Research – Page 4 – Preservation of Historic Winchester

Friday Roundup: Historical Articles, Applications, and Archived Video

We enjoyed the article “Thanks to the Internet Archive, the history of American newspapers is more searchable than ever” from Nieman Journalism Lab. While we don’t quite have anything of such importance or national relevancy in the PHW archives, we do enjoy searching the newspapers that are becoming more available for researchers. Two articles that stood out this week are a description of building a house that rotates to catch sunlight all day long, as well as a small slice of life on Christmas dinners on Braddock Street long ago. We have also had fire stations on the mind this week, so to nod to the ongoing adaptive reuse taking place at the Sarah Zane Fire Company building, here is a short note on the old engine donated to the fire company by the aforementioned Sarah Zane.

The National Fund for Sacred Places provides training, planning grants, technical assistance, capacity-building support, and capital grants up to $250,000 to congregations of all faiths for rehabilitation work on their historic facilities. Submit your letter of intent by March 15 to keep these places as an important part of our national cultural heritage. You can also register for an introductory webinar for the 2021 grant cycle on February 10th at 2 pm ET.

Applications are due February 23 for the Spring 2021 Fellowship ARCUS Leadership Program. This leadership development program is for anyone who identifies as an emerging leader in the cultural heritage, public history, and historic preservation movement. The Spring 2021 Fellowship workshops will focus on Developing an Inclusive and Antiracist Approach to Cultural Heritage Leadership. Learn more and apply at ARCUS Leadership Program: Fellowship Spring 2021 Application. Not interested in a fellowship? Individual courses are also available at arcusleaders.com.

Last, from the PHW archives, check out our Lunch and Learn lecture with Chuck Swartz on How to Green Your Historic Preservation Project.

Friday Roundup: Nominations, Grants, and More

Nominations are now open for the 2021 Virginia’s Most Endangered Historic Places list. The list features buildings, cultural landscapes, cemeteries and archaeological sites that face imminent or sustained threats to their integrity or survival. Nominations are due by February 26^th and can be submitted online at preservationvirginia.org. The announcement of the 2021 Virginia’s Most Endangered Historic Places list will take place May 11, 2021.

The National Park Service’s Underrepresented Community Grant Program (URC) works towards diversifying the nominations submitted to the National Register of Historic Places. URC grants are funded by the Historic Preservation Fund (HPF), and are administered by the NPS. Projects include surveys and inventories of historic properties associated with communities underrepresented in the National Register, as well as the development of nominations to the National Register for specific sites. Applications are due March 31, 2021. Apply via Grants.gov.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the Bough and Dough Shop survey for planning our 2021 event so far. The feedback survey will be used to adjust the event for the next year in regards to timing, location, and the types of artisan vendors you would most like to see. There is still time to voice your opinion before February 8. Find the survey online at SurveyMonkey.

PHW has been following the discussion on the Conditional Use Permit for the conversion of the Selma property to a bed and breakfast with an event center. As many others have noted, the bed and breakfast aspect raises no concerns for PHW and is to be lauded for finding a new use for the property without damaging its historic character. As a neighboring business, we are in favor of a review period and slightly restricted event capacity to see what noise and congestion may arise from the proposed outdoor events. If you have not, you may also want to review the agenda material for the request at the City of Winchester site.

We often find interesting tidbits while we are correcting text in the Virginia Chronicle. A short article on Fine Woodwork stood out for the mention of fine artistry, as well as the use of sycamore wood, in the RMS Queen Elizabeth. The ship itself has been lost, but happily, a promotional photograph of the “Canterbury Pilgrims” does exist. You can see what this panel looks like at Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History.

Friday Roundup: Links to Preservation Reading

As is usual following the Annual Meeting and the Fourth of July, we have been in “cleanup mode” at the PHW office, tidying up loose ends from the first half of the year and preparing for the next six months. With not much else to report in office happenings, we thought you may enjoy this selection of links to historic preservation articles this weekend.

Volunteers clean up historic alley in City with ties to the Underground Railroad – The alley, located where Canal and Caroline streets meet at the northern end of the Fredericksburg’s Historic District, may have led to a site where slaves crossed the river to their freedom at Union Army encampments in Stafford County. The cleanup may be the first step in bringing the story of this alley and the free black family that once lived here wider attention.

Should architecturally significant low-income housing be preserved? – One of the pitfalls of much modern construction, no matter how architecturally intriguing, is that it is prone to failures in both the mundane engineering and materials as well as the humanistic interactions people have with the building. The article goes in-depth in the case of the Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, NY.

Mysteries, skeletons abound under Virginia church’s floor – Graves are everywhere underneath St. Mary’s Basilica in Norfolk, VA. The voids were found by ground penetrating radar, confirming the oral traditions that the church was built over a graveyard. Although the find has delayed the needed renovations to the church, the congregation is pleased to turn their church into a small archeological dig site to better understand their history.

A lot is going on inside the historic preservation community, but you may have missed the discussions. The National Trust for Historic Preservation released their Statement on Confederate Monuments and highlighted a blogger working on Building the Mental Resilience of Preservation Professionals. On the Forum Connect, they also compiled Preservation, Social Justice, and Inclusion (Resources and More).

Schools remain a hot topic for the pandemic and the preservation world. University Business posted How to bring historic buildings new life and purpose for college buildings. Old Sterling Schoolhouse still Standing Today focuses on a center not just of education, but community, in Loudoun County. The school is hoping to be incorporated into a larger development plan; contact information is available at the end of the article if you can help. In more encouraging news, Plans for Old Mount Vernon High School detail hopes to turn the school into a multi-generational learning, housing, and playing uses.

Last, The Most Beautiful Mansions in Every State and From UFO Towers to Tsunami Clocks, Every U.S. State’s Most Unique Roadside Attraction can provide you a bit of armchair tourism this weekend. Stay safe and healthy until we see you next post!

Friday Photos and More

This week, we uncovered a stash of 30 more Holiday House Tour photographs while cleaning old files. The exact year of the tour depicted was unknown until some careful background detail sleuthing revealed the home was on Seldon Drive. With that knowledge and the database in progress cataloging our past tours, we were able to determine the images came from the 1990 tour “A Neighborhood Christmas,” the only year (so far!) Seldon Drive was featured. Enjoy this look back at the past in our Flickr album!

Holiday House Tour 1990 — One of the images from the 1990 Holiday House Tour held on Seldon Drive in Winchester.

As a friendly reminder, PHW’s 56th Annual Meeting is coming up on June 28th at 5 PM. The Annual Business Meeting will consist of the Proposed Bylaws Amendment, President’s Annual Report, and Election of the 2020-2021 Board of Directors. A full copy of the bylaws is available on PHW’s website.

Only PHW members with current dues who attend the meeting in person may vote on the actionable items. If you plan to attend the meeting, RSVP your name and number of attendees to 540-667-3577, phwinc.org@gmail.com, or on the Facebook event page. The meeting is capped at 50 guests.

The meeting will be held outside and no refreshments will be offered. Social distancing due to COVID-19 will be in effect. Wear face coverings and do not attend if you have been exposed or feel ill. Please bring your own seating. A livestream of the meeting will be hosted on Facebook. The meeting will not be rescheduled for inclement weather.

Last, we have a few curated reading links for you to enjoy this weekend along the theme of Juneteenth celebrations:

Early Photographs of Juneteenth Celebrations from the Public Domain Review

Stand for LOVE: 18 Museums and Historic Sites to Learn about Virginia’s Black History from Virginia’s Travel Blog

Take Free Courses on African-American History from Yale and Stanford: From Emancipation, to the Civil Rights Movement, and Beyond from Open Culture

Friday Roundup: RSVPs and Reading Links

PHW’s 56th Annual Meeting will be held on June 28th. The meeting will be held at the Hexagon House, 530 Amherst Street, beginning at 5:00 P.M. The Annual Business Meeting will consist of the Proposed Bylaws Amendment, President’s Annual Report, and Election of the 2020-2021 Board of Directors.

A full copy of the bylaws is available on PHW’s website.

Only PHW members with current dues who attend the meeting in person may vote on the actionable items. If you plan to attend the meeting, RSVP your name and number of attendees to 540-667-3577, phwinc.org@gmail.com, or on the Facebook event page. The meeting is capped at 50 guests.

The meeting will be held outside and no refreshments will be offered. Social distancing due to COVID-19 will be in effect. Wear face coverings and do not attend if you have been exposed or feel ill. Please bring your own seating. A livestream of the meeting will be hosted on Facebook. The link will be made available approximately one week before the event. The meeting will not be rescheduled for inclement weather.

For further reading and researching this week, we have a selection of links:

It seems many people are taking the pandemic time to research their homes and towns. Atlas Obscura has been providing a steady stream of informative articles on how to get started, including How to Dig into the History of Your City, Town, or Neighborhood.

If you are looking for early Winchester Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps to help with your research, you can find them at the Library of Congress. You can also look at other maps PHW and other local researchers use to date local buildings at Historic Map Works.

Do you like transcribing old documents or going on deep history searches? East End and Evergreen Cemeteries in Richmond are accepting remote volunteers to help make their documents more accessible and preserve Richmond’s African American history. Follow the links to register for Biography Writer, Cemetery Research, or Record Transcription.

If you are interested in similar efforts to document, preserve, and tell forgotten stories, you may also enjoy Architectural History Fieldwork Project Seeks to Find ‘Suppressed and Erased Histories’ and When Architecture and Racial Justice Intersect.

AmazonSmile customers can now support Preservation of Historic Winchester, Inc. in the Amazon shopping app on iOS and Android mobile phones! Simply follow these instructions to turn on AmazonSmile and start generating donations.

Open the Amazon Shopping app on your device
Go into the main menu of the Amazon Shopping app and tap into ‘Settings’
Tap ‘AmazonSmile’ and follow the on-screen instructions to complete the process

If you do not have the latest version of the Amazon Shopping app, update your app. Click here for instructions.

Friday Roundup: Annual Meeting Updates and Internet Reading

First, a quick update on PHW’s plans for the Annual Meeting in June. The expected date is June 28th, at our normal start time of 3 PM at the Hexagon House. The meeting will be a business-only event with a proposed bylaws amendment to allow for teleconferencing for meetings, clarify the mission statement, and minor consistency edits throughout. We will also elect the board of directors for the next year.

Because of the continuing restrictions on gatherings, the meeting will be held outdoors with spacing between people. No refreshments will be served. Only PHW members in physical attendance will be able to vote at the meeting for the bylaws amendment, but we plan to livestream the event on Facebook. More details and the proposed bylaws edits will be made available online in full and in a condensed version in your invitation. The Facebook livestream link will be made available approximately one week before the event.

Unlike past years, we will be keeping an RSVP list for PHW members who wish to attend so we can prepare for the proper spacing. Please respond at phwinc.org@gmail.com or 540-667-3577 with the number of attendees. This information will be included in your invitation as well.

We will still accept award nominations for a later event or for the next year’s Annual Meeting. Thank you to everyone who has made suggestions so far. Please know that your projects have been filed and saved for later discussion.

For your reading pleasure this weekend, we have a selection of links:

The Farmer’s Apprentice: African American Indentures of Apprenticeship in Virginia features a Frederick County document. At the end of the entry are the links to the Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative database and the transcription project Making History at the Library of Virginia.

To match the story of the plank house we shared on Facebook earlier this week, The History Blog has posted another incredible find beneath the floorboards of a private home in Norway.

If you’ve seen some interesting signs while you are out exercising or getting supplies and you like taking photos, the Library of Virginia is collecting signs from the pandemic for their collections of ephemera. You can find more information at RichmondMag or BoomerMagazine.com or visit the Library of Virginia’s Tumblr. If you just want to see the images, the Tumblr is the place to go!

History is a strange and twisting tale, and April White at Atlas Obscura highlights How the Influenza Pandemic Popularized Lemons. Without giving too much away, the article follows the tale of changing marketing strategies and timing to world events in 1918 turned what was once considered a luxury into a household necessity.

Friday Roundup: Memorial Day Weekend

The PHW office will be closed Memorial Day. Stay safe and healthy as you enjoy your long weekend! For your reading pleasure, we have gathered links for you to enjoy:

Protecting Family and Heirlooms – If you started organizing photographs or sorting through other family memorabilia and are concerned on how to safely handle or sanitize them, this blog from the Library of Virginia may put some fears at ease and help keep your precious documents safe.

More Than Maintenance: Replacing the Glass at the Glass House – The National Trust offers a peek behind the curtain for a unique window replacement situation at the Phillip Johnson Glass House in Connecticut. This is an interesting look at how defining architectural features that wear out are replaced sensitively in respect to the building, its furnishings, and its function as an interpretive site for most of the year.

Atlas Obscura offers two articles, Fun Ways to Get Kids Into Photography and Dig This: An Online Field School for Junior Archaeologists to whet your children or grandchildren’s appetite for skills useful in historic preservation.

You may also want to check out Use Online Time with Family to Record Family Stories from West Virginia Public Radio. Be sure to scroll to the bottom for additional links to help you get started with question suggestions.

One of the things I have enjoyed is looking through some long forgotten boxes and finding treasures inside. If you like that thrill as well, you might enjoy the story On the Hunt for National Treasures With America’s Archive Detective following the discovery of missing items and the effort to recover them with Mitch Yockelson. (Sometimes, though, the items are just misfiled!)

If you’re looking for a longer read, Public Domain Review recently highlighted a book Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time (1896). In addition to the highlighted summary of what to expect from the Review, you can enjoy the entire book for free online and see what other traditions you may not have heard of before.

Clowser House Painting — Larry Webb shared ten more photos of the exterior painting progress at the Clowser House. You can drive by to see the exterior yourself at 152 Tomahawk Trail in the Shawneeland subdivision off Back Mountain Road in Frederick County. You can see the other photos at our Flickr.

Apple Blossom Articles

To tide you through a weekend without a celebration, we have uncovered and OCR corrected a number of historic articles on past Apple Blossom celebrations on the Virginia Chronicle website. Don’t forget you can watch last year’s Grand Feature parade on thebloom.com from 1-3 PM on Saturday to recreate some of the spring festivities in your home. Stay safe and enjoy a healthy Bloom!

Rappahannock Record, March 29, 1928: “Apple Blossom Festival“

Highland Recorder, March 25, 1932: “Apple Blossom Queen of Family of Washington“

Highland Recorder, May 13, 1932: “The Apple Blossom Festival in Retrospect“

Highland Recorder, April 16, 1937: “Apple Blossom Festival“

Highland Recorder, April 12, 1946: “19th Apple Blossom Queen“

Highland Recorder, April 18, 1947: “Apple Blossom Queen“

Southside Sentinel, February 19, 1970: “Winchester to Present 43rd Festival“

Things to Do Online This Weekend and Beyond

We’re sure you may be looking for some activities to get your mind off the current situation. Luckily, many resources are being made available online to help ease your burden. Handley Regional Library has a webpage dedicated to activities for the whole family. If you’re of the historical bent, don’t forget their many local history resources available online (some require a library card and some are open to the general public).

If you are looking for more scholarly reading material, Project MUSE has a list of resources that have been made free to access. One of those publishers is the National Trust for Historic Preservation; the entire catalog of Forum Journals are available. The list of material and publishers may change frequently at Project MUSE, so check back often!

The Library of Virginia has also compiled a blog post of databases you can access digitally. These resources can be accessed at home with a Library of Virginia account. If you are looking for free access materials without an account, check out the blog post A Library Is More Than a Building for even more resources you can access at home.

Open Culture is also a fantastic place to find educational resources so you can learn and hone skills while you are in quarantine. We suggest starting with Use Your Time in Isolation to Learn Everything You’ve Always Wanted To: Free Online Courses, Audio Books, eBooks, Movies, Coloring Books & More and Live Performers Now Streaming Shows, from their Homes to Yours: Neil Young, Coldplay, Broadway Stars, Metropolitan Operas & More to get you started with their offerings.

While museums and other indoor entertainment venues are closed, at least some offer virtual tours. Check out 10 Historic Homes You Can Virtually Tour for worldwide sightseeing. Historic sites operated by Preservation Virginia and other locations in Virginia are available on Encyclopedia Virginia’s website. The Virginia’s Travel Blog site has also compiled a listing of virtual tours. You’re sure to find a new building or place to virtually explore!

Last but not least, if you want some visual entertainment, we have a YouTube channel to recommend. Some of you may remember episodes of About Your House with Bob Yapp. The show was filmed between 1996-2000 and aired on PBS channels. About half of the episodes are now available for anyone to enjoy on YouTube. To get you started, here’s a commonly asked question: repairing plaster walls.

Friday Roundup: Spring Events This Weekend and Beyond

On March 7 from noon to 9 pm, the popular St. Paddy’s Celtic Fest returns to Old Town Winchester (FREE!). There will be a wide variety of live entertainment at seven different locations and along the Loudoun Street Mall (weather permitting). During all scheduled performances, a percentage of the food and drink sales will benefit the SPCA of Winchester, Frederick, and Clarke Counties. The SPCA will also host Celtic activities for children ages 3-12 on the 1840 Courthouse lawn. Other activities and entertainment will take place on the Loudoun Street Mall. The Magic Lantern Theater will show “The Quiet Man” at the Handley Library at 12:30 pm. Click this link for the event schedule and more information.

The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley (MSV) and Handley Regional Library’s Stewart Bell, Jr. Archives will host the tenth annual Shenandoah Valley Heritage Day event from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 7, at the MSV. This free event will include two expert-led lectures, door prizes from Ancestry.com, and information tables hosted by ten historical societies and research organizations.

At 10:30 a.m., author and Library of Virginia Exhibitions Coordinator Barbara Batson will present “Where are the Women?” to discuss the challenges and opportunities tracing women’s history. At noon, MSV Curator of Collections Nick Powers and MSV Registrar and Collections Manager Lauren Fleming will talk about preserving and protecting textiles, such as quilts and samplers, and will provide insight into identifying and dating quilts. Both lectures will take place in the Museum’s Reception Hall. Those interested in attending the lectures are encouraged to arrive early as seating is limited and tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets will be available at the MSV Visitor Information Desk beginning at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Register by March 10 for Winchester Parks and Recreation’s Apple Blossom Wreath class on Tuesday, March 24 from 6:30-8:30 pm. Make a beautiful wreath in pink and green. Materials provided. For ages 18+. Fee: $35 city residents ($38 non-residents). Register online of call 540-662-4946.

Last, for your reading pleasure, the Washington Post covered the story of an amateur historian’s discovery of a graveyard in Harper’s Ferry, WV. In 1867, a military officer stated that “all the bodies of U.S. soldiers interred at Harpers Ferry” had already been moved to Winchester National Cemetery in Virginia. This forgotten Pine Grove cemetery may hold more Union soldiers that were overlooked, as some elusive archival records refer to co-mingled soldier and civilian interments in this graveyard. A grant for ground penetrating radar to explore the site for remains is one of the next steps planned to determine if bodies are still awaiting identification in the forgotten cemetery.

Mark you calendars for April 3 and 4 for the Limestone Launch and Book Sale for the revised copy of Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture. In addition to those books, we will host a small book sale of other new and used books (including copies of Why Old Places Matter) and magazines relevant to local history and architecture. We are still accepting donations for our book sale. If you have books or magazines in good condition to donate, stop by the Hexagon House between now and April. Sandra will be happy to look over your items and see what is suitable for the sale (tax donation forms are available on request).