Historic Images – Preservation of Historic Winchester

Friday Roundup: Image Search and Free Workshops in September and November

424 and 426 N. Loudoun — Do you have an image of 426 N. Loudoun (unpainted brick, left) with a porch in place? Please share with us!

First, we have a specific image request to aid a local building owner. Do you have images of 426 North Loudoun Street between 1920-1950? Sanborn maps indicate a porch was once installed on the house during this timeframe, but by the time PHW or the Archives obtained photos of it, the porch had been removed (pre-1976 survey). If you have any view of this building that includes the front porch so we can get an idea of its appearance, please contact us!

The National Trust for Historic Preservation announced this week that they will be offering pre-conference workshops in September and post-conference webinars in November to extend the educational experience of their yearly PastForward conference.

These skill building workshops are free and open to all, and compliments content in the conference program. Registration is free and required for participation, however registration for PastForward Online 2021 is not required.

Just Do It! Grassroots Advocacy for Preservation
Tuesday, September 14 • 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Learn how stories, documentation, and outreach can be turned into action plans for preservation.
Understanding Climate Change
Tuesday, September 21 • 2:00-4:00 p.m.
This workshop provides clarity of definitions and terminology, describes climate concepts and outlines various strategies to address the impacts of climate on heritage.
An Introduction to Preservation Law + Easements
Tuesday, September 28 • 2:00-4:00 p.m.
This session provides an introduction to the legal mechanisms used to protect historic resources, including constitutional issues related to governmental regulation of historic properties, preservation easements, as well as federal, state, and local historic preservation laws.
Replacement Windows for Historic Buildings: Managing Compromise When Perfection Is Out of Reach
Tuesday, November 9 • 2:00-4:00 p.m.
This workshop will consider different levels of replacement and the effect of the materials used.
Amending National Register Nominations
Tuesday, November 16 • 2:00-4:00 p.m.
Learn how to amend existing National Register nominations to address untold stories and underrepresented communities.

Learn more about PastForward, including how to register for the conference, at SavingPlaces.org/Conference.

Friday Roundup: Winchester Receives a Grant and Old John Kerr

Winchester is the recipient of a $25,000 Virginia Main Street Grant for a comprehensive revitalization project of East Piccadilly Street between the George Washington Hotel and the pedestrian mall. The project is stated to encompass 12 façade improvements, 16 community-designed parklets, and a large exterior mural. This stretch of Piccadilly has been one of our highlights in the daily image caption project on social media due to the business history contained in this block. We’re looking forward to seeing these predominantly late 1800s commercial buildings get the same love and attention as their neighbors on the Loudoun Street Mall.

We were delighted to be gifted a few more prints of the first John Kerr School by Christy Broy at the MSV. One mounted on matboard was in PHW’s collection, and we had no idea any more existed. The suspicion is the prints of Bob Woods’ 1975 drawing were made as part of PHW’s efforts to preserve the school in the late 1970s. They were likely in the MSV holdings because Lee Taylor and/or Julian Glass were using them for PHW projects. (If you know any more details about how these prints came to be, let us know!) We anticipate having them available for purchase later, possibly at the Bough and Dough Shop or through some other venue. In the meantime, you can revisit the history of PHW’s involvement with the old John Kerr School with our Lunch and Learn Lecture “Partners in Preservation: Shenandoah University and PHW.”

Friday Roundup: Celebrate National Preservation Month

Happy Preservation Month! We hope you’ll take a moment to show your love for our local history and architecture with a few of these ideas and activities:

Visit the National Trust for Historic Preservation for a new set of daily informative activities you can do to celebrate this year’s theme “Tell the Full American Story.” There is reading material, videos, images, interactive maps, and petitions and letters of support you can join and share.

*Click to view the full letter. The donation form is at the bottom.*

The French and Indian War Foundation is looking for your help! The organization has launched a fundraising campaign to help them retire the debt on the Baker-Hardy House, and every donation will be matched by the Wilkins Family Trust. The Baker-Hardy House serves as the organization’s resource center, and the hope is once the mortgage is paid off, other long-term goals for interpretation can take place. See the letter and donation form image for more information and how to contribute to the campaign.

The four City-owned museums (Abram’s Delight, Hollingsworth Mill, George Washington’s Office, and Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters) reopen for the 2021 season on May 10th. Each museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 am-4 pm and on Sundays from 12-4 pm. Stop in and see some familiar faces, learn about our local history, and the view the current exhibit at the Hollingsworth Mill: “Quaker Families of Winchester & Frederick County.”

We have been captioning images on our Flickr page, and we recently had an unidentified building in the midst of demolition come up on our randomizing program for captioning. Our suspicion is the building may be in York, PA, based on the demolition sign on the building. The slide’s imprinted date on the cardboard is November 1979, and it appears we had a series of three images of this building from different angles to use during informative slide presentations. We suspect the image may have been shared with us by our preservation consultants from Pittsburgh who assisted PHW in the 1970s. If you are familiar with the York area and can provide any further information or possible context on this series of images, please drop us a note!

Help us recognize local preservation projects and preservation leaders by nominating a person or project for a 2021 PHW Preservation Award. We are tentatively hoping to host awards in June, and as such, the award nomination form has been updated. Projects completed between June 2019 to May 2021 are eligible for this combined round of recognition. Awards are open to BOTH Winchester City and Frederick County. People or projects may be nominated by anyone (including the potential award recipient or family member) AND you may nominate an unlimited number of projects. Applications DO NOT need to be complete, but should at least have enough identifying information that the project can be further discussed by the award committee. Return applications or suggestions to PHW, 530 Amherst St., Winchester, VA 22601 or by email at phwinc.org@gmail.com. Applications should be sent by May 28, 2021 for consideration for a 2020 or 2021 award.

Friday Roundup: Grants and Recreating the Colored Sanborn Maps

Before our weekly update, we wanted to share that the National Park Service has several grant deadlines approaching. The Underrepresented Community Grant Program grants are due March 31. Learn more about URC or Apply to URC via Grants.gov. The Historically Black Colleges & Universities Grant Program is also due March 31. Learn more about HBCU or Apply to HBCU via Grants.gov. Last, the Tribal Heritage Grant Program deadline is approaching May 5. Learn more about THG or Apply to THG via Grants.gov.

As some of you may know, when we returned to the Hexagon House in 2006 we uncovered a treasure trove of PHW articles that had been left behind in the move to the Kurtz Building. One of those items was the portfolio of colored Sanborn Fire Insurance maps that were used in our presentation to City Council lobbying for the creation of the Historic District. The maps languished forgotten in the basement at the Hexagon House in a damp spot and have been very badly damaged. In addition, the rubber cement used to mount the maps to display boards has also greatly discolored the paper and made the color-coding hard to discern.

Coloring of the assembled map commences.

During one intern program several years ago, we assembled the individual 1897 Sanborn map pieces into one larger map. At long last, we have unrolled this assembled map and begun the task of recreating the color-coding from the portfolio sheets on the wall-sized map. While it will not have quite the same feel of a portfolio of individual pages, we hope the fully assembled and colored map will provide the same impact of seeing the amount of historic building stock left in the historic downtown. (We must note, however, that we are exactly recreating the color-coding from the portfolio, and that work in itself was preliminary before the more in-depth architectural surveys of 1974-1976 took place. The color-coding is only for historic purposes and not intended to be a 100% accurate representation of the age, building material, or significance of any property colored or uncolored in the maps.)

Correction on the Construction Date of 201 North Loudoun Street

The Winchester Star has been publishing the bank building at 201 North Loudoun Street, most recently a Wells Fargo, was constructed in 1950. The Beaux Arts style building was actually constructed in 1903 for Shenandoah Valley National Bank. The bank appeared in a newspaper special on Winchester commercial enterprises published in 1904 and has been documented extensively since that point via postcards throughout the 1910s and ‘20s.

Shenandoah Valley National Bank 1904 — Shenandoah Valley National Bank, 201 N. Loudoun St., circa 1904.

For more information, you may also wish to refer to the 2011 architectural survey of the building, which can be found here.

Friday Roundup: History and Preservation News

The new state historical highway marker for Spottswood Poles, announced in March, has been installed in the 500 block of North Kent Street near where he lived. Poles was an outstanding player who was born before a time when his achievements could be more widely remembered. You can read a brief article on his career and life at the Society for American Baseball Research and check the Winchester Star article for more details on the new marker.

If you are feeling a bit disconnected from our local tourist spots, local 360 degree tours may help fill in the gap. The Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center has been posting videos on their Facebook page of local tourism spots like Bell Grove Plantation and Blandy Experimental Farm. If you’re feeling a bit shut in, you might enjoy a walk along rows of blooming peaches taken about two weeks ago:

Same video as a moment ago, just in full beautiful HD this time :)
Posted by Winchester-Frederick County Convention & Visitors Bureau on Friday, March 27, 2020

The Shenandoahvalleytv Youtube channel also offers looks at Apple Blossom time, Belle Grove Plantation, Patsy Cline exhibits, and many other events, museums, and activities in our area. Check out their quick (one minute and change) video on Route 11 potato chips if you aren’t feeling too fried!

Are you looking for more interesting images of Winchester’s past? we found a collection of images primarily of a horse and pony show, listed as happening in Winchester, that were taken for a Life magazine article by Edward Clark in Google Arts and Culture section. While we have not found the accompanying article, we’d be interested in sharing it in the future to put more context to the images – if you have any leads on the story this may have appeared in, please let us know!

Friday Roundup: Welcome to March

It might seem early, but artist applications for the 2019 Bough & Dough Shop are open! The Shop will be held at the Hexagon House between November 22 and December 15, 2019. With last year under our belt, we have a bit more information to share with potential artists in a small booklet with the application. Applications are also available online through Google Forms and printed copies will be available at the office. We will be reviewing applications for new artists starting at our March 11 board meeting. We do have one item to note for potential artists we may have spoken to last year at the shop but not had contact information to follow up – commission fees for 2019 have increased to 25%. We are still a no table fee and no application fee event, and admission to the shop is free for shoppers (or anyone curious to see the Hexagon House).

If you could not make it to the City Council work session to hear the discussion on the Conditional Use Permit for the old hospital site, the City Council meeting from February 26 is available for review on the Meeting Portal. The application is scheduled to return to City Council on March 12. You may also want to review HDP’s video of a 3D rendering of the proposed new construction. We hope HDP will continue to work with the neighbors and address their issues throughout this process, particularly exterior design and landscaping choices and addressing the uptick in traffic and parking.

For something a bit different, we have a link to a historic article on a topic that many people may not know about. We don’t talk much about Winchester Gas and Electric Co. in our history of Winchester despite its establishment here in 1853. By chance we came across an article this week that goes into some detail on the company’s history and its re-invigoration in 1922 after years of poor management and dilapidated equipment had taken its toll. Take a look at Reviving a Run-down Gas Plant in the September 16, 1922 Gas Age-Record for both a glimpse at an underappreciated piece of Winchester’s vanished history, along with numerous photographic illustrations of the town and the plant. Happy reading!

The Winchester Gas and Electric Co. buildings were located on the corner of Kent and Boscawen Streets where the Court Square Autopark is today. The stone wall still exists at the Joint Judicial Center’s Boscawen Street side. The wall was part of the fence of the Conrad House property.

Friday Roundup: Old Hospital Development and Further Reading

Warren Heritage Society is announcing new hours and rates for 2019. They are actively seeking volunteers to help with their new Saturday hours – contact them if you can help!

We know a number of our members and readers are following the development at the old Winchester Memorial Hospital site on Cork Street. From the Winchester Cit-E News from January 23, ” After much discussion, Council decided to table the item until the February 12th Work Session in order to allow Council more time to gather additional information from the applicant and to review public feedback.” You can find the documents relating to the application starting on page 94 of the agenda packet for January 22. There is much to read and digest here, but we recommend reading through the neighborhood concerns and worries to gather a fuller understanding of the issue prior to the February 12 meeting.

While the Old Hospital property is outside of the HW zoning overlay that falls under BAR purview, it is in our Winchester National Register Historic District expansion in 2015. Readers may wish to refer to the following publications for more insight on compatible new construction in historic areas:
New Construction within the Boundaries of Historic Properties
New Additions to Historic Buildings
Regulating New Construction in Historic Districts
Historic Districts: Preserving the Old with the Compatible New
Can Modern Architecture and Historic Preservation be Reconciled? The Definition and Application of “Compatible” as used in the DC Historic Preservation Act
And should anyone be looking for one of the essays printed in Old & New Architecture: Design Relationship printed by the National Trust, PHW has a copy of the book available in our office library.
Last but not least, we have pulled the PHW file on the 1990 rezoning of the Old Hospital site and we are happy to provide copies of our statements to researchers.

Looking to expand your historic image and content searches for Virginia and West Virginia? The Digital Public Library of America has a new hub service Digital Virginias, with more than 58,000 items from the University of Virginia, George Mason University, William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech, and West Virginia University. A quick search for Winchester in this subset turned up not just photographs, but also a wealth of medical records for West Virginia soldiers treated in Winchester and telegraphs exchanged during the Civil War. You might want to take a look at some of the school images from the University of Virginia Library in particular; they seem to show the original John Kerr School classroom in 1921. Let us know if you find something intriguing!

Friday Photos: Slides and Stories from the Past

Happy Friday! We had a great time downtown on July 3, and we hope you had a great holiday, too. This week, we have twenty slides to share, including some sites in Frederick County, some Kurtz Cultural Center images, and a few stragglers for the Simon Lauck House. Catch them all at the top of the Flickr photostream!

Since this is a bit of a quiet week, we also wanted to transcribe the article accompanying the oldest photo we are aware of for the Piccadilly and Kent Street intersection on the Central Garage. We believe the following article was written in late 1914 or 1915.

Central Garage and Machine Shop
H. B. Sell, Proprietor
Repairs, Storage, and Automobiles for Hire

That the wonderful development of the automobile will go down in history as one of the greatest wonders of this wonderful age, no thoughtful man can for a moment doubt. Every season improvements are being made and it would seem that perfection is not very far away, though many contend that the machine of the present is comparatively nothing to what the future will bring forth. Winchester is one of the best automobile places in the country, when its size is considered. With the famous and historic Valley Turnpike and other fine roads leading to it from every direction, it is a favorite stopping place for tourists, between the North and South, and hundreds of machines owned by local people. One of the most popular garages in the city, and the only one that is steam heated, is the Central Garage and Machine Shop located at the corner of Kent and Piccadilly streets, opposite the B. & O. passenger station, of which Mr. H. B. Sell is the proprietor. There is ample storage room for a large number of cars. The repair department is by far the best equipped and most complete in Winchester. Only the most expert and skillful mechanics are employed, men who make a specialty of automobile work, and keep in touch with every advance that is made in automobile construction. Mr. Sell is himself and expert mechanist and gives his personal attention to all work entrusted to his care. His facilities for repairing and making broken parts are of the best, much better than are usually found in a small city. He also owns a number of cars which may be hired at reasonable rates. In addition to his automobile business he conducts a general machine shop and most of the large plants in this vicinity, such as the Virginia Woolen Mills and the Knitting Mills are among his patrons. There is no job too intricate or too difficult but that he is prepared to undertake and carry to a successful conclusion. Mr. Sell is a native of this section where he is well and favorably known. He has for years been identified with its business life and is always ready to aid in its upbuilding.

Images and History of Architecture and Industry Along Winchester’s Railroads on YouTube

Did you miss the September 29 lecture? You can now catch the event on YouTube. The three sections of the talk are in individual videos, so you may skip directly to the portion which interests you. The audience interactions are at the end of the third section. Although the audio is fairly muffled due to the location of the microphone at the live event, there were a number of good questions asked, and many others were not picked up on the audio at all. Thank you all for your insight and curiosity!

Part One on YouTube

Part Two on YouTube

Part Three on YouTube