PHW – Page 39 – Preservation of Historic Winchester

Patricia Zontine

We were saddened to learn yesterday that one of our honorary council members and guiding lights at PHW, Pat Zontine, has passed away. Pat became involved in PHW during the early Jennings Revolving Fund years and helped to shape the program into the effective preservation tool PHW used to save houses in the Potato Hill neighborhood and South Kent Street. She is also well-remembered inside PHW for her work connecting Shenandoah University to the Old John Kerr building and helping to save that school from demolition as well. Her crowning achievement will always be the Kurtz Cultural Center, saving an “ugly” warehouse from demolition and transforming it into a hub of downtown activities in the 1990s. You may find her obituary at the Winchester Star, including information on the celebration of her life event at 124 W. Boscawen St. on February 3 at 5 PM. If you would prefer to hear her voice one more time, we were fortunate enough to have her as a lecturer with Gene Fisher talking about SU’s relationship to preservation. You may watch the video on YouTube.

Around the Internet: Deadly Wallpaper

With the repainting and interior spruce up at the Hexagon House, wallpaper has been a decorating topic of speculation. The quick and low-tech paint analysis revealed very few paint layers in most rooms, further fueling the suspicions the Hexagon House was likely wallpapered in almost every room for most of its history – as you would expect from a house built during the wallpaper boom of the 1870s. While having a bit of fun daydreaming about what patterns might have adorned the walls once upon a time, an article on a deadly book of wallpaper samples, appropriately titled Shadows from the Walls of Death popped up in my news feed.

This beguiling pattern would be right at home in the Hexagon House – but it could kill you.

The wallpaper samples are all genuine papers that were printed in the 1870s, and their deadly reputation comes from the arsenic used to produce the green hues in the patterns. The arsenic would flake off when brushed or be released when the paper became damp and spread microscopic amounts of the poison into the home. Healthy adults may not have noticed any ill-effects, but children could be killed from even a small amount of the particulate. Many people of the time dismissed the fear over green pigments as hysteria, and the exact cause of the poisoning took well over one hundred years to solve.

You can read more about the origin and spread of the vivid green, arsenic-laden paints and dyes from Europe to the United States at Jane Austen’s World blog and Smithsonian.com.

Once you have had your fill of the verified deadly wallpaper, you might also want to page through the trade catalogs on Archive.org to see more wallpaper samples and color plates of suggested room designs from 1900-1960. You may also enjoy some window shopping of other vintage patterns at Designyourwall.com. Those patterns probably won’t kill you, at least from arsenic.

Friday Roundup: Newspapers, Photos, Grants, and More!

First, an addendum to last week’s post on newspaper archives. We missed one provided through the Handley Library, Advantage Digital Archive. This archive provides OCR searchable text and full page images of some of Winchester’s more obscure historical newspapers, including:
Virginia Gazette (1787-1796)
Winchester Gazette (1798-1824)
Republican Constellation (1814-1814)
Daily Item (1896-1897)
Morning News Item (1906-1907)
Daily Independent (1923-1925).

The search functions are similar to the other newspaper archives covered last week, and browsing is available for those looking for a surprise or coverage on a certain day. We are happy to report a quick test search for “Burgess” turned up a new tidbit on the first owner of the Hexagon House, James W. Burgess, that we had not previously seen. It corroborated other accounts of his furniture business in 1870 (about the time construction started at the Hexagon House.) His furniture was used in the newly built home of John M. Miller near Middletown. The residence in question is likely the Cooley House, referenced in Maral Kalbian’s Frederick County, Virginia: History Through Architecture on page 93.

While reviewing some of the files being moved around for painting, we found some images that had not been scanned. Sixteen images have been added to Flickr, including eight that were attached to a display board for the Kurtz, possibly in a fundraising or open house event in the early 1990s. The remaining eight photos may include some duplicates of images already scanned from the slide collection on North Loudoun Street, the Virginia Woolen smokestack, and one image of the John Wall House at 11-17 S. Kent during demolition. You can catch the photos right at the top of the photostream.

As we are also working on the files during the office shuffle, we have made a few edits to our online directory of program and event files. While it feels like we started this index just yesterday with two boxes of Kurtz Cultural Center files, we anticipate adding an eighth box to the storage collection of programs and events from the last ten years. Although these files are of limited interest to researchers outside of PHW, this is a bit of a teaser for the next round of indexing we hope to tackle for our themed research files on topics or locations. No precise timeline is available (yet!) but the indexing will likely take place in the spring.

The National Trust has several grant deadlines approaching, including African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund (Jan. 31), National Trust Preservation Funds (Feb. 1), Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund for Historic Interiors (Mar. 1), and Johanna Favrot Fund for Historic Preservation (Mar. 1). You can see the full list and details on how to apply and what qualifies for each grant here.

Preservation Virginia is also taking applications for their Most Endangered Historic Places list of 2018. If you know a site worthy of recognition that is imperiled with damage, neglect, or development pressure, you can find the application and instructions here. Nominations are due by March 9.

How to Find Historic Newspaper Articles Online

Happy Friday! We are still deep in the throes of repainting, cleaning, and better organizing our office at the Hexagon House. Instead of us sharing something interesting this week, we want to help you find things that are interesting in your own research projects. Finding unusual historic accounts and articles in newspapers is a goldmine – and a never-ending rabbit hole. Unfortunately, some of the most comprehensive archives are paid subscription only, but for historic accounts, there are still ways to find articles online. If you are researching something a little off the beaten track, here are a few sources where you can start a free newspaper archive search. This can be helpful to find dates for an event you know took place to help narrow down a search range before resorting to paging through microfilm, or to find connections to topics you didn’t know to pursue.

First stop: Chronicling America
The Library of Congress’s historic digitized newspapers collection is a quick barometer on how much information you are likely to find in other online sources. When searching, I often have the best luck with a broad keyword topic, followed by either “Winchester” or “Winchester VA.” In many cases, this will turn up a story from a Winchester newspaper reprinted elsewhere. Commonly, stories have been picked up in Alexandria, Berryville, Charles Town, Richmond, Staunton, Stephens City, Washington D.C., Woodstock, and other nearby localities. Be sure to watch out for other Winchesters when searching – Kentucky is a frequent false hit.

Second stop: Virginia Chronicle
Many of the papers here are duplicated in the Library of Congress holdings, but a few are unique to this collection. Searching here can either turn up the same or nearly identical articles, but on occasion new or more in-depth accounts can be found. The Virginia Chronicle site also allows users to register and correct the OCR (optical character recognition) text files generated from the newspaper scans and aid researchers in future reading and searching.

Third stop: Google News Archive Search
Particularly the newspaper archives. Not quite as easy to use as the first two websites, but it has the advantage that it covers more recent newspapers – at least until the 1970s and possibly even newer than that. The advantage here is that any articles will likely be new and unique finds.

Fourth stop: Archive.org
The pilot program for newspapers is of limited use to Winchester researchers currently, but while you are here, you may also want to check out their other free text collections, which includes patents, fiction and nonfiction books, pamphlets and other ephemera.

Fifth stop: Newspaperarchive.com
If you are looking for something more modern and just need the text, I have had some limited success with this paid subscription site. Newspaperarchive.com provides OCR text transcriptions of the scanned pages, so while a free user won’t be able to load the scan of the newspaper, they will probably be able to get the gist of the text. There are options to browse the site, but for a search to just see what turns up, I often use Google’s advance search options for a string like “preservation of historic winchester” site:newspaperarchive.com. This random search turned up a 1982 newspaper article on our tenth Preservation Week activities, which I had not seen before. If you need to see the original page (for illustrations or to check the OCR text accuracy), you are now armed with a date and page for when you visit the Stewart Bell Jr. Archives or whichever archives is most convenient for you.

Sixth stop: Advantage Digital Archive
This free online archive is provided through the Handley Library. It provides OCR searchable text and full page images of some of Winchester’s more obscure historical newspapers, including:
Virginia Gazette (1787-1796)
Winchester Gazette (1798-1824)
Republican Constellation (1814-1814)
Daily Item (1896-1897)
Morning News Item (1906-1907)
Daily Independent (1923-1925).
The search functions are similar to the other newspaper archives. Don’t be discouraged if the OCR text does not return a hit on the topic you want – text recognition for older newspapers can be tricky. Instead, if you have a date or year range in mind to check an event, you may want to try the browsing option to read the scan yourself.

Happy searching!

Friday Roundup: Tax Credit Edition

Welcome to 2018! As you may have heard, there had been an open demolition request for 137 South Loudoun, the building most heavily damaged by the fire in February 2016, submitted to the Board of Architectural Review. We wanted to publicly share the news from the applicant that at the same time the Board of Architectural Review was meeting and discussing how to proceed on the demolition request yesterday, Part 1 of the historic tax credit application was approved by the Department of Historic Resources. The applicant will be proceeding to Part 2 of the application, and as such, the demolition request has been withdrawn.

This is a prime example of how the historic tax credit can help save endangered buildings. The tax credits will help make this project more financially feasible than it otherwise would have been, and the community can retain at least a substantial portion – and the most important portion for experiencing the downtown as a pedestrian – of the historic Italianate-style building. While there is still a long process ahead, we hope to see 137 South Loudoun Street recover and thrive.

On that note, while we mentioned that the Federal-level historic tax credit was spared the chopping block, we did note there was a change to the implementation. As of now there is no hard-hitting look at how spacing the credit over five years will impact projects financially, although there is expected to be some lessening of value. The National Trust for Historic Preservation recapped the changes due to the preservation community’s advocacy as such:

“This strong showing of support resulted in an amendment to restore the HTC to 20 percent. The amendment—offered by Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and cosponsored by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa; Pat Roberts, R-Kan.; Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.; and Tim Scott, R-S.C.—was accepted at a critical moment in the Senate Finance Committee’s markup of the tax bill during the week of November 13. To file the amendment, however, Sen. Cassidy needed to identify a way to offset the cost of the incentive. The solution was to take the HTC in phases over five years instead of in its entirety the year a rehabilitated building is completed. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that phasing the HTC in this way reduces the cost of the program by approximately $2 billion over 10 years.”

The Trust also notes what a remarkable and almost improbable feat it was to retain the historic tax credit, noting that “[o]f the more than 300 amendments offered, the Finance Committee ultimately approved only about a dozen.” We hope to see more of this good luck spread to other preservation projects in 2018!

Happy New Year!

We’re not quite there yet, but this will be our last post of 2017. Before you completely wrap up your holiday spirit, be sure to let us know your feedback on the Holiday House Tour in a quick 5-10 minute survey.

As you snuggle in for another holiday weekend, you may want to read up on the first photographs of snowflakes and read about the Feast of Fools celebration on New Year’s Day. If the cold weather has you down, you might want to read about the Victorian-inspired decorations in the Allan Gardens Conservatory.

Stay safe, stay warm, and have a happy New Year!

Happy Holidays!

As we wind down another year at PHW, we would just like to say thank you to all our members, supporters, and volunteers. 2017 was a year that saw a lot of changes, good and bad, and there is still much uncertainty in the future. We will be doing our best to keep you informed on what these changes mean, particularly in regards to the historic tax credit and other staple preservation programs that have made our work possible.

Our expected holiday schedule for Christmas and New Year is:
Closing at 3 PM on Thursday, December 21.
Closed on Friday, December 22
Closed on Monday, December 25
Opening at noon December 26-29
Closed on Monday, January 1
We will likely be out taking our yearly Revolving Fund photos either shortly before or after the New Year, depending on weather conditions.

We will also ask for your patience if you want to visit the Hexagon House over the next few weeks. The downstairs is currently being repainted, so the office is being shuffled from room to room as the painting progresses. We are very excited to see the final product, which will bring some of the interior colors in the downstairs more in line with colors that were historically used in the Hexagon House. We are looking forward to adding some interior decorating history to our guided tours in 2018.

As you know, we also love looking at vintage postcards and maps, and this year Atlas Obscura writer Jessica Leigh Hester delivered an entire collection of quirky cards with Christmas-themed maps in the New York Public Library. We couldn’t pick just one as our favorite, so take a look at the full article at The Most Festive Treasures of the New York Public Library’s Maps Division or explore other digitized treasures at the New York Public Library.

Friday Photos: Holiday House Tour

Happy Friday! We have several sets of images from the 2017 Holiday House Tour to share this year. To start, you can view the scrapbook images from the Cornelius Baldwin house that were playing on a slideshow during the tour. You can also do the same to the slideshow images that were playing at 125 E. Clifford St. On top of that, we have a general album with the room setup at the Bough and Dough Shop on Friday night and some of the houses on Saturday and Sunday.

If you haven’t yet, please help us out for next year’s tour and send us some feedback. Average completion time is about 4 minutes. We read and discuss all feedback and take it into account for next year, so thank you for sharing your thoughts!

Take a Quick Holiday House Tour Survey!

Thank you all so much for your support of the Holiday House Tour and Bough & Dough Shop. While we are still tallying final numbers, we had at least 400 visitors come through the event, and the overall Shop numbers were close to last year.

We want to keep building on this momentum! Please help us plan for the 2018 Holiday House Tour by providing feedback. The survey is estimated to take 5-10 minutes. All comments are anonymous and will be reviewed in our planning sessions in January and February. The online survey closes on January 31, 2018.

Click here for the survey on the 2017 Holiday House Tour!

P.S. – Mark your 2018 calendars for December 1 & 2 for our 42nd Holiday House Tour!

Holiday House Tour Wrap Up Notes

Thank you all very much for your support of the 2017 tour! Early reports are that we likely had over 400 visitors again this year. While we work on getting the feedback survey for 2017 finalized for Friday’s post, we wanted to update two things very quickly:

1. We discovered our old email address was still showing on PayPal receipts, and this may cause problems if you find an error in your checkout information. We found one more place the old email information was hidden in PayPal and flipped the setting. If you need to contact us for a PayPal payment double charge/dispute, the correct email address is phwinc.org@gmail.com.

2. As we were getting to the bottom of the donated paper bags on Sunday (thank you to everyone who chipped in!) we found a pair of prescription glasses in a black leather case in the bottom of the bags. If you are missing your glasses and think they might have been picked up in the donated bags, please let us know at phwinc.org@gmail.com or 540-667-3577. We will hold onto the glasses for a reasonable amount of time before donating them.