Category: Informational Events

It will be a brief roundup this week, as we’ve been working on PHW membership renewal letters. If you’d like to skip mailing a check, you can pay online using a credit/debit card. You can find the automatic subscription form on our website, along with a link to make a one-time donation or a form to mail in with your check (just in case you misplaced your form). Thanks in advance to everyone renewing for the 2022 year!

It’s Virginia General Assembly advocacy season at Preservation Virginia. The bills they have identified as a priority can be found on their website. They are currently following the progress of  SB 158 and HB 141, Virginia Black, Indigenous, and People of Color Historic Preservation Fund, which will establish a grant fund to support and provide nonprofit organizations, localities, and state and federally-recognized Indian tribes eligible costs to acquire, preserve and interpret historic structures, cultural landscapes and archaeological sites important to the history of Black, Indigenous and People of Color. No such fund currently exists to support these resources. Its establishment would help to ensure the preservation of historic sites and resources from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities, which traditionally have not been priorities for state conservation grant funding.

PHW is working on producing a pamphlet covering the Hexagon House. Do you have questions about the house and its history you want answered? Drop us a note and we’ll try to cover as many questions as possible. We’ve touched up our house history with information recently uncovered and are looking forward to printing this spring. Stay tuned for more details!

Ever wondered about the type of architectural detective work we do here at PHW? You might enjoy Didn’t Used To Be a Pizza Hut for the saga of uncovering land use history of a weird-looking Pizza Hut in Landover, MD. It’s quite a chain restaurant tale hitting both recognizable names like Pizza Hut and Howard Johnson and some mostly forgotten ones of a bygone era.

Last, for a bit of documentation of Vanished Winchester, you may wish to look through the Winchester Towers interior photography album on Facebook from shortly before the building was demolished. Thanks for sharing, Matthew Lofton!

Oops – sometimes we save too many things in our bookmarks and don’t get to share them in a timely manner. To make things a bit more manageable on the back-end of blog post production and inspiration, here is a selection of links we’ve gathered over a few years (gulp):

From Strong Towns, here is a simple list of questions and attractive graphic titled Ask Yourself These 20 Questions to Make Better Decisions for Your Community. Many people seem to make impulsive decisions without thinking through consequences, and we encourage anyone who has had a thought of charging ahead on any decision to take a few moments of reflection and really consider consequences past your immediate gratification. If you need to make a lot of decisions and keep finding the decisions are not working out as planned, perhaps you should print out the graphic and hang it in some conspicuous places.

We dusted off our PHW PayPal Giving page this week. If you’d like to drop us a little monetary donation, you can use an existing PayPal account, or a credit or debit card. This function, as we just learned, allows for anonymous donations and PayPal covers your tax receipt.

History lovers, have you tried Wikitrivia? We checked it out over the snow days and had a fun time placing events and people along a timeline. Test your general history knowledge this weekend, and perhaps you’ll find a topic you’d like to explore further.

We’ve mentioned the photographs of John Margolies in the Library of Congress collections before, but Atlas Obscura covered his images of novelty gas stations across America in Fuel Your Imagination with Glorious Photos of Odd Gas Stations.

Ghost signs are a love it or hate it topic in historic preservation (personally, we love them). If you’ve ever wondered about the ghost sign on the mountainside at Harpers Ferry, check out The Sign Above the Tunnel for a quick history of the sign.

Black Businesses in Antebellum Virginia is a look into how freemen could become business owners – as well as underscoring how difficult such a path was and how it was not a guarantee their family could remain together and their business remain viable.

Is Winchester a “15-Minute Neighborhood” for you? Can you walk to most of your necessities in 15 minutes or less? (It’s close for us, but groceries are our sticking point, and probably yours, too.) We can see this process in the downtown, and in the recently-proposed rezoning for the North End, that we are heading toward this process of becoming more dense instead of expanding ever outward (due of course in part to Winchester’s limited geographic footprint). Strong Towns posted 7 Rules for Creating “15-Minute Neighborhoods,” even for areas that may not currently be set up to accommodate this ideal. We find this suggestion particularly resonant (and reflective of past building practices): “A 15-minute neighborhood may be dense, but the more important thing is that it’s fine-grained and truly mixes homes, businesses, and public spaces seamlessly instead of segregating them into zones. This is why we need to let all our neighborhoods thicken up incrementally, instead of building clusters of high-rises to meet the demand for new housing.”

Last, in keeping with our “West of the Blue Ridge” series, Native American Trails Key to Settlement from Mt. Airy News calls back to a few of our early installments in the series. Look for the Winchester mention!

It’s our first appreciable snowfall of the year, so PHW is operating from home today. Monday may also be suspect due to the forecast of more snow and freezing rain. While we work from home, you can still reach us at our email phwinc.org@gmail.com and we can answer most questions. Anything that needs further exploration will be answered when we get back to the office, weather permitting.

To hold you over on this winter weather weekend, we have a few items to share. From the Handley Regional Library, you’re invited to Family History Hunters, a group for those interested in discovering their family history. Whether you have years of experience or are just beginning your journey, this is the place to learn tips and strategies, find new resources, and share successes. The first meeting will be virtual on January 13, 12:30 PM and all are welcome! Future meetings will be February 10 (special beginner’s session), March 10, April 14, May 12,
and June 9. Join one session or all!

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a number of grant deadlines and events coming up – see if any of these can benefit your organization or preservation project:

• Grant Deadline (January 14): African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund
  Grants range from $50,000 to $150,000 for historic places such as a site, museum, or landscape representing African American cultural heritage.
• Grant Deadline (February 1): National Trust Preservation Fund
  Apply for grants ranging up to $5,000 that support preservation planning and educational projects.
• Webinar (January 26): National Fund Letter of Intent Intro Webinar
  Learn more about the upcoming National Fund for Sacred Places which provides capital grants ranging from $50,000 to $250,000.
• Award Nominations Due (February 17): National Preservation Awards
  Is there a person, organization, or project in your city or town that deserves the national spotlight? The National Trust wants to hear from you on how people and places are redefining preservation in your world. 

Last, for a bit of interesting side reading, you may want to check out “How to design a house to last 1000 years” part I, part II, and part III by Brian Potter. When considering the houses and buildings here that made it past the century mark, we see many of the same confluences of luck against fire, lack of natural disasters, durable building materials, and stable neighborhood uses or ability of a building to be repurposed to changing uses. The third part might be of the most interest to see how this person designed a building that might last 1000 years. What do you think of the final design choices?

Thank you all for joining PHW on this year’s adventure. We persevered through another round of the pandemic, managing to safely host in-person events for both our Annual Meeting and the Holiday House Tour and Bough & Dough Shop. While the Shop itself is finished until next November, a few PHW products can be ordered at any time through our online store. Of course, we continued our educational mission about architecture and local history through our image captioning project on social media, assisting homeowners in research questions, and coming out to events and speaking to other similar historically-minded organizations about preservation and history topics.

In preservation news, we have had two projects of note for the second half of 2021. In addition to the usual Revolving Fund house oversight, we have been delighted to put some of the salvage material in PHW’s holdings back into 609 S. Cameron Street (and a few other local preservation projects.) Our salvage holdings are a bit of a secret service. We are in no way set up to compete with Maggie’s Farm, but we have taken in some select local building parts over the years and are always willing to see if our holdings might have something you need for a project. We currently have an abundance of window sashes in various states of repair, doors, and a few mantels and light fixtures. We’re happy to do some basement spelunking with you to look over the items, but it’s up to you to get them back out of the basement and to your work site. Prices are flexible and go to supporting PHW’s operations (like this!).

We are also delighted to have partnered with the Godfrey Miller Home and Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church to support the maintenance needed for this special building. You may have gotten to peek in at the freshly-spruced up interior earlier this month during an open house event. They are still collecting donations to help with their expected expenses, the forms for which can be found here on our website. We’d like to see our members meet our donation of $10,000 and get the Home well on its way to a clean and safe exterior!

This year, we have also been collecting targeted donations for the Sherry Bosley scholarship fund, with which we hope to establish a scholarship for local students entering the historic preservation field, as well as donations made in memory of Dr. James Laidlaw. While we don’t have concrete plans yet for the Laidlaw donations, we hope to use the funds for something in partnership with the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, another organization the Laidlaws have supported over the years. If you’d like to make a last minute donation for your 2021 season, you can utilize PayPal to make a payment by debit or credit card (no PayPal account needed). If you’d like the donation to go toward one of our targeted funds, just write us a little note in the PayPal form and we’ll take care of it. You can also use this form to renew your PHW membership one time – just write the note that it’s your membership dues so we can record that accurately, as well.

We know there’s still a lot more work to do in 2022, and we probably don’t know of every preservation project or need that exists. That is why we are a membership-driven organization – it takes our members to help keep the board and staff informed and let us know if there are ways for us to help. Don’t be afraid to reach out to us at phwinc.org@gmail.com or 540-667-3577 and let us know what’s going on.

Stay safe, celebrate responsibly, and we’ll see you in 2022!