Tag: Informational Events

March is women’s history month, and PHW’s past is filled with women who believed in Winchester’s architecture and sought to improve the quality of our historic downtown. Perhaps none did more for PHW in our founding years than Katie Rockwood. Before PHW had an executive director, it had Katie, who worked tirelessly coordinating the original publication of Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture. Her coordination skills were also utilized in the 1976 architectural survey of Winchester (plus a few add-on surveys after the fact) that guided the National Register of Historic Places listing for Winchester’s Historic District, PHW’s targeted areas for the Jennings Revolving Fund, and Board of Architectural Review decisions. Much of the basis of the historic walking tours of Winchester still in use today came from her pen. Schools benefited from her knowledge and enthusiasm for Winchester’s buildings in their teaching curricula. She coordinated countless events and touched countless lives as she moved with grace and dignity through the often fraught trials of saving importance places for fifteen years.

Due to her importance to PHW, she features in a number of our history of PHW blog posts previously written. If you would like more details on some of the items she worked on, you may wish to read:

Surveying for the Historic District

PHW Is Gifted the Lozier House

PHW’s 15th Anniversary

Architectural Walking Tours Shed Light on the Downtown

The Assessments of Downtown

The Baldwin House, 522 S. Loudoun St.

PHW and Winchester lost Katie at the tragically young age of 44. To help keep her memory alive, a memorial fund was started in 1991. In 1996 PHW named its preservation award for outstanding work on a Jennings Revolving Fund property in her honor.

From the Winchester Star editorial on April 11, 1991 following her funeral: “Those of us who know Mrs. Rockwood only by that work [in historic preservation] cannot truly share in the grief of her friends and family. But the whole community — those of us who live here now and those who will live here in the future — will share in and benefit from her legacy.”

Preservation Advocacy Week -2021, hosted by Preservation Action & National Conference of SHPOs, is going virtual on March 8 – 11, 2021. In-depth advocacy training, policy briefings, networking opportunities for Historic Tax Credit advocates will take place March 9^th. Participants will be able to participate in virtual Capitol Hill visits March 10^th. Registration is now live, and to participate in Capitol Hill visits, please register as an “advocate.” If this is your first time participating in the conference, please email Michael Phillips at mphillips@ntcic.com to assist in connecting you with appropriate registration links and individuals coordinating the conference.

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The recent snowy weather is ideal for doing some reading in historic news articles. Like any good treasure hunt, you never know what you might find when you start a general search. While some searches turned up nothing, we stumbled across a deep rabbit-hole of stories related to the Hotel Evans on Piccadilly Street while attempting to find information on the Hotel Evans of Sharp Street. If you would like to follow the saga of attempted murders related to James M. Jack, son of the proprietor of Hotel Evans, the stories found so far are:

Jack Shoots Officer Down. (Times Dispatch, Number 17654, 16 August 1907)

Shoots Wrong Man. (Daily Press, Volume 12, Number 193, 16 August 1907)

Policeman Shot While Doing Duty. (Evening News, Volume 16, Number 40, 17 August 1907)

Shot Hits Policeman. (Culpeper Exponent, Volume 27, Number 19, 23 August 1907)

J. M. Jack Sent To Staunton Asylum. (Shenandoah Herald, Volume 90, Number 47, 22 November 1907)

Speaker Byrd Retained. (The Times Dispatch, February 25, 1913)

Mrs. Jack Recovering. (The Washington Herald, March 04, 1913)

Jack Is Freed by Pittsburgh Jury. (Times Dispatch, 17 May 1913)

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To lighten the mood after the above saga, a story for our friends in Stephens City: Remember when a Little Virginia Town was Taken by Polecat Army? (Culpeper Exponent, Volume 43, Number 27, 11 October 1923)

If you have a Winchester or Frederick County topic or building you would like investigated for a future blog post, drop us a note on any of our social media outlets. Results are not guaranteed, but anything we can find will be shared.

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.

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!