Let’s step back for a minute and discuss how you came up with the idea for the workshop.

Schroer: We’ve been working for some time with a number of technologies, but one of the key technologies is called Reflectance Transformation Imaging or RTI. And RTI is a really great technique for bringing out very fine surface details of an object. Reflectance Transformation Imaging allows you to create a very detailed model of the surface of an object, and you do that by taking a sequence of digital photographs with a light in different positions around the object. And then that’s processed on the computer to a new type of image that generates the surface information based on how the light reflects off of the object. And so once you have it in the computer, you can dynamically relight the object from any angle as well as apply some mathematical enhancements to bring out very fine surface details that could be difficult or even impossible to see with the naked eye.

We have used it successfully in a couple of different rock art sites, and we have presented some of our work at the American Rock Art Research Association Conference. There was a lot of interest among the rock art community in this technology. So that combination, with us putting together some training programs a little more focused in the museum community, really just brought this idea together. But we also included photogrammetry. And photogrammetry is a technique where you take overlapping images, and from those overlapping images, you can generate 3D points in space. And we brought in experts in photogrammetry from the Bureau of Land Management National Operations Center that have been using photogrammetry for really more than a decade on a lot of different projects, including rock art. So it was great to have them involved. Right now we can shoot a Reflectance image and a photogrammetric sequence of a rock art panel and get two different results. One of the future directions we’d like to do is put those two together so that you can have the reflectance image together with the 3D model of the surface. And we have some early research that is very promising in that area.

Guin: Tell us about how the workshop went.

Schroer: First, let me talk a little more broadly about the project. The project really has two components. So the first component was the workshop, and we held that in July. And then the second component, which we are working to complete right now, is to develop materials to be freely available on the web. So more focused on do-it-yourself kinds of materials, to make people aware of the technologies, see how it can be used and to start trying it themselves. So the first component, the workshop, we put out the word through various sources. Meg Conkey is the currently the president for the Society of American Archaeology. She gave out fliers at their last conference, and then various people we had met from different sources and we put out a call and an application process. And we were able to fill the workshop. We had 14 participants plus the instructors for the two full days that it went. It was pretty intense. We were covering an awful lot of material in two days.

The first day we spent a lot of time just showing people examples of results both with photogrammetry and with the reflectance imaging, and going through what it takes to shoot the stuff. So the people from Cultural Heritage Imaging did the reflectance imaging part and the BLM folks did the photogrammetry part. And we walked through what it actually takes to shoot the stuff. And then the second day, the focus was more on actually shooting some objects. So we had set up to work outside and to work with some material and to give people the chance to actually be part of actually shooting the material and then looking at the results. We also spent a little bit of time talking about where this technology is, where we see it going in the future; kind of what’s upcoming. And we had a tremendous conversation that was led by Michael Ashley with the participants to really get a lot of feedback about what are our barriers for adopting this technology in the field, how did folks see it being used. It was really great to have the technical people and some of the target audience really share what makes it valuable, what’s getting in the way and actually we are making a podcast of that discussion that’s going to be available as part of the materials that we are going to be producing.

Guin: Tell us about some of those conversations that you had during the workshop, especially about the future of this technology.

Schroer: We had a great mix of folks. The people who came were largely in the rock art field. We had people from all over the U.S. and a couple from the U.K., as well, but we also included some people on the technology side, including a researcher, a professor from U.C. Santa Cruz, who’s been helping develop some of the technology. And so that was really useful to create some conversations around both sides of that. We also had some folks interested in using the technology not specifically for rock art, but a little more broadly for other kinds of material. And, in one case, for early American grave stones, which obviously has a lot of shared qualities with rock art. So, in terms of the future work, the technology today is something people can learn to do themselves with off-the-shelf digital cameras. You need a good tripod, you need a few things to get it done, and you need to learn how to shoot an image sequence. And then there is free software that you can get that will allow you to process it and look at the results for the reflectance imaging.

Where we’re going is, we’re trying to raise money, and we have some proposals out to further that the software, to make it more robust, add features that people are asking for, and also to add, well, really, there’s this whole field called computational photography, which is based on taking image sequences and processing them for various kinds of results, and that field in computer graphics research is just taking off. So, there are a number of ways that the reflectance imaging we see going into the future can be married with techniques like photogrammetry or structured light scanning could be used with techniques that are being developed to capture more accurate color because the sensors in a standard digital SLR are not great at color accuracy. And then also a proposal that we have out is to do something that we call “automatic rendering” that allows you to take these imaging sequences with light in different positions and generate technical drawings with very different drawing styles that the user can choose from. This data that’s collected, is the same kind of data that’s collected to do reflectance imaging. So we’re very excited about that because you can take a data set one time, process it two different ways and get two very different kinds of results depending on what questions you’re trying to answer or how you’re trying to present your information to others.

Guin: Are you involved with actually coding software?

Schroer: Our organization is small, and we collaborate. We have technical expertise and project management and a little bit of coding expertise, but by and large, the real software development is happening in university research groups that we partner with. We partnered with the National Research Council in Pisa, which has a team that is very focused on cultural heritage work, and has worked with us extensively on a project funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services. There’s a team at the University of Minho in Portugal, and we’ve done some work with Warwick Digital labs. The tool I was just talking about, the automatic rendereing, that’s a project that we have proposed in conjuntion with Princeton University, so the primary code development would be happening at Princeton.

Guin: It seems like these things you’re developing could be used in other applications as well. For a larger audience beyond just archeology. Have you explored any of that? You’re in the “tech capitol of the world,” pretty much.

Schroer: Our focus is really about finding solutions that solve problems in the cultural heritage and natural sciences area, so we do have a focus on museums as well as on archeologists and archeological sites. There are potential other directions that people could go with some of these techniques, and where we’ve seen people doing other kinds of work we’ve tried to partner with them. One thing we’ve found is that a lot of the tools that are out there are either very early in the research phase so they’re not quite ready for people to do themselves, like the actual techniques and methodology aren’t well described or you have to be a propeller head to actually figure out how to do it. And so what we try to do is figure out what of those things are really interesting, compelling and solve problems in the field, and how do we get those things developed and get them in people’s hands where they can do it them themselves. Because one of the core principles of our organization is that we are a “teach a person to fish” model. So for technology to get out there and really get used that helps in imaging, people have to be able to do it themselves. If they have to hire a specialist to do it, then only a very tiny fraction of the work that needs to get done will get done. If people can do it themselves and it fits in their regular work flow and it solves problems that they already face everyday, then we think it will get adopted and used. And so that is a real driving force for us for what we choose and what we try to get funded and how we try to develop it and get it in people’s hands.

Guin: How do you seek out those people who are good potential partners?

Schroer: What we did was we focused vary early on on people that were working on how to capture information about the real world from photographs. So that’s a fairly narrow band actually. And our president, who also operates as our chief technology officer, has been going to CIGGRAPH, which is the big computer graphics conference, for many years.

And so really through just starting to make some relationships with people there; he was invited on a panel many years ago that opened some doors that talked to people additionally. So really looking for people in this field that also have an interest to applying it to cultural heritage or natural sciences. And what we found is that folks really want to collaborate.

They really want to find ways that their work can get used in the real world, and the kinds of material that we are working with is really exciting to everybody. So the hard work initially was finding the right people that had the right background, but getting them excited about working with rock art or working with ancient ceramics or coins or whatever it is, that’s been the easy part.

Guin: Alright, well is there anything else you want to add about the project or maybe your future directions for Cultural Heritage Imaging?

Schroer: We are a small organization with a big vision, and how we do that is through collaboration and finding the right collaborators is really key. I have been talking a little bit more on the technology side, but we have really important collaborators on the cultural heritage side as well. So for us, all the projects need to have both sides represented.

You don’t want to just build tools without having the users that you’re targeting them for involved and helping to influence them and so forth. So we are getting close to posting the materials from this project and then we got kind of a related project grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation to develop materials specifically for the museum conservation audience that are based on the reflectance imaging.

And so we are partnering with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco on that one. We are going to be shooting some objects from their collection, and interviewing their conservators about specific conservation issues and how they see these tools helping them solve conservation issues with the materials. So we are continuing to do training and trying to spread the word — that’s one side. And then the other future direction is trying to bring in the funding to try to do the related tools — the adding these features that we have been talking about — marrying this kind of technology with photogrammetry and 3D.

And there is just a whole range of possibilities out there and lots of great people that are willing to work on it if we can get the funding institutions to give us support. And we do have a couple of big proposals that are out there right now.Guin: Carla, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Schroer: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.

]]> Green Design and the Economy of Sustainability (Episode 12) ]]> Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/A81396A4-E80F-1AB5-33F4F0E7817EE87E.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-A83E2D00-F10B-9B41-B9F174BD4CB1EE9C Green Design and the Economy of Sustainability (Episode 12) National Park Service Jessica Cleaver speaks with Tracy Nelson, director of the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, about sustainability and historic preservation. 682 no full 12

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CLEAVER: What is your background regarding sustainability?

NELSON: Well, I have a Master’s degree in sustainable design. I went to the Martin Center at Cambridge University, and they have a sustainable design degree. And while it is focused on new construction and technology and adding to new construction, I actually focused on sustainability for the built environment and how you can add new technology to an existing building.

CLEAVER: What is your position now?

NELSON: I am the program director for the Historic Building Recovery Grant Program, which is a grant program resulting from Hurricane Katrina. We got funding to focus on historic buildings that were damaged by either Hurricane Katrina or Rita, and we have about 568 grants — historic houses that we are helping to renovate and rehabilitate.

CLEAVER: What is your definition of sustainability?

NELSON: Well, there are many definitions, but I think probably the most concise one would be any effort that creates a result that has a long-term life. Basically, any effort that can be maintained or used or reused. Sustainability is about sustaining something, and that really goes into a long term and not a quick turn around, quickly disposable product.

CLEAVER: What does the term green building mean to you?

NELSON: Well, that one is another one that is used quite a bit. A structure that requires little energy to achieve its function, but also a structure that is designed for its climate, for its location and for its use. So you don’t really want to build a glass tower in a dessert. So wherever your climate is, the location of the property, you want to design something for that area.

CLEAVER: What is embodied energy?

NELSON: Well, embodied energy is any energy that goes into making a product, which includes human labor, fossil fuels, transportation-getting it there to where ever it ends up being. So embodied energy is all the energy in a product until it gets to its end use.

CLEAVER: What features of historic buildings are environmentally friendly?

NELSON: Well one, the society has already paid for the cost of building your houses so the embodied energy is already paid for. So every product has a cost and we have already paid for that. An historic building is inherently sustainable: the products are so good that they are made out of. You can’t get them anymore that they last a long time and they have a long-term life. New material is made to be obsolete in a few years, so modern construction is not made to last, but historic properties are.

Historic buildings were built before we really had mechanical systems to give us a false environment inside, and so the buildings were designed to have passive cooling and passive heating. So most historic structures have designed in them a way for the occupant to interact with their building and to actually use the passive strategies to keep them cool or warm without using energy.

So if you were to use those features before you ever got to the mechanical system of the HVAC system then you can have a lower energy bill just from the fact of interacting with your house. We have gotten out of the habit of interacting with our buildings, and so we have very large glass windows that we leave open in the summer that take a lot of heat, and we just don’t know how to work with our buildings. And you could actually lower your power bill quite a bit if you would just interact with these.

If you take just in the South where it is hot and tropical, some of our best-known and little under-used strategies are, a lot of our buildings are built up on piers. That is for two reasons. One, because we have a very high water table and it keeps the moisture away from our building, but it also allows cool air to go underneath the structure and have a cooling effect in the summer.

Because if you look at a building and think about if you don’t turn your AC on, how are you going to keep yourself cool. The other thing that we have, is we have very tall ceilings because heat rises, it allows people to walk in a cooler area because the heat is up around the ceiling. If you don’t put a drop ceiling in and you actually use that, then you have a very effective way to keep the temperature in your house a lot cooler.

Plaster has the same effect. It is a great insulator, it absorbs and releases moisture as it comes through and it has a very cooling effect inside. The other two things that are really predominant in the South that people do not use very much now is our shutters. A lot of people think of those as a storm prevention, but actually if you use them in the summer, they not only stop the solar rays from coming into your house and heating it up and causing a large energy bill, but it keeps your house cooler because it creates an air barrier between the shutter and your glass so heat does not actually come into your building as much as it does.

The other one is our transoms because you have what is called degree days, which is a way that scientists measure how many days you use a mechanical system. Up north the degree days are heavier when it is cold–they have more cold degree-days–and in the south most of our degree days have to do with cooling our buildings off.

So for example, in a climate if you have an average of two-hundred degree-days a year where you would need to use a mechanical system to make yourself comfortable in your house. If you were to interact with your building and use your shutters when it’s hot on the south side of the building to keep it cool, if you were to come home and open your transoms above your door and allow a breeze to go through and take the heat out of your house, you could go from an average from two hundred degree-days a year to one hundred twenty five degree-days a year. So it just is really interacting with your building.

CLEAVER: How do you incorporate these ideas into your position now?

NELSON: Well because we have so many grants and we have exposure to so many people that most of our grantees have never been involved with historic preservation, so it is a really unique opportunity to educate them.

And probably the biggest education we try to give them because we interact with them over a two-year period, so you don’t try to give them all this information at once and kind of overload them, you are allowed to really work with them through a time frame that allows you to kind of give them a little bit of information and kind of build on it.

And the biggest thing that we try to do is to educate them that what you see on the TV is not your only option. And that if you have a certain amount of money, that if you start with what is already in your building and work with that, if you are trying to lower your energy bill, if you would work with what’s in your building first than your construction or rehabilitation dollar could go further because you’re not trying…if you only have $5,000 and you do it and you use that money to replace your windows with new windows because you feel that that’s what is going to give you the best bang for the dollar, but you have good windows then you could spend maybe half of that on shutters to protect your windows and then have that additional money to go somewhere else.

So the big thing that we try to do is educate the public that what they see on TV is not their only option, and that what is in most of our historic buildings, what is already in place, is something that if you learn to use it-which costs nothing to do, to interact with your building-that you can use your renovation dollars for something else. And that is probably one of the biggest things that we try to do. That is to one, teach them the value of what they have because most people don’t realize what a valuable asset you have, and then how to best interact with it and use what you currently have instead of try to replace it.

CLEAVER: If less new construction is the result of these ideas, then what is the effect on the economy?

NELSON: Well, I think that we are so used to or so in the mode of doing what we’ve always done, which is new construction, which is a large business and I understand that, but I really do think that if you were to lower new construction and go into rehabilitation of the built environment that it really does balance it out. And the reason is because you can take people that work in new construction and if you have less new construction, then those trades people can go into the rehabilitation renovation field.

I also feel that on a city-wide or development company that if you are not focused on construction than you can focus on other things, which is sustainable resources other than oil or coal. For a city, instead of having your city council do new infrastructure for new subdivision development, if you are not having to put your resources into that, you could put your resources into fixing your current infrastructure.

So I think that it all balances out, I just think that you have to look at it in a different direction. I think that less construction and more renovation of your built environment creates the same amount of jobs if not more and can create the same type of profit that companies are looking for. You just have to direct your business in a different way.

New construction, a portion of the people that work in that don’t have to be skilled, you just have to be strong and willing to work hard to where preservation is a skilled labor. It is something that you can take with you. It is like going to school, you actually get educated on it. I just think that it is a poor argument to say that new construction is the only way to go, it’s just the way that we are used to going. It’s fast, it’s a quick turnaround and I think that there are too many houses currently that are unoccupied that you could use.

I think sustainability is not just for architecture, I think it is kind of a way of thinking about things. We have the ability to change the direction that we are going. I think that we are in a consumer-based society, and I understand why we are in a consumer-based society, but instead of trying to sell five things for a dollar each, why don’t you try to sell a well-made thing for 5 dollars for one of them.

I think it is just a new direction of thinking, and I don’t think it is new. I think it is just changing the direction that society thinks. I think that being a disposable society has got to stop sooner or later, hopefully it will be sooner. And sustainability, I think, is an umbrella in which all that fits under. It is more of a recycle, reuse, not need as much, don’t throw away as much. So, but sustainability is attached to architecture because it is one of the largest energy uses that we have in society, other than automobiles, but it can really trickle down to everything. It is just a way of thinking.

]]> Curriculum Development for Preservation Landscape Maintenance (Episode 11) ]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/A512FFCB-EB59-AD39-C0A421CAEE0F982F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-A5D4051A-90BD-A5CC-8D7964D2F0C7C08A Curriculum Development for Preservation Landscape Maintenance (Episode 11) National Park Service Today we join the historic landscape preservation maintenance curriculum roundtable discussion at the Hampton National Historic Site in Townson, Maryland. The roundtable is hosted by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. The 15 attendees, who include National Park Service and non-National Park Service landscape professionals, gathered to discuss and identify common needs and interests around historic landscape maintenance and to prov 758 no full 11

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the historic landscape preservation maintenance curriculum roundtable discussion at the Hampton National Historic Site in Townson, Maryland. The roundtable is hosted by the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation.

The 15 attendees, who include National Park Service and non-National Park Service landscape professionals, gathered to discuss and identify common needs and interests around historic landscape maintenance and to provide recommendations to guide creation of a training curriculum. Join me as we hear from some of the roundtable participants.

I’m Bob Mackenzie from the Adams National Historical Park and I’m here to help throw around ideas and brainstorm about developing curricula for landscape maintenance skills or just ideas that focus on historic preservation or preservation of historic landscape, historic fabric.

What I’d like to come out of this is some idea of a primer for anyone who is working on a historic landscape, primarily field people so that they get an idea of why we do things differently. It’s a struggle sometimes to explain to a new employee or a seasonal employee who has been working in the private sector and has done it one way for so long, to try to explain to them why we do it the way that we do it and why it is important, to the whole concept of a historic fabric and why we need to protect this, why we can’t plant that, why we can’t mulch this, why we don’t use power equipment.

I’m Susan Dolan. I’m with Mount Rainer National Park. I’m a historical landscape architect. I also work in the Pacific West Regional Office in Seattle. I think that one of the most exciting things isthat we’re really defining a new position a new role, particularly for the National Park Service, speaking from that perspective, of landscape preservation maintenance specialist. We’re identifying what the central ingredients of a curriculum would be for training for that position and therefore essentially what are the qualifications or basic competencies someone would need in that role.

My name is Christian Zimmerman and I’m with Prospect Park and the Prospect Park Alliance. I think what’s been most interesting for me is the fact that there is this strong need to differentiate between regular park maintenance and historic preservation landscape maintenance in that there is a different component and with all the historic properties that are out there, including mine that there is an education component that needs to be brought to the maintenance workers.

One it would be very beneficial for them as well as to increase that skill set, and I think it would also help with a matter of pride that they are working in special places, and that it’s important that y recognize that, and the practices that they complete throughout the day are following certain guidelines, for the longevity of those historic properties.

What I really appreciate about this group and what we’ve been doing is we are focusing on the field worker. It’s not just a management approach, it is a management approach for field workers because they’re the ones who really do fulfill those requirements in maintaining our public properties, our historic properties, so I really appreciate that and the fact that we’re trying to create this curriculum.

I’m Iris Gestram; I’m the executive director of the National Association for Olmsted Parks. What I found most helpful really is the, I think the diversity of perspectives around the table and I think the discussions in terms of one getting different perspectives but also sparking my own thinking.

I think I bring a pretty diverse perspective in terms of public horticulture, historic preservation, and association management. Thinking about the resources that are out there already from the different organizations and how we might all incorporate and utilize them in a much more effective manner. I think in that way the workshop was really productive.

Hi, I’m Tom McGrath and I’m the superintendent of the Historic Preservation Training Center located in Frederick, Maryland, and we’re part of the National Park Service’s Learning and Development Division. Certainly the exciting point is the fact that we’ve been discussing training and development for the stewards; those people actually working on our historic landscapes, doing the preservation maintenance. So it’s really where the rubber meets the road.

I’m very excited any time we’re talking about addressing training needs for the rank and file National Park Service employees and also the other thing that I would say that’s exciting was the partners from the outside agencies and sites such as Monticello and Dumbarton Oaks that have really identical training needs. I was involved in the practice category and I’m glad I was because I think I can contribute to that; I’m not a landscape architect, but an architect dealing with historic structures, however, the training program that we’ve developed to deliver training opportunities to our maintenance workers dealing with historic structures, called the PAST program, would be very similar in terms of its concept and delivery methods to training our landscape preservation workers, and so there’s a lot of cross-walking we could do of delivery methods, curriculum basing preservation philosophy, but the practice, the actual using tools, using equipment safely, recognizing materials, sourcing materials, all of those kinds of areas that we discussed have direct application both in preservation for building as well as for historic landscapes. I certainly think we’ve identified a leadership group both within and outside the Park Service.

Our friends at the Olmsted Center, Charlie Pepper in particular, has long experience in exactly this field, so we would love the opportunity to share our knowledge and expertise and help expand training opportunities for those maintenance workers in the National Park Service, but also the other thing I think is very exciting to wrap up, is that we start this new program with partners and look to develop it with partners, look for application both inside and outside the Park Service and I’ve never done something exactly like that so this would be exciting and I think would help with the success and make for a much better product at the end.

Hi, I’m Beate Jensen and I’m the Buildings and Grounds Preservation Supervisor at Gari Melcher’s Home and Studio in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Yesterday and this morning we will wrap up our conversation talking about maybe starting a program that will help the people that actually maintain the gardens understand the concepts of historic preservation or landscape preservation, and why working in a garden that has history to it would be different than working in let’s say a botanical garden. I find it very exciting there is so much information out there to share with the people on the ground, and I’m realizing that there is actually more than I thought.

Hi, my name is Paul Bitzel. I am chief of resource management at Hampton National Historic Site and Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore, Maryland. I feel very strongly that the historic preservation ethic needs to be instilled in our younger staff, whether they’re maintenance or resource management staff.

I think the joint efforts of Charlie Pepper and Tom McGrath’s organizations within the building and landscapes preservation efforts of training Park Service staff are really important, and I think the conversations that they’re having now to basically build the boat as it sails is a cleaver way to put it, but I think that time is of the essence, and I think that their programs are a good place to start. And I do believe that reaching out to the public sector, for instance with Dumbarton Oaks and Prospect Park in New York were a great start, and we need to continue to solicit the involvement of these and other organizations that are working toward the same goals.

My name is Lucy Lawliss. I am superintendent at George Washington Birthplace National Monument and the Thomas Stone National Historic Site, and I have been there just a year. It’s my first superintendency, but I come from a background with the National Park Service in the cultural landscape program. I started in the southeast region as the first historical landscape architect and then after 10 years there, moved to Washington and was the lead for the cultural landscapes program, so the topic of historic landscape maintenance is a perfect fit for my career with the National Park Service. The exciting thing is that we had an incredible array of expertise around the table from the people who are working in the field and know what those needs are to people who’ve just sort of been watching at a higher level of management but know that there are a number of unmet needs, and so one of the really important things is to go back and see what we already have that we can reshape and reformat for a different audience.

And so I believe that there is a number of things that have been done already in the recent past with the cultural landscapes program, both in Washington, regional, park level that could be brought together as sort of as a baseline group of information that could be made available and the technology isn’t my strength, but as we sit and listen to all the interesting possibilities with the web and social networking that we could get information out there to people who are looking for these kinds of answers and trainings.

And then I think most importantly is working to develop a full curriculum so someone who over a period of time and interest and support could specialize in a trade that is critical to the longevity of our historic sites. So we are working at it from both ends. It will be really exciting to get this all done.

]]> Tom Jones on Urban Ecology (Episode 10) ]]> Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D8E4F37B-BCFF-5A0A-3C6ADD6B38705828.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D8E617C9-C219-7F8D-52FDEF4A5F1B408F Tom Jones on Urban Ecology (Episode 10) National Park Service Andy Ferrell speaks with Tom Jones, an urban conservator for the West Ward Urban Ecology Project in eastern Pennsylvania. They will discuss the West Ward Ecology Project and something called the Green Design Laboratory. 917 no full 10

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Ferrell: Good morning and welcome to the podcast, Tom.

Jones: Morning Andy, how are you?

Ferrell: I’m doing great. Thanks for asking. So let’s get to the meat of this: what do you mean by urban ecology?

Jones: Well up here in Easton our definition of Urban Ecology encompasses the integration of human and natural systems that support healthful, sustainable, and productive life in a densely populated city environment, which is the situation in the West Ward in the city of Easton in Pennsylvania.

Ferrell: Ok, tell us a little more about the West Ward Urban Ecology Project.

Jones: Well the West Ward Urban Ecology Project has been funded for five years by the Wachovia Regional Foundation(Wells Fargo Regional Foundation ), and it’s a grant that’s to the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley in partnership with the citizens in the West Ward and also the city of Easton which is a neighborhood of over eleven thousand people and encompasses an area that’s being determined eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Place that encompasses well over 2,300 buildings and most of them are over a hundred years of age or over at least 80 years of age.

Jones: The Urban Ecology Project is set up for significant citizen participation through the canton process. Some of the basic practices of Urban Ecology is to study the full interconnected urban ecologic system including its composition, character in relationships of natural order and human settlement, and to develop replicable and measurable standards for measuring and evaluating our practices. We are also going to seek to educate the community about Urban Ecology and the findings that we are developing.

Jones: We’re instigating a management process that is beginning to arrest the urban decay and develops improvements to insure and expand beneficial and sustainable urban ecologic systems. We’re working hard on producing sound economic conditions and growth that support healthful and social and economic capacity, stability and development that follow, sustainable development standards.

Jones: We’re going to integrate an interpretive and artistic program throughout the architectural and urban fabric for describing the urban ecology system and demonstrating its effectiveness, so that our citizens can participate and enjoy, as well as those who come here and visit us.

Ferrell: Oh wow, that is very ambitious. Tom, tell us, how did this project begin?

Jones: Well, the West Ward is the most challenged neighborhood in the city of Easton, which is a city that was started back in the 1752. It’s an area that was originally, primarily a residential section, but because of the industrial decline, that’s typical for the northeast portion of the United States; there has been a lot of disinvestment, especially in the last 20 years and then unfortunately what were originally single residential buildings were converted into multiple residential units apartments.

Jones: There has been a significant cycle of decline; the Urban Ecology direction was undertaken for the West Ward to take a more holistic approach to manage the physical space of the community, because we are set with very significant natural resources being located at the juncture of the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers and also because of the Bushkill Stream that forms a normal northern boundary of the community, which is one of Pennsylvania’s finest limestone base, native brook trout streams.

Ferrell: Great, and I understand there are students involved in this effort. Who are these students and what is the role they play in this?

Jones: One of the things that we feel that is distinct about our effort is the partnership with Lafayette College, which was originally founded by the citizens of Easton. It has one of the oldest mechanical and civil engineering departments in the United States and the College, historically has been intimately tied with the growth and development with the community.

Jones: Under a memorandum of understanding between the college and the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley, they are defined a partnership for the five years where the students are working on a whole set of defined projects for community based service learning and this is beginning to encompass all the education departments at the college through the technology clinics. The mechanical engineering department has a green design laboratory and the Landis Center does a lot of community outreach that even gets involved with developing reading programs for mentoring for the disadvantaged youth in the West Ward.

Ferrell: Great, you just mentioned the Green Design Lab. What is the goal of the Green Design Lab?

Jones: The Green Design Lab, which is very prominent with Lafayette College, has made a long-term commitment to set up a true design laboratory that is headed by Dr. Erol Ulucakli, who is a mechanical engineer at Lafayette College, and we’re beginning to undertake long-term studies, not only for integrating green building concerns and historic rehabilitation for the buildings stock in the West Ward, but we’re also looking at the development of an application of new technology for energy efficiency and also new research in materials that could make residential buildings more efficient in terms of energy efficiency concerns.

Jones: The research and application of the research the we are undertaking through the Green Design Lab is dedicated to developing and applying practical methods that are affordable for low and moderate income populations and currently, this summer, working with Dr. Ulucakli and one of the mechanical engineering students, we’re doing a set of base-line study buildings which are setting up the practices and protocols on how to approach three buildings that are frame and also masonry.

Jones: Those will be the basis for our approaches for the Green Building Historic Rehabilitation programs for the West Ward, not only for the Weatherization Program but also for the Comprehensive Rehabilitation Program that we are seeking to get funded under neighborhood stabilization program funding and will be administered through the Urban Land Trust, which has just been established by the Community Action Committee in the Lehigh Valley. So the research at the college, through the Green Design Lab, will be directly applied as a benefit and experience to the populations in the West Ward and also to serve as a model for other potential cooperating communities in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Ferrell: And I just love this project the more I hear about it, it’s fantastic. So, Tom, what is the major key to the success of this program?

Jones: In my opinion, it’s developing a true democratic process that respects citizen participation. One of the key things we constantly do here in the West Ward: we’ve developed a sub-committee structure that is composed of some key committees that work consistently and in reference to our work plan which is projected over a five-year basis.

Jones: We have a community economic opportunity committee; we have a Human Resources and Public Safety Committee; we have a natural resources committee; and we also have a Neighborhood Physical Quality Committee composed of residents inside and throughout the West Ward as well as other stakeholders in the Easton area that can just meet together, cause discussion, and also seek common resolution to a lot of the critical issues we are facing and also to effect change both programmatically and physically throughout the West Ward in a planned manner.

Jones: We also have the approach which we based on what is called the cantons we have throughout the 11,000 population base of the West Ward, we have eight Canton subdivisions and within each of those Cantons which does reference the ancient tradition of Cantons in Switzerland, which is one of the basic precedents for democracy in the western world, we go through an integrated process of seeking input from the residents and through our workshop process we define the agenda and the work plan and application and also to disseminate ideas.

Ferrell: What would have been some of the pitfalls of this process?

Jones: Well one of the pitfalls is something that we’re going to be addressing here shortly in the West Ward, is working with the people in the West Ward to understand more fully what used to be called in our high school years: civics. Often times when we’re going through this process you run through, as in any community, the difficulties of getting everyones’ voices heard and listened to besides the ones that tend to be dominant and we’ve been trying to use the nominal group technique in our workshop process to address this but we’re going to be working with potential professionals for example so that people learn how to listen to each other and also for those people who tend to be the more quiet personalities but have a lot of good ideas to find ways that their voices can be heard.

Jones: Because at the end of it, the process that we are using for the West Ward project it’s strength come from full cooperation from the people that live within the area, and they have to come from people who can speak loudly in the community development process as well as those who have more silent voices. I can start typically saying that we always need more money, but we tend to be very tough there and we also tend to focus on getting as much volunteer activity contributed as possible. We’re an economically challenged community because the neighborhood that we’re within, we have a very large portion of the population that did not achieve a high school diploma or they’re severely economically challenged but we are finding the ways and means to have these people’s voices heard and also to concentrate on creating jobs for these people so that they have economic stability, both in the present and in the future.

Ferrell: How do you imagine getting this model out in the field further applied in other places?

Jones: Under the Wachovia Regional Foundation grant we made the obligation up front to Wachovia that we would engage in dissemination. We’ve already started on that within the state of Pennsylvania. We were committed to reaching out to other communities throughout Pennsylvania to form a network of urban ecologic communities we’re already engaged in that process we already have the letters of interest from the upper main street communities in Schuylkill County of Pennsylvania, which are quite stunning but they’re very challenged, historic anthracite communities.

Jones: Next week we’re meeting in Germantown in the city of Philadelphia to discuss the initiation of our ecology network community there. We have interest from Uptown section of the city of Harrisburg, and we have a letter of expression of interest from Ridgeway all the way out in Northwest Pennsylvania in Elk County in the beautiful Allegheny Highlands and we’ve made contacts in the Pittsburg area specifically toward Braddock as well as some initial communities out there.

Jones: Our state’s Bureau of Historic Preservation for the Pennsylvania Historic Museum Commission has shown a significant initial interest here and working through Jean Cutler we’re defining how to go about exploring the development of this Urban Ecology Network within Pennsylvania. Also within the framework of that commitment of dissemination we are working also in concert through Lafayette College, which has international connection concerns, we are initiating contacts elsewhere to cooperate with a set of initial urban equality communities internationally. And our contacts have gone into India, we’re also discussing towards Madagascar and we’re evaluating going into Wales, Russia, and possibly some other points around the globe, but that’s very initial at this point in time.

Ferrell: Well, that really has a far-reaching application. And so Tom, let’s end quickly with: what are the next steps? How can we get this to the next level?

Jones: Well, what we’re doing here in the West Ward: we are going through our work plan and we are trying to approach this with a sense of humility because we are trying not only to share the things that we feel are successful but we also want to share those things that don’t work. We’re hoping for example that the integration of green building and historic rehabilitation for our low and moderate income populations in the West Ward.

Jones: We want to show and share with other people those things that work or don’t work that are practical and affordable, to basically take care where most people live in the United States, which are these older buildings that are energy inefficient and we’re hoping to be innovative there and to share that. We’re hoping that we can disseminate this idea and this approach because it’s based upon addressing some primary thematic areas that relate to Children and Families, Affordable Housing and Counseling, Neighborhood Building and the Environment, and Economic Development.

Jones: We here in Easton are trying to do the best that we can to address climate change and also the critical issues in terms of the expansion of carbon. We are in the northeast of the United States, which in the last Brooking Institution report is one of the places in the world that is most responsible for causing climate change because of our consumption of energy, historically. We’re hoping that we can grow with other communities and also go into areas that are similar to us, like our neighborhood, in terms of economic challenges and to grow together towards this and we’re looking towards state and federal agencies to take a serious look at what we’re doing here and to become active partners, hopefully with our approach and efforts.

Ferrell: Tom, thanks for talking to us today. We’re very eager to see how this develops and we wish you luck.

Jones: Thank you very much Andy; thanks for talking.

]]> Digital Survey Methods in Archeology (Episode 9) ]]> Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D8B96F33-B600-9DEB-B07E1E454CAAF617.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D8BF56DB-B093-7228-692D69709BF8E034 Digital Survey Methods in Archeology (Episode 9) National Park Service David Morgan speaks with Graeme Earl of the University of Southampton in the UK about digital survey methods in archeology. 752 no full 9

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David Morgan: Welcome Graeme! What is The Portus Project?

Graeme Earl: The Portus Project is basically a collaboration between a whole bunch of people in the UK and in Italy and elsewhere, and it is a project mostly directed by Southampton University, the British School of Rome, and Cambridge, and we are looking at what’s the imperial port of Rome. It was probably the biggest classical fort of the first and second century.

David Morgan: What is the project’s focus and where do you stand in terms of its schedule?

Graeme Earl: What the project is focusing on is some excavation and site survey, looking also surveying the wider landscape and, from my perspective, looking at how various kinds of technology can be used to help on an ongoing excavation and survey project. The project has been running for over ten years in total because we have had a long series of geophysical seasons–we’ve done about two hundred and fifty hectares of geophysics on the site, and plus some marine geophysics. We have done some marine geophysics on the hexagonal basins as well, so pretty much every area anywhere near the site that isn’t underneath the modern airport we have done some geophysics.

David Morgan: What kinds of archeological materials are you finding?

Graeme Earl: I mean the artifact density is quite great, but it tends to be mostly things like quite workaday items, like building material. The area where we’re excavating is the industrial and commercial center, really, so you are looking at building materials: large lumps of masonry. You are not getting the fine, beautiful kinds of finds that we perhaps excavated in Egypt, where the preservation is so much better. You are getting an awful lot of materials though. The evidence that survives underground is fantastic, but there is also quite a lot surviving above ground. The scale of it is quite difficult to appreciate, but you are looking at warehouses that are maybe a couple of hundred meters long and fifty meters wide. It’s all big stuff, so it is quite a challenge for us working there.

David Morgan: What does it mean for an archeological record to be “born digital” and how does that apply to the Portus Project?

Graeme Earl: Born digital in archeological terms normally relates to capturing data on site, as you say, in a digital fashion not using a conventional context sheet, not using conventional methods for planning and drawing up surveys and so on.

Graeme Earl: At Portus we are experimenting with a lot of these techniques to create a born digital record, but what we are also able to do is to try and see how they relate to more conventional approaches.

Graeme Earl: Is it better to have someone sat there with a computer and a wireless network and typing in context information, or typing in their geophysics grid location data straightaway?

Graeme Earl: Or is it actually better to have somebody entering data on a piece of paper…on the back of a notebook–however they want to do it–and then afterwards bring the data together and put it in some kind of digital archive.

Graeme Earl: We’ve got to end up with a digital record. At Portus we’re trying to whether actually using a born digital record helps at all in all aspects of archeological practice. I think the jury is still out on that.

David Morgan: How have archeologists adapted to creating born digital data?

Graeme Earl: It comes down to familiarity, really. If you are familiar with using a trowel and a pencil and a piece of permatrace then that’s a kind of place where you think about the archeology that you are doing. If you are really familiar with using a mouse or, I don’t know, some kind of VR equipment, or whatever –some technological process– if that is where you are most familiar, then that’s where your archeological engagement happens. That is where your interpretations derive from. The problems occur when you have someone who is very familiar with the computing, who is not so experienced , maybe, with the tactile excavation process, or vice versa, but if you are not familiar–if the computer is something that worries you–that you feel is falsely objectifying your data, for example, then it is not going to be a good thing to think with. It’s not going to be a good way of re-excavating the data.

David Morgan: What technologies have the greatest potential to yield more digital data?

Graeme Earl: Technologies that require the least change in the way that you practice. So you use something that the excavator is familiar with–the camera–bolt on a few gizmos–exciting, flashing, and whizzing things–and then you produce some new useful archeological record at the end of it.

David Morgan: What are these PTMs and how are they used?

Graeme Earl: Polynomial Texture Maps, or PTMs, are a technology that was invented by a guy called Tom Malzbender at Hewlett Packard Labs. If you are familiar with recording something like rock art panels, or if you are working with inscriptions, which is a good example from over here, what you do when you are taking that photograph is you try and get the best light. You try to get the best raking lights so you can see the details. What PTMs are, really, is a way of capturing that variability in light and shade.

Graeme Earl: A few of us in archeology have started to use this particular technique. So, there is Cultural Heritage Imaging over there in the States–you’ve been pretty much key players in it–and ourselves, trying to use it as an embedded practice within an archeological project. So as well as using it to record maybe something that is in a museum collection, or some rock art, we wanted to try and use it as a technique that was used day in and day out, just as a standard part of the post-excavation process.

I mean, one of the greatest things about the technology–you know, if you come to write a text and you want to produce a static image–you set up your virtual lights within the PTM, freeze the image, and there you’ve got just a perfectly composed finds image. You can tell people that it is amazing what they can do with a camera, a flashlight, and a shiny ball.

David Morgan: What is “virtual reality” and how do you use it in archeology?

Graeme Earl: If you want to be specific about what virtual reality is, virtual reality implies a kind of computer graphic model that you can interact with. There are lots of different terms for what this is: there is “virtual archeology,” there is “virtual reality archeology,” and there is to say “computer graphic imagery.” There is a whole host of them, but basically we’re just talking about methods primarily drawn from the film industry, and the things that makes Gladiator look beautiful, and using those kinds of technologies. Computer graphic models provide a really intuitive, quick way to convey what a really complicated interpretive process is.

David Morgan: Is there a danger inherent in the “Disneyfication” of cultural heritage?

Graeme Earl: That’s an interesting term. I would say I really don’t have any problem at all with the Disneyfication–the popularization–of cultural heritage. I think that the more people we can reach out to, and demonstrate to, the magic of Portus, or the magic of the archeology of Louisiana, the better. The more we can convey our own excitement for the discipline, which we’ve developed over however many years…if we have a chance to demonstrate or pass on that kind of excitement through maybe quite a simplified, exciting presentation, then that’s great. I think the more we do that, the more people would care about cultural heritage, and fewer bad things would happen to cultural heritage.

Graeme Earl: That doesn’t mean that we give people carte blanche to lie about the past and to present a past as if we know all of the facts, but I don’t think that you have to have a very bland, sterile presentation of the past in order to be true to your archeological principles. I think you can convey the magic and the interpretation and the flamboyance of some of the practices, as well as being true to the archeology. And I think we’ll have a lot to gain in partnerships with people like Disney or Pixar–people who know how to tell these kinds of stories. We know about the past, and if we work together we’ll be presenting better stories.

David Morgan: One of the biggest problems with virtual interpretation is missing information. How do you handle missing data?

Graeme Earl: We are very good at taking portions of information and looking up all of the other correlating data sources: things that maybe better preserved at other sites–mixing and matching but doing it in a consistent fashion, and then bringing it together to form one, or preferably a series, of interpretations. So again I don’t think the production of computer graphic models differs from any other kind of aspect of the archeological process. Again, it is incumbent upon us to be true to the data as much as we can, and to make sure the representation of the archeology is as near as possible–as close to the truth–as we understand it. I don’t think you can use technology as a way to make it any clearer what data there really are. I think we’ve been maybe a little bit too worried in the past about computer images being overly convincing or computer representations being overly kind of scientific. I think we can take a step back and say: people who are looking at these–they know all about Pixar, they know that you can make things up, but they have to trust us that we archeologists aren’t in the business of making up, but interpreting.

David Morgan: What are some of the biggest problems with the adoption of some of these new technologies?

Graeme Earl: A practical problem…a practical consideration comes down to cost and various ways of measuring it. You don’t have to have ludicrous computers. You don’t have to have very expensive software. But, to a degree the better software that you have, the more computers that you have to produce the work, the more time you have, the more person-hours you have to dedicate to the project, the better the results that you are going to get. So there is always some kind of cost implication, and computer graphics in particular is very processor intensive. The bigger the computer you have, the better the results you have quicker, so that is always a limitation.

Graeme Earl: So the great thing is the more data you get like that now–so if you get your XRF data–because the computer graphics technologies enable you to represent all of that data in a physically accurate way, you know that when you look at the image it definitely isn’t just a pretty picture, because it’s based on a simulation of the interaction between light, pigment, the surface of the marble, deeper down…the subsurface scattering within the marble. The computer graphics now are at a stage where for the first time you know that it is physically right. It doesn’t just look right, it is just physically right. The example I use is look at Shrek 1, 2, and 3, and look at Shrek’s skin. Shrek’s skin in 3…if there is a real ogre in the world, then it would look exactly like Shrek.

David Morgan: Thanks very much for joining us today Graeme.

]]> Using Lasers to Remove Graffiti from Rock Art and Rock Imagery (Episode 7) ]]> Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D446A5DB-0B9D-23BD-440940DB56FB8D63.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D4527CD7-A055-3DB6-4EF18F7612F42CEE Using Lasers to Remove Graffiti from Rock Art and Rock Imagery (Episode 7) National Park Service Jason Church speaks with Claire Dean of Dean & Associates Conservation Services about using lasers to remove graffiti from rock art. 798 no full 7

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Jason Church: This is Jason Church. I am here interviewing Claire Dean of Dean & Associates Conservation Services. How are you doing today Claire?

Claire Dean: I am doing fine Jason how about yourself?

Jason Church: Very well! So Claire you are known for conserving rock art. Can you tell us what this is and a little bit about it?

Claire Dean: Sure. Rock art is the common term for paintings and carvings on rock and in North America that is mostly associated with native communities. I personally prefer to use the term rock imagery as it’s a little more neutral and I actually use that term at the request of elders Native American elders whom I work with who actually find the word some what offensive from their cultural stand point.

Claire Dean: So if you hear me refer to it as rock imagery that’s why and typically the other two terms you hear for it pictograph which are the painted sites and petroglyphs which are the ones that are carved into rock surfaces.

Jason Church: Very good. Well recently I know you did a project where you used a portable laser to remove graffiti off of rock imagery at Joshua Tree National Park. Can you tell us a little bit about this project and the use of lasers in conservation?

Claire Dean: The project at Joshua Tree is one that I have been working on for a couple of years and actually it was a two phase project initiated by the park. The first phase was to do a condition assessment of a series of sites within the boundaries of the monument. Not all of the rock out sites were looked at but a good number of them and from that assessment and working with the cultural resource manager Jan Keswick out there at Joshua Tree.

Claire Dean: We prioritized which ones would be looked at in phase two and also what we could do with the resources available under the contract for phase two. And we had one particular site that we decided to concentrate on which happens to be located within a camp ground and perhaps one of the most popular camp grounds in the park. And it is a small painted panel a pictograph that is located inside a small wind form alpa which is a little difficult to describe. But if you imagine a huge bolder with a big scoop taken out of the middle of it so that it looks like a half formed donut.

Claire Dean: The panel was inside the donut and this bolder is located smack between two camp sites at the level of the campsites and as the area is one that is frequented by recreational climbers actually inside the camp ground the reclining roots. This particular bolder gets a lot of visitation from folks who are not technical climbers but want to do a little bit of scrambling.

Claire Dean: Consequently we also have a lot of graffiti inside that bolder so that was the one that we decided concentrate our efforts on and the graffiti in there has been building up over many years and was mostly magic marker type inscriptions along with some paint and wax crayons and pencils and a little bit of charcoal. So we decided that that is the one that we concentrate on.

Claire Dean: I was adverse to using chemicals in that location for a number of reasons just overall for an environmental point of view. I prefer not to chemical cleaning has been typically the method used to remove graffiti at sites like this. The other reason for not wanting to use chemicals is that the alkaline is extremely small and close and without any type of ventilation and especially in the temperatures which we get out there in the desert there was an added issue of health in safety for people like myself and my assistant.

Claire Dean: So we decided to use lasers or at least to try at this site. Lasers have been used in art conservation for many years in fact back in Europe where I come from we were using them I think it is safe to say before North America was and mostly in architectural settings to clean off dirt and crusts related to air pollution on cathedrals and historic buildings.

Claire Dean: Lasers have had their limits until recently because of their size a portable laser a few years ago was typically the size of a small car and you could get them onto a big scaffold thing on a building but taking them out to other locations was really not feasible also because of the power needed to keep these puppies going that just wasn’t possible.

Claire Dean: Now laser technology has moved along and we have a lot of more portable units and more controllable ones including units that we can literally take out into the field. The camp ground at Joshua Tree is developed and as much as you can drive the truck into it in about fifty feet into the site but other places where we have taken laser we use rock image sites have involved having to pack it in a little distance but it is possible to do it with a team of people.

Claire Dean: So the potential for using lasers now is much greater and this is fantastic for people like myself that are working in areas that aren’t developed. Lasers typically are a much greener type of treatment. They really the main pollution they put out is the exhaust from the generator needed to power them.

Claire Dean: The laser that we were using at Joshua Tree can run off a four-hundred watt gasoline driven generator which if you got a good generator and you are maintaining it it is not putting out that much pollution probably less than your car. So the laser itself basically does not generate any pollution other than the material it is removing which of course burns but we are talking about something on a very very small level.

Jason Church: So on an environmental level the laser is a definitely a much greener version compared to the traditional chemical methods?

Claire Dean: Yes, absolutely.

Jason Church: How does it compare as far as removing the graffiti?

Claire Dean: In the work that I have been doing and I need to acknowledge not just the help of NCPTT with this but also Dr. Margaret Abraham who has been the recipient of a large research grant from NCPTT. And she and I also have another grant from NCPTT dealing with culturally appropriate treatment for rock image sites which lasers was one. So we have two NCPTT projects here that are joined at the hip.

Claire Dean: Now the grant that we received from NCPTT which actually was awarded to the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla one of the southern nations in Oregon. we were looking at trying to find culturally appropriate treatment for rock image sites and this is because many of the Native American groups that I work with including you are not happy from a cultural and spiritual stand point. They are not happy with the use of chemicals on rock image sites and sacred sites in general.

Claire Dean: We also have some pretty strict environmental legislation in Oregon too so that prohibit the use of chemicals. And chemical treatments have pretty much been the main ones up to date that have been used at rock image sites. We have done some microbration with some form of abrasive unit. Those are problematic you have to run a generator which you do with lasers. The abrasive unit is a dry system which we have to use two because we can’t soak these sites.

Claire Dean: Water can be a major issue for reasons of causing salt problems but also literally washing the site away. So we are using the dry system we don’t have the ability to abstract dust. So it becomes an extreme messy and dusty project. Collecting the dust on tops is not really very affective the wind blows it around. It works and it certainly has its place but microabrasion is not as green as you might think in the circumstances in which we have to use it.

Claire Dean: Chemical treatments has been the other one. Typically solvents using solvents to remove paints and other materials and usually applied in a gel form or as a poultice. These again have issues of course with giving off vapors into the air with disposal of the waste materials and also health and safety for the operators because we have to wear aspirators in the field because we don’t have installation.

Claire Dean: So and also a lot of the locations that I work in are extremely warm which means we have an issue with them evaporating to fast and it is very difficult to control that in the field. So looking for these alternatives to help us out was is very important but particularly for the Native American communities.

Claire Dean: An elder who I work with regularly described it very sensitively she said how would you feel if I came into along and tipped paint stripper on your grandmother because that is exactly how they look at these sites. These sites are living places. They are not just lumps of rock with inscriptions on it.

Claire Dean: So the laser was one of the options we wanted to look at and the Native American community has been almost 100 percent positive in their reception of this. They like the concept that it is cleaning using light. They are very aware of the impact that ultraviolet light has on things outdoors and they could see a sort of direct connection between how light can get rid of paint and the everyday experiences. So we definitely have a lot of questions that are asked about the use of it.

Claire Dean: Megan and I have demonstrated the use of lasers to Native American communities on several occasions now. Only one of them has had its doubts but they weren’t completely negative. They were something they wanted to discuss and haven’t been discussing amongst themselves since. So it’s a for me it is a much cleaner alternative. It does a better job. It is more controllable. We don’t have the problems with bleeding of pigments and paints which we do when we use solvents for cleaning.

Claire Dean: While we can control that to a certain extent by our application method such as {unintelligible}. It is not that controllable especially in the field. So the laser takes care of that nicely and I also find that we have less residual staining. It is very difficult not to be left with residual staining when you chemically clean. Especially on particular surfaces that I deal with which are not dressed surfaces or finished surfaces they’re rough rock.

Claire Dean: The light emitted by a laser does seem to do some cleaning sub surface as well leaving us with less of a residue. So it has a lot of promise and we hope to be able to continue this and use it more extensively in the future.

Jason Church: Thanks Claire that answers a lot of questions I had about lasers and also chemical cleaning. So thank you very much.

Claire Dean: You are welcome anytime.

Kevin Ammons: That was Jason Church with Claire Dean. If you’d like to learn more about this technique, visit our podcast show notes at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training website. That’s ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everyone.

]]> Preservation Trades with Nancy Finegood (Episode 6) ]]> Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D42671B1-F88B-2326-83F535D202A47D76.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D42F6D95-EE0F-881D-C58537E669ED6735 Preservation Trades with Nancy Finegood (Episode 6) National Park Service Andy Ferrell speaks with Nancy Finegood, executive director of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network. NCPTT recently published online a guide titled “Introducing Preservation Trades to High School Students” which grew out of via work with Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center. 775 no full 6

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Kevin Ammons:Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I am Kevin Ammons and today we join NCPTT’s Andy Ferrell as he speaks with Nancy Finegood, executive director of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network.

Andy Ferrell: So good morning Nancy. Welcome to the podcast.

Nancy Finegood: Good morning. I am very excited to be joining you.

Andy Ferrell: NCPTT recently published online a guide titled “Introducing Preservation Trades to High School Students” which grew out of via work with Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center. Can you tell us a little bit about this publication?

Nancy Finegood: Sure the publication actually evolved from successful grass roots program that the Michigan Historic Preservation Network began about four years ago at Detroit’s Randolph’s Career and Technical Center.

Andy Ferrell: And what was the genesis of that project?

Nancy Finegood: We were contacted by a teacher from Randolph’s school who was very interested in working with his students in rehabbing homes instead of just building new like they do for habitat and got us involve got the state historic preservation office involved and others in the Detroit community. We started the program about four years ago. The program at Randolph was so successful that we wanted to share the program with other preservation educators around the United States.

Andy Ferrell: How did this collaborate effort with NCPTT begin?

Nancy Finegood: NCPTT assisted us with funding to convene a sort of summit of experts from a wide range of preservation organizations and educational institutions. The goal of the summit was to bring together preservation educators everything from grassroots high school features to college professors from around the country to share their ideas and document their experiences and help us create this publication. One of our board members Tim Turner is a wood window restoration specialist and he was one of the instructors for the Randolph School program. He traveled to Louisiana to meet with Kirk Cordell the director of your organization and Jim felt that this program that we started in Detroit could be a model for others around the United States.

He was aware that the NCPTT had been instrumental in promoting the program at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts and he approached them to collaborate with us to create a guide so that could be utilized in programs around the entire United States. The ultimate goal of I think both programs is to train students who see appropriate preservation of historic resources as another career opportunity.

I think the major thing that we have to keep in mind is that every program needs a passionate champion to carry the piton at Randolph’s school. It was Rody Rivers the teacher that I mentioned earlier who wanted to introduce his students to preservation and tradition building schools in Brooklyn. It was Kate Burns out of Vino the director of preservation technology at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. We found that if you do not have someone in the community truly passionate to start the program and to see it through because it does take quite a bit of effort the program will not be successful. So we have been trying to reach out to different sort of champions in communities to start new programs.

Andy Ferrell: Fascinating, tell me a little bit about the students. Who were the students?

Nancy Finegood: The students were awesome. Make sure you take a look at the video that’s on the NCPTT website. You’ll see the students up close and hear some of their interviews. What was interesting was that all the students were self selected. So we didn’t say you need to learn about preservation because you are in carpentry or you need to add preservation to your cab design program.

We took the students on a tour of historic sites of Detroit in the situation in this cause and then we did a half day program an educational program about general preservation and what it means. They self selected themselves and not only did they work at a historic site. They missed some of their other class time, and they needed to commit to fulfilling their other classroom requirements. That’s a lot of work for a high school student.

The first year of our program there were ten boys and one girl. She had a hard time, but she followed through and committed to fulfilling all the requirements in her classroom and at the site that we had chosen in the community. Another requirement in order to participate was that the student’s parents or guardian had to come to an organizational meeting and agree to their participation and all 11 parents showed up and agreed which is unheard of in most school districts much less a school district like Detroit. So that was really exciting.

Andy Ferrell: That is exciting. Now how did the students enjoy working on historic buildings?

Nancy Finegood: They loved working on the Historic building. We chose Historic Fort Wayne as our laboratory. Historic Fort Wayne is owned by the city of Detroit Parks and Recreation department. It is a city that is very important to the city but had become downtrodden and was sorely in need of some help. So we chose one building on the site as their working lab which they traveled to four days a week the first year of the program.

One student told me that he heard of the fort but had never been there even though it was walking distance from his home. Another student said this was one of my favorites now that he has taken this course he can fix his grandma’s old windows instead of calling Wallsite.

Andy Ferrell: That is great that is great. The instructors were they all staff at Randolph?

Nancy Finegood: No they weren’t actually. The first year all the instructors were recruited from preservation professionals around the state. Some traveled o I would say over 100 miles round trip just to participate in the program. They were paid a small stipend the first year but really taught primarily because they felt strongly about training these students.

They would come to organizational meetings I mean their buy in was spectacular one of the instructors young preservation carpenter said I wish there was a program like this when I was in high school. It took me many years after high school to find this kind of training. The following years we had a grant from the State Historic Preservation Office to do the program. In the following years our funding diminished.

We had a little bit of help from some local foundations and others but many of this instructors wanted to see this program continue and they volunteered their time as did Randolph school teachers. We actually had kids that wanted to come out there because they had heard how wonderful the program was and of course the food was good too. So the electrical heating and cooling teacher brought his students out there to repair the furnace because there was no heat in the building so that was volunteer and additional.

There was no working plumbing which was an issue with 11 students and four teachers so the plumbing instructor brought his students out to repair the plumbing and all of these students wanted to come back. They wanted to be a part of this program. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that they were able to take a bus and leave there regular classrooms.

Andy Ferrell: Yea that’s always enticing. Now Nancy what was the major key to the success of this programs.

Nancy Finegood: I think there are lots of keys to this success. It is hard to pick just one. But I still think that having a champion is key like with Randolph. It can be a teacher we’ve seen other programs were its a local preservation advocate or preservation tradesman but there must be one person with that vision and the passion to see the program through.

It’s sort of easy to get the ball rolling you know people are interested. There is a lot of excitement but it takes perseverance to keep that ball rolling up the hill especially when you run into any kind of obstacles along the way.

Andy Ferrell: Well that’s a perfect subway into the next question. Are there any particular problems associated with this model?

Nancy Finegood: There are I think that the biggest problem associated with the model is getting buy in or convincing others of the potential career opportunity for the students in many schools unless they can see the internship or career opportunities we have a hard time getting that buy in and that can also lead to a lack of resources and like a said before primary financial funding for the program.

Andy Ferrell: Certainly. Now Nancy what are the next steps?

Nancy Finegood: Well we have already begun the next steps. In the short term the guide has been distributed widely around the country. I posted something on the statewide and local partners lister of the national trust and actually received request for 32 copies of our publication and that was just electronically. Others asked for the actual paper copy that I sent out also.

We have also started a second program in Battle Creek, Michigan as a result of this. There is a new program in Indiana that one of our experts who participated in the summit had started. We are also having conversations with folks in Ohio, New York, and Wisconsin and we primarily are having conference calls giving them extra sort of incentive to get them started.

Andy Ferrell: That is brilliant. Are there opportunities for greater collaboration?

Nancy Finegood: Definitely we would hope to collaborate with other national organizations like your own including the National Trust, the Preservation Trades Network, the Nation Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers and the World Monuments Fund.

They have all we have had conversations with all of them and in fact the National Trust wanted to summit our program for a National Award a Green Award. I have not heard back on that but they are all very interested in the program and we are hoping to collaborate with more organizations.

Andy Ferrell: Excellent. How do you envision scaling this up?

Nancy Finegood: I would like to work on greater marketing of the program using new tools like the podcast as a part of the first program. We created a video which of course can be downloaded from your site and I’d like to see some clips of that uploaded to you tube so I am working with a videographer on that to get wider exposure.

As an extent of this program this is really exciting but my organization will be running a two week program in July in Kalamazoo Michigan to train underemployed and unemployed carpenters and contractors in preservation carpentry and wood window restoration in a lower income historic neighborhood. And we are hoping that will help people see what can be done while we are training folks that need jobs so it has gone beyond the schools it has actually going out to the neighborhoods.

Andy Ferrell: Great Nancy. It has been fantastic talking to you today. Thank you very much.

Nancy Finegood: Thank you for inviting me.

]]> Second Life as an Archaeological Tool (Episode 5) ]]> Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D3FA9C39-BFEF-B9AA-A335D0191F492E51.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D3FD34AC-BB2F-3ADD-89E347A25CCC69AD Second Life as an Archaeological Tool (Episode 5) National Park Service Kevin Ammons speaks with Ruth Tringham, one of the founders of the University of California Berkley the People in Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology at Berkley (MACTiA). As a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkley Ruth uses an online virtual environment called Second Life in her teaching. 739 no full 5

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Kevin Ammons: Welcome Ruth! How did you find yourself at Berkley exploring the notion of Second Life as an archeological tool?

Ruth Tringham: Well it sort of developed out of my work with digital forms of visualization things like multimedia 3D modeling and of neolithic archaeological sites in southeast Europe and in Anatolian more recently with Çatalhöyük. I actually did know anything about Second Life. It must of been in the early 2000’s because I had been doing this visualization multimedia stuff for – all through the 90’s – at least the last part of the 90’s. But then I was working with this digital technologist I suppose is not really that he is somebody who worked with museums and digital technology called Noah Whitman. He started working with us on a project called Remixing Çatalhöyük and I can tell you about that a little later but while we were working on that, which was really a method of sharing our Çatalhöyük media database with the public, he introduced me to Second Life. He said, “Have you seen this? You might be interested in this.”

Ruth Tringham: And so I of course immediately said “Oh my God, it’s exactly what I have been waiting for!” And it was! And it was early in 2007 that our team UC Berkley with the students, archaeologists, and media specialist began using Second Life to develop a virtual reconstruction of this iconic Neolithic settlement at Çatalhöyük in present day Turkey and the way this project was conceived was as complimentary to this concurrent project of Remixing Çatalhöyük which is this online exhibition and resource. So we purchased our virtual island. We were so enthusiastic about it that we actually purchased a virtual land thanks to our contacts in the UC Berkley information technology service.

Ruth Tringham: We were especially thankful of the support of this guy called David Greenbound and we named it Okapi Island which might seem weird because what is Okapi which is an east African animal got to do with Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Okapi Island island is actually named after our sponsor which is the open knowledge and the public interest program who the that was our program that was creating this Remixing Çatalhöyük the sharing of Çatalhöyük through open knowledge software. Open knowledge the idea that all of our data should be sharable through a Creative Commons License, a Share Alike attribution but it is ambiguous whether we would allow it for commercial use. But the problem at this point is that these media and the data and everything else that we do is sharable without the constriction or the copyright or the royalty type of license.

Ruth Tringham: So that was what Okapi Island is all about as well. So the team meets face to face Okapi Island team meets face to face every week in our computer laboratory call the MACTiA, the People in Multimedia Authoring Center for Teaching in Anthropology at Berkley. In world we meet on our virtual property in Second Life. Actually, currently one of our undergraduate students team member is leading these meetings through teaching a decal, what is called a decal course at Berkley, for ten registered students. Decal course is short for democratization of teaching. So I sponsor this course but I do it since I am on sabbatical I do it off in world in Second Life from my home. And I’m doing it along with my college and archeology and new media doctoral student Cally Morgan and she and Noah Witman and our long time colleague Michael Ashley. We find that Second Life is the potential as a way of embedding archaeological research that is its database and its interpretations in a game like environment.

Kevin Ammons: What exactly is Second Life?

Ruth Tringham: It’s an online environment that has game-like immersion and social media functionality without game like goals and rules they say that at the heart is a sense of presence with others at the same time and in the same place and I think that is a really good way of describing it there is another definition which was provided by this group called move nations moves I do not know if you know that Second Life is a move its stands for m-u-v-e that is it stands for massively multi use of virtual environment and there are others there are other worlds like Second Life but not as open.

Ruth Tringham: They include things like open crochet there is one called Open Sim, there is once called Twinity and there another called THERE. That is t-h-e-r-e not t-h-e-i-r. And then there is another one called Coniva. I have not actually visited any of these. I know that I have visited Open Sim and it’s open source unlike Second Life which is propriety. Open Sim has much of the characteristics and even the interface of Second Life but it is its actually a little more difficult to use.

Kevin Ammons: What is it about Second Life that you think people find compelling?

Ruth Tringham: I love that question. That is because there are some things which are quite compelling and it depends on who you are whether you are going find these things compelling. I find the some of the compelling things I have talked about the events the meeting my colleagues and being able to talk to my colleagues in place in Second Life I find this very compelling. I find this whole creating a community of your island and of the people who come and visit I find that really compelling. When I am visiting a place I find that one of the things that I hate are places that are empty and there is something creepy about Second Life that will put people off and that is that if there is not any events going on. You go to visit a place your likely not to find anyone there except perhaps some of these none non player sims which I find as creepy as no one being there. So I find these empty places very, very repelling and I do not know the answer to that is but to have constant events or to at least have the idea that this island is not abandoned.

Ruth Tringham: There (should be) signs up there (that there) is going to be an event here at such and such. We do not do this. We should. I wanted us to have an event. Some kind of an event at least each month. We have not done that. We’ve had a couple each year and I think that to really make an island popular and not repelling you need to have some kind of activity there that everyone knows about each month. We tend to so to have this idea that this place is not empty because that will put people off the creepiness of the empty places I think going along with that if you visit a place and there’s nothing to do there or nothing really there is not much guidance there. You’re not sure what’s going on you just sort of twitter around you move around and birds are twittering and oh it is very beautiful and the wind is rustling people say this is poetic and so is lovely and I don’t find it myself very attractive. Many people do but I don’t. If there are assets, that can be things like gestures or scripts, available for free there are some some sites like that I find these great what I find repelling is where people are trying to make money out of there out of there building or or even money out of something else there actually trying to sell I find the commercial sites quit repelling about Second Life some people don’t some people find this is as fun as eBay or something like that I’m not an eBay person so you can see I don’t really go for any of this buying in Second Life.

Kevin Ammons: What can Second Life offer archaeologist in the realm of interpretation that other traditional approaches can not?

Ruth Tringham: One of the things about Second Life is that you as a residence you can create your own game like place context you can create buildings you could create. They won’t look as good as some of the game engines, but they are you do have it in your power to create these built environments and so that is one of the things which can really attract people. I think like heritage professionals possibly to use Second Life rather than to try to use something like some of the more famous game engines.

Ruth Tringham: I mean the famous game engines they are just beautiful they are just fantastic and I would love to do that. But if you remember Myst, the Myst stuff is very beautiful but the movement through it is for the most part quit clumsy.

Kevin Ammons: Is this something that you imagine will be possible for archeology when you embarked on your new career as a new professor?

Ruth Tringham: When I started excavating or when I started being a professional archaeologist in the 1970’s I’ve dreamed of being able to enter my data and write on my own computers and so I dreamed of that and in the 1980’s I got my own computer and could enter my own data into an Excel or something like that whatever the equivalent of Excel was later on and in the 1980s I dreamed I would be able to create models of Neolithic buildings in three dimensions like architectural cardboard models and that I would be able to model prehistoric scenes and access. That’s what I dreamed in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2002, I was in a conference talking about game engines. There were these gamers at this conference called Siggraph Campfire and I was invited to go there with Michael Ashley because we’d been working on these hypermedia things about archeology and bringing in three dimensional imagery into thinking about places in the past. So we were invited to this 2002 conference and there were all these gaming people and laser scanning people and high tech people who showed us what they could do.

Ruth Tringham: I went to another conference in 2003 in Vienna right they were using Unreal, thinking about using Unreal for archaeology. I was “Oh my God, it would be fantastic to use a gaming engine to try to think about all of the alternatives paths that people could take through their life histories!” Whether we were thinking about life histories of buildings and life histories of people and places and things for archaeology, wouldn’t it be great to embed these ideas into a game engine?

Kevin Ammons: What was the most difficult thing for you in using Second Life for archaeological interpretation?

Ruth Tringham: It is difficult. Like any modeling program, it has challenges and frustrations. But you don’t have to be a complete computer geek to do it, which is what really makes it different from many of the other MUVEs. It also makes it different from using the game engines. With game engines you have to be a real computer specialist for that. This mean going into a very different sphere of money and interaction. I mean, okay, so you have to pay for your Second Life island if you want to build on it, but you can actually always visit some of these free buildings to mess around in their sandboxes. You can come to Okapi Island and build whatever you like in our sandbox and it’s big enough to experiment. You could build a small model that would stay persistent if you wanted, so that don’t have to have your own land to build. Again, this makes it very different from many places. One of the things that I am always sorry about in Second Life is that I can’t make life messy enough. I can’t make the surfaces messy but that’s the same in any computer (virtual reality). They can’t even make the places messy with all of the the fancy gaming engines.

Kevin Ammons: Ruth thanks for joining us today.

]]> National Park Service Geophysics Training at Los Adaes (Episode 4) ]]> Fri, 29 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D3C32946-E445-4AC7-6A2920B2599B1F01.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D3D0F88B-0017-46AE-6CFAC1E0F9F97233 National Park Service Geophysics Training at Los Adaes (Episode 4) National Park Service NCPTT staff go on-site to the National Park Service 19th Annual Workshop on Geophysics and the Technology of Archeology. 633 no full 4

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I’m David Morgan, and I am the chief of archeology and collections at the National Center for Preservation, Technology and Training. And we are out here at the state historic site Los Adaes, which is a late 18th century colonial fort and mission where Steve De Vore from the Midwest Archeological Center from the National Park Service is hosting his 19th annual course on geophysics. And what we are doing is using a variety of instruments that rely on principles of geology and physics to try and locate archeology features without having to disturb the earth.

Steve has assembled about 10 different instructors and about 18-20 different participants here that we are hosting for classroom opportunities at the National Center and then we are using Los Adaes as a field-training site out here. And it ranges from everything to power parachutes flying thermal cameras to ground penetrating radar, electrical resistively, conductivity, magnetism. We are essentially using all the things we can borrow from earth sciences to image things below the ground without actually having to dig.

I’m Steven De Vore. I am an archaeologist with the National Park Services Midwest Archaeological Center. This is part of a workshop that we have been putting on archaeological perception using a variety of different kinds of geophysical tools and other types of remote sensing to have an idea what is under the ground prior to doing excavations or in lieu of doing excavations.

In the long run getting the information out to people that these things, that we can cover a substantial area. I can do with some of the magnetometers; you can cover 6 to 10 acres a day. If you go with just a shovel testing with just a group of three, which would basically, what a geophysical crew would amount to. I don’t think you could shovel test that much area in one day and be able to deal with all the material you would be coming up with. In fact, I am almost certain you can’t.

In excavations, in order to excavate you are removing materials from the ground. If you don’t take good documentation on what you are doing then you are going to lose that information. With the geophysical information, we aren’t removing anything from the ground. We are just looking at what’s buried in the ground, looking at the physical properties that they represent. Now sometimes the interpretation may get we may have problems with that. It may not be quite what we thought it was. But then again, the data is there and people can look at it and they can come to their own conclusions.

It is fairly cost effective. You can cover large areas in a short time. You can process it. You can have it available overnight, next day you can come out in the field and have it all in one map so you can see what is going on, you can actually then ground truth it, check spots, see what those things are. What those anomalies are, see what the other features are. And it helps to further interpret the site.

I’m Rinita Dalan and I work at University Minnesota Moorhead in Moorhead, Minnesota. Hopefully if we have some nice anomalies that the surface surveys are finding then we will put the down-hole in for some of those anomalies and get some information on a vertical event you know, where do they start and where do they stop and we wont have that information from the surface surveys. We will get some information on if there is layering within them. If we put some down-holes close together maybe we can get some horizontal extent in. We can say something about the strength of that anomaly and then compare it to some across the site or maybe at some other sites.

So we can have a signature for something to look for. We can even model what maybe what a magnetometer would expect to see. So we could get a lot of information that could help us interpret those other surface surveys. We often see layering in archaeological sites, cultural layers, house floors, occupation layers. We see layers in soils at different horizons. As it turns out this property is very sensitive to a lot of environmental variables like climate and time, people how they affect the soil. And so there is a potential to learn about those things by studying this property. So ya. When we look underground it hardly ever is homogeneous. It would be a pretty easy problem for geophysics if it was. It often is layered and so it is good to know that to know how it affects other methods. And to just learn about that. Archeologists are all about stratigraphy.

That is what we record. We want to know that layering.

I’m Andrea White and I am the Greater New Orleans Regional Archaeologist and so I am affiliated with the University of New Orleans and also the division of archaeology regional program. I chose to come to the seminar because working in an urban environment; I wanted to see what types of options I had with remote sensing equipment. What types of options I had that had deep deposits and very complicated deposits, multicomponent sites and so I wanted to see what options I had in terms of the different types of equipment, but you never know where you might end up in the future so it is always good to have an interest and knowledge with these types of things so you will know how to talk to people who you might hire to do these types of things.

What I like about here what I think is really cool it is almost like an exhibition except it is at a really cool archeological site. So we can go around to all the different venders and remote sensing operators and talk to them about their equipment, what are the price ranges of some of the equipment, what they do, what sites they are good at, what sites they might not be so good at and you get to see and actually use some of the equipment. So I think that is kind of neat. To see how things would work and see how functional it is like in a real live field setting. So far I have found the ground penetrating radar to be pretty useful. It can give you time slices or depth slices where you can actually see the different deposits. So I think that is kind of neat and might be something that is applicable to the type of environment I work with as an archeologist. Well, I think in addition to learning the different remote sensing technology, you also get to meet a lot of different people, and I think that is a plus. You get to make connections and I think that is a benefit as well. It also makes it more fun too.

My name is Dennis Jones and I work with the Louisiana Division of Archaeology which is part of the department of culture, recreation and tourism. The work that I do with the division of archaeology. There is a lot of research that goes on in advance of development it is called contract archaeology and it is required by federal and state law. And increasingly use of remote sensing and geophysical techniques are important for archaeological sites or in planning out to study preserving archaeological sites. And I needed to familiarize myself with these various techniques and technologies so when I encounter them with people doing them I’ll understand how they are doing them and if they are doing them correctly and sufficiently.

My name is Kris Lockyear and I am a lecturer of Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology University College London. I came on the course as a student five years ago and enjoyed it so much I persuaded them to invite me back as an instructor and I come back every year since. So it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday, but it is good fun. I teach resistance survey which is a method that works by passing an electric current through the soil and measuring variance in the resistance of that electric current which you can then plant on a map to give you plans of walls and ditches and so on. That is the technique I mainly use on my site. But they should have a really good feel for the variety of different techniques available. Their strengths and weaknesses. When you would use them. How much they cost. Realistic appreciation of what they are going to get out of it.

The downside of programs like CSI is you get this picture of a skeleton in the GPR data. The GPR data never actually looks like that. It is completely sort of false. So a realistic appreciation of what the techniques can do. The sorts of situations when you can use them and that sort of thing. And then to know enough of one technique or commission someone else to do it and be able to talk the same language as a specialist so they get the right technique for the right assignment. I get to see lots of bits of technology that I wouldn’t normally get to see in my daily rounds of things. I have never been anywhere with so much kitty in one place before. Because people bring their latest equipment I get to see the newest models and things. It is a really easy way of me keeping up with developments in the field. The other big thing I get is to be able to meet with other like-minded archeologists and get to talk them about problems and issues. Get to show them things I have been doing and them show me things they have been doing. And just the fun of doing it actually. I quite enjoy this week.

]]> Rapid Documentation of Historic Resources (Episode 3) ]]> Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/D3A6208D-01F1-CD0B-30CF95BBE7D2D029.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-D3AB30FE-0844-ED3E-5C511D6D894C8234 Rapid Documentation of Historic Resources (Episode 3) National Park Service Kevin Ammons speaks with Dr. Barrett Kennedy, professor of architecture at Louisiana State University College of Design. 882 no full 3

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Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I’m Kevin Ammons and today we are talking to Dr. Barrett Kennedy, professor of architecture at Louisiana State University College of Design.

Kevin Ammons: Dr. Kennedy is working with NCPTT to develop a strategy for the rapid documentation of historic resources. Welcome to podcast, Barrett.

Barrett Kennedy: Hey Kevin. It’s good to be here.

Kevin Ammons: Last time I saw you, Barrett, you were hovering precariously about 30 feet over Front Street in Natchitoches with a camera. Was that related to this new technique?

Barrett Kennedy: Yeah, that’s right, Kevin, but as I recall, it was your folks at the center that got me sky high over Cane River Lake. It was all strictly in the line of duty I guess, but let me you, it was a perspective rarely equaled in Louisiana.

But the project that we’re talking about involved improvements to stabilize the road bed, upgrade utilities and add some barrier free access components to Front Street. It was a classic conflict of interest between preservation and progress, and the work threatened the historic integrity of the street with its distinctive pattern brickwork. Natchitoches was looking for a way to quickly, accurately, and of course inexpensively document the existing appearance of about 4 blocks of historic brick paving. Project was set and on ready and time was of the essence, so we really were coming in on the last moment.

I’d been working on a rapid documentation project with the NCPTT, so on behalf of the city and the Cane River Heritage area, the center approached me with the Front Street problem. Well we were glad to rise to the challenge and we decided to use some technologies that we’d been working with, which were GPS enabled digital cameras as a means to comprehensively document all of the paving in the project zone.

What we did was place reference targets on the street surface and used a bucket lift, or a cherry picker, to position a photographer at an elevation of about 40 feet above the street, and then we systematically moved the lift along the street, capturing high resolution digital imagery. We were then able to take those images and load them into a GIS system and create a dimensionally accurate, spatial photo mosaic of the Front Street brick work.

The images were also loaded into Google Earth to facilitate access to that photographic record. The photo mosaic could then be used to guide the process of relaying the historic brick and replicating the distinctive patterns once all of the other roadway improvements were completed. Kevin, I understand that the finished street work looks good and the project represents a successful balance between preservation and safety.

Kevin Ammons: Your current project with NCPTT is to develop and test geospatially enabled digital video documentation. Wow, that’s a mouthful. Can you walk us through it?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, I’ll try, Kevin. You’re right, it is a mouthful, but conceptually it’s pretty simple. It’s a natural progression from the use of GPS enabled still photography that I was just talking about.

The difference is that we are substituting a digital video stream for the still imagery. In this sense, the geospatial video refers to the melding of video and GPS technologies. The data collection equipment that we use enables us to embed a GPS data stream, or in other words, location data, on one of the audio tracks of the digital video tape. We can still include a recording of commentary or other environmental sounds on the other audio track as a supplement to that audio/video record.

Kevin Ammons: What exactly is spatial data?

Barrett Kennedy: Well the term spatial data indicates data that references location relative to space and time. So it’s a geographical construct of latitude, longitude, altitude, and date, for example.

The spatial reference allows us to use a GIS system to manage multiple, diverse layers of information, in relationship with a global relation or physical place. Maps are a useful and familiar way of representing and visualizing these multidimensional layers of information in a GIS system. For example, Google Maps and Google Earth are components of a simple, user-friendly spatial data management system.

Kevin Ammons: How did this collaborative effort with NCPTT begin?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, Kevin the operational premise is that documentation is fundamental to successful heritage conservation, and accurate fulsome documentation is essential for the integration for heritage conservation into a broad range of resource management and planning activities, particularly in places that are subject to a high risk of human induced disaster.

So, what we were looking for was a means to rapidly and inexpensively capture the data that characterizes large areas, for example, extensive cultural landscapes, streetscapes, and historic districts. Examples of this might include Cane River National Heritage Area or one of New Orleans’ many National Register historic districts.

Well, we’ve worked with the NCPTT on several internet related information management and distance learning projects over the past ten years or so and felt like the center would be a natural partner for this project. Consequently we applied for and received support from the Preservation Training and Technology grants program to explore how emerging spatially enabled technologies could advance resource documentation methods and facilitate better informed heritage stewardship. Importantly, in a place like Louisiana, this also means informed disaster planning and preparedness.

So we were just mobilizing our project in August of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, closely followed by Hurricane Rita. So what was conceived as a research exercise to explore techniques for rapid documentation in anticipation of a disaster became an all too real incident response and mitigation challenge. Well, the U.S., as you know, never encountered a disaster of the magnitude of Katrina.

In the midst of the chaotic response effort we recognized that timely access to spatial data was absolutely essential in responding to the disaster, and as a consequence we developed the LSU GIS Clearing House to collect, index, and disseminate spatially referenced data to a variety of federal, state, and local agencies.

Kevin, I should mention that our team received a national award from the Association of American Geographers for these efforts, but to continue as we indexed the assorted spatial sets, we were frustrated that field collected data was inconsistent and too often incomplete and unreliable.

This affirmed our original premise that a new method for rapid spatially enabled data collection would improve the consistency and reliability of the data and make it more useful not just in disaster planning, but also, as we came to realize, in disaster response and mitigation efforts. We felt that the digital video was a key element in our approach because of its low-cost data richness and rapid technological advancement. So, working with a research partner from the University of Ireland, we acquired a prototype GPS enabled video system that was being developed for roadway and pipeline inspection applications.

We configured an inexpensive data collection system on this foundation that consisted of three video cameras with wide angle lenses and mounted these on suction cups on a vehicle so that they recorded the view perpendicular to the video, that is, each side of the road way and the road straight ahead as we moved down the roadway at about 15 to 20 miles an hour. We began testing this configuration in January of 2006 in the lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, which was one of the areas most profoundly impacted by Hurricane Katrina and Rita.

Kevin, at the same time we also explored the use of spatially enabled PDAs and digital still photography so that we could deploy mobile digital survey forms that ensured data consistency and rapid data transfer to legacy GIS systems. This represents the interactive data entry component that we’re currently working to integrate with the spatial video system.

Kevin Ammons: How is this technique different from traditional documentation strategies?

Barrett Kennedy: The fundamental difference that we’re talking about here is that we’re working with a digital environment from the outset, whether with a spatially enabled video, or the PDAs and the still imagery.

Obviously, this approach is going to be faster, far more robust, and more scalable than using paper forms, with the ability as well to capture spatial data, video and audio commentary, and other kinds of data in a digital environment.

Importantly, where effective triage is critical for the protection of threatened resources, this configuration can be quickly employed to disaster scenes, ensuring the rapid collection of data, which in turn, can be uploaded to internet enabled GIS systems for analysis by experts off-site. In other words, analyzed by folks virtually anywhere in the internet world.

Kevin Ammons: Is this only useful in disaster context?

Barrett Kennedy: No, Kevin.

Remember, we originally conceived this of approach as a way to rapidly and inexpensively document landscapes and streetscapes as part of a proactive strategy of anticipating threats to heritage resources, whether those threats might be slow and incremental or sudden and cataclysmic.

The idea is to capture the data, then return to the office and do the analysis on an as needed basis. The appropriate expert can review the data stream and supplement the database with their analysis. As I said earlier, we see documentation as a key to preservation, so the more effective we are in anticipatory documentation, the better prepared we’ll be for planning efforts and disaster response efforts.

Kevin Ammons: Any particular problems associated with this technique?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, yes, Kevin. Since we don’t have the resources of Google at our disposal, it has been a challenging learning curve for us.

But since we’re compelled to take this affordable, cost-effective approach, we’re reminded constantly to focus on really practical applications of these complex, rapidly evolving technologies. For instance, we’re asking simple questions that the information must approach and capture and how that might critically inform initial disaster response and mitigation efforts.

At the same time, as we develop a fundamental understanding of the technologies and their developmental trajectory, our prototyping efforts can help us better understand how we can effectively assimilate the technologies into our work processes and become more effective as stewards of our heritage assets.

Going forward, we know that we can anticipate higher resolution digital video cameras with crisp wide angle and telephoto optics, and we certainly expect greater sensitivity and accuracy in our GPS devices, as well as more robust information management and analysis systems with friendlier user interfaces. All of this technology is coming, but it’s the kind of prototyping that I’m talking about here that prepares us to take best advantage of the technological advances as they become available and affordable.

The data collection process is pretty straight forward and I expect that the ongoing advances in audio/video technologies will resolve many of the technical problems that we’ve encountered.

Even so, remember the project was conceived as broadly inclusive and the real challenge is in configuring a user friendly interface that invites participation of a wide range of area experts. These might be the historical architects, landscape architects, planners, engineers, historians, and others as well as a broad cross-section of public constituencies, from governmental agencies and preservation commissions to neighborhood associations and homeowners.

As we go forward, we will be looking for ways to meld the technologies into readily accessible, interactive applications that can deliver useful information across the internet to all of these constituencies.

Kevin Ammons: Are there opportunities for greater collaboration?

Barrett Kennedy: Well, what we’d like to do is test the approach across a representative range of sights and settings and bring a variety of disciplines together to interact and contribute to the developmental process over these prototyping efforts.

This means we’re actively looking for potential partners and projects that might help with the prototyping as part of an overall planning and management strategy.

Having said that, Kevin, I want to reiterate that we’ll continue to be interested in opportunities to respond to the rapid documentation needs that we encounter in the wake of disaster events.

Kevin Ammons: Barrett, thanks for being here.

Barrett Kennedy: Really, Kevin, it’s been my pleasure and I enjoyed the opportunity to speak with you. Thanks very much.

]]> Entry Level Landscape Management and Preservation Training (Episode 2) ]]> Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/4579823D-0F4C-7A4A-33ABC13D88C96CCD.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-458AD3B4-0D1E-B1D1-61646110997E58C6 Entry Level Landscape Management and Preservation Training (Episode 2) National Park Service In the second episode of The Preservation Technology Podcast, Kevin Ammons interviews Charlie Pepper who directs the Historic Landscape Preservation and Maintenance program 610 no full 2

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Charlie Pepper outlines the youth training program which has been successful at preparing young men and women for job placement. Pepper directs the Historic Landscape Preservation and Maintenance program at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation.

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Condimentum lacinia quis vel eros donec ac odio tempor. A scelerisque purus semper eget duis at tellus at urna. Nullam non nisi est sit amet. Cursus vitae congue mauris rhoncus aenean vel elit scelerisque mauris. Proin sed libero enim sed faucibus turpis. Pellentesque id nibh tortor id aliquet lectus proin nibh. In hac habitasse platea dictumst quisque sagittis. Id aliquet lectus proin nibh nisl condimentum id venenatis a. Aliquet risus feugiat in ante metus dictum at tempor commodo. Vitae justo eget magna fermentum iaculis eu non diam phasellus. Facilisis magna etiam tempor orci eu lobortis elementum nibh tellus. Quis vel eros donec ac odio tempor orci dapibus ultrices. Arcu risus quis varius quam quisque id. Massa tincidunt dui ut ornare lectus sit. Ut faucibus pulvinar elementum integer enim neque volutpat ac tincidunt. Nec ultrices dui sapien eget mi proin sed. Vitae proin sagittis nisl rhoncus.

Et egestas quis ipsum suspendisse. Nisi scelerisque eu ultrices vitae auctor eu augue. Fringilla est ullamcorper eget nulla facilisi etiam dignissim. Ultrices gravida dictum fusce ut placerat orci nulla. Commodo viverra maecenas accumsan lacus vel facilisis volutpat est velit. Vitae et leo duis ut diam. Aliquam ut porttitor leo a diam sollicitudin tempor id eu. Nisi quis eleifend quam adipiscing vitae proin sagittis. Sed augue lacus viverra vitae congue eu consequat. Mattis nunc sed blandit libero volutpat. Amet consectetur adipiscing elit ut aliquam purus sit amet luctus. Varius quam quisque id diam. Tortor condimentum lacinia quis vel eros. Gravida dictum fusce ut placerat orci nulla pellentesque dignissim enim. Sed felis eget velit aliquet sagittis id consectetur. Duis at consectetur lorem donec massa sapien faucibus. Non curabitur gravida arcu ac tortor dignissim. Elementum integer enim neque volutpat ac tincidunt vitae semper. Morbi tristique senectus et netus. Diam volutpat commodo sed egestas egestas.

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Quam pellentesque nec nam aliquam sem et tortor consequat id. In aliquam sem fringilla ut morbi tincidunt augue interdum velit. Sed arcu non odio euismod lacinia at quis risus sed. Quam id leo in vitae turpis massa sed. At risus viverra adipiscing at in tellus. Iaculis urna id volutpat lacus laoreet non curabitur. Ultrices sagittis orci a scelerisque. Purus viverra accumsan in nisl. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit aliquet. At quis risus sed vulputate odio ut enim. Arcu vitae elementum curabitur vitae nunc sed velit dignissim. Id neque aliquam vestibulum morbi. Sagittis vitae et leo duis ut diam quam nulla. Vivamus at augue eget arcu dictum varius. Venenatis cras sed felis eget velit. Ornare arcu odio ut sem nulla pharetra diam sit. Montes nascetur ridiculus mus mauris. In dictum non consectetur a erat nam at lectus. Ipsum dolor sit amet consectetur adipiscing elit duis. Sagittis vitae et leo duis ut diam quam.

]]> Who Wants to Preserve a Cemetery? (Episode 1) ]]> Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/podcasts/2A12274C-0CC4-7B66-A36C8A51AE1DB89F.mp3 https://www.nps.gov/podcasts/preservation-technology-podcasts.htm#episode-2A133271-B1DA-7E3F-CEA3B614FAB79EB8 Who Wants to Preserve a Cemetery? (Episode 1) National Park Service Kevin Ammons interviews Jason Church, a conservator with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Jason coordinates the Center’s very successful series of cemetery monument conservation workshops. 617 no full 1

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Kevin Ammons:Welcome to the Preservation Technology Podcast. I’m Kevin Ammons and today we are talking to Jason Church a conservator with the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training. Jason coordinates the Center’s very successful series of cemetery monument conservation workshops.

Kevin Ammons: Welcome Jason, I understand you used to live in a graveyard.

Jason Church: Kevin, that is true. I used to live in a graveyard. My wife, daughter, and I all lived in Laurel Grove South Cemetery in Savannah Georgia which is an all African American Victorian Rural Movement Cemetery. We were there as live-in caretakers for about almost two years. It’s always a good conversation starter at a party. “Well when we used to live in a cemetery…” It was a fun place to live we had good times there.

Kevin Ammons: Well most people don’t think, well I want to grow up and preserve cemeteries. What brought you into the field?

Jason Church: Actually I’m probably one of the few people that can narrow that down. Fourth grade North Carolina history class my teacher Ms. Lucas made us all do local history projects, and I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina and did a video tour of Oakdale Cemetery there in Wilmington. I got to know the caretaker he took me around told me all kinds of crazy stories and my dad and I would go there on the weekends and hang out with the caretaker. We even skipped school and worked together a few times to go. He took us in one of the mausoleums, the things a normal person wouldn’t get to see and I was always sort of interested and after that I did a lot of projects in graduate school. I did the graduate program in historic preservation at Savanna College of Art and Design and of course kept on focusing on cemetery. It ended up being a career.

Kevin Ammons: So tell us about the workshop. What are you teaching folks?

Jason Church: This year were covering all the basics we’re talking about cleaning techniques on stone, consolidation techniques, adhesive repairs, and both reinforced and unreinforced. We are also looking at patch fields and of course resetting a monument. And all of that this year will be focused on slate and brown stone which is sort of our unique spin on this workshop in the past we’ve looked at things like bronze, zinc, wooden fences, wooden grave markers, brick mausoleums, and vaulting that sort of thing. So every year it changes up a little bit and that’s good for the people that take the workshop year after year. We get the same people that occasionally will come back to get sort of the new techniques. This year it is being held in New England. It will be in New England this is the first time we have ever taken it to New England which is really important for us. New England is a very important area for cemetery conservation that’s of course the oldest cemeteries in the country and that’s where cemetery conservation really started was in New England so its very important for us to go there. We haven’t done it before and we are really looking forward to going there. It will be in New London Connecticut.

Kevin Ammons: I understand this workshop will focus on brown stone and slate. What made those materials so popular in New England and are they still used today?

Jason Church: Well they don’t use them as much today. There’s a few slate carpenters still in New England doing really beautiful work. That’s a very specialized thing that isn’t being used as much. I don’t know of any brown stone that is still being used but I could definitely be wrong about that. Slate and brownstone were really used especially in the slate because that was a very familiar material you have a lot in Europe, England, and in the British Isles. So it was sort of coming over with the people. They knew how to work that but it was also their material especially the brown stone that was very easy to get out of the ground so with minimal effort and not a lot of technology and tooling the pioneers of that area of the early New England settlers were able to carve and do some very beautiful work with the material. That was fairly easy to acquire.

Kevin Ammons: I understand the workshops have been held all over the country how do you determine where to host a workshop?

Jason Church: Well, we have moved this all over the country this is the 6th year we’ve done the workshop. We try to hold them in different regions to draw the people interested in this topic from that region. It works fairly well. We’ve discovered a lot of people from other regions also come for a little bit of a vacation as well and to see new thing and to look at new problems that they might not have. The reason we bring it to different regions also is to try to focus on different materials like the slate and brown stone of New England and the way that we choose this originally was areas that really needed. This issue of people who were calling us repeatedly saying were having a lot of concern in our area or a lot of interest in our area could you come here we have a lot of people interested we have a great case study for you to work at.

Jason Church: It changes because we’ve done so many of them now that now we have a large map of the US. I have mapped out everyone that we have taught classes to and were trying to start feeling in gaps where haven’t we been where haven’t we taught people and that’s sort of what’s helping us choose the new locations. Then we find partners in that and a really important thing to get us to come to an area is how good our partner is. We might not have the resource in that area so we’re looking for good partners who can help us come into that area and help us advertise help us learn that area that were going to hold the workshop at. Well as I said before it is hard to imagine folks wanting to work on cemeteries for a living yet the workshops have been going strong since 2003.

Kevin Ammons: What kind of people come to the cemetery monument conservation workshops?

Jason Church: Well that’s one good thing about our workshops we actually see a pretty wide diverse group. We have a real wide audience which is a real plus for the workshop because not only do you get to meet a large group of instructors we have a very small teacher to student ratio. We have anywhere from eight to ten instructors and we have the workshop at 32 participants.

Jason Church: So yeah, you get a lot of hands on time with each instructor but also you really get to network with other people that come from different disciplines and different areas. We get professional conservators. we get small church sections who maybe only want to do a few grave markers that you know have small cemeteries. A lot of people come in from national cemeteries that oversee pretty large groups of graves. A lot of city planners who maybe are not necessary going to do the work themselves, but they are looking to speculate the work out to professionals. So they don’t need to know what is the right way to do it, what should they be looking for in contract bids. So we have a really large group and of course we have lately a lot of retirees who are retired from some other occupation who are wanting to get into this in retirement age.

Jason Church: Genealogy is the fastest growing hobby in America right now so we are starting to get that baby boomer generation coming in to take these professional workshops and start doing it from time to time. Have these workshops branched out to other audiences too? Well when it started out we had just this three day hands on workshop like we will be holding in New England and that’s three days very intense hands on out in the field but we realized maybe we weren’t locating all of the audiences we needed. So we’ve actually branched off into three workshops in the series.

Jason Church: We have a much more hands on much more intensive five day workshop and that’s a week long. It takes a lot of time out so it’s really professional that really needs this sort of hands on intense workshop that covers a lot of complex issues.

Jason Church: But more important, we also teach a basics workshop and these are for a little bit larger groups. We take about 40 participants for these workshops. We hold them at different areas of the country as well and these are one day workshops that last about four to five hours. It’s mostly inside lecture with a hands on cleaning demonstration. In the inside lecture we talk about documentation of cemeteries. We talk about condition survey, how to identify the material that you’re looking at, and then of course the dos and don’ts of cleaning and usually a different topic each time we talk to our partners which are usually state preservation organizations on a different topic. Sometimes they want to look at well how do you do simple resetting or they want to look at trying to convey the importance of iron fencing or the importance of grave surrounds to a group.

Jason Church: The basics workshop really brings in that genealogist group. The small church sextons, a lot of DAR and Sons of Confederate veterans. A lot of groups like that that are really passionate about cemeteries who are doing the work and really want to know the right way to do it.

Kevin Ammons: Do you see any unmet needs or any other audiences out there that you plan to address in the future?

Jason Church: Sure there are a lot of materials involved in cemeteries. Most of our workshops are involved around stone and that’s one of the things we started branching out from to look at iron work, bronze, and zincs possibly start looking at more materials in cemeteries. We’ve done wood that sort of thing to try to hit audiences that maybe know about the stone work in cemetery but are maybe curious and need information about uh things like the fencing or the iron work. We talked to most groups. We do a lot of work with the Monument Builders of America that’s a really good group to work with cause they are really in the cemetery the most. They’re the ones there ancestors put the headstones in originally that sort of thing. So we done a lot of work with those that’s been a really good audience for us as well.

Kevin Ammons: Thanks for being here Jason.

Jason Church: No thank you Kevin.

Kevin Ammons: If you would like to learn more about the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training and the Cemetery Monument Conservation workshops visit our website at ncptt.nps.gov. Until next time, goodbye everybody.

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