NCPH 2013 Student Project Award: Learning from community

Posted on April 10, 2013 by editors

The congregation of Cedar Grove Baptist, one of the two churches in Terra Cotta, in the 1930s
Photo courtesy Dennis Waddell.

Editors’ Note: This series showcases the winners of the National Council on Public History’s annual awards for the best new work in the field. Today’s post is by Ellen Kuhn, Shawna Prather, and Ashley Wyatt, students at the University of North Carolina Greensboro and co-creators of the exhibit “Past the Pipes: Stories of the Terra Cotta Community,” which won the 2013 Student Project Award.

What creates a community?

In the face of significant social and economic constraints, a tightly-knit, self-reliant community developed in Terra Cotta, a segregated company town located a few miles west of downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. From the 1900s to the 1970s, members of this community worked at the nearby Pomona Terra Cotta Company, manufacturing clay pipes used to build sewer systems. Terra Cotta was the kind of place where family meant more than just blood kin; it meant giving food to the homeless man who lived in the woods nearby–even though residents had to feed their own large families on less than eleven dollars a week. It meant sharing one church building between Baptist and Methodist congregations, alternating services each week. It meant welcoming white children to play in their homes when a reciprocal invitation to play at white homes was never extended. Today, community in Terra Cotta means keeping bonds initially formed in the neighborhood alive through shared memories.

Now, these previously unheard voices are featured at the Terra Cotta Heritage Museum in a permanent exhibition that was created through a collaboration known as the Terra Cotta Community History Project. Continue reading →

Conference (P)review #1: Rideau Street Convent Chapel

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Jill Dolan

Editor’s note: In preparation for the upcoming NCPH conference in Ottawa, The Public Historian has commissioned a series of Ottawa site reviews, as it does annually for sites in our conference city. These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons. Further online post-conference reviews will follow later this spring; we invite readers to comment on these posts as they appear.

Rideau Street Convent Chapel, National Gallery of Canada, Sussex Drive, Ottawa. MARC MAYER, Director.

Georges Bouillon
Interior Architecture and Decoration of the Chapel of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Convent, 1887‑1888
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Photo © National Gallery of Canada

Passing from the busy exhibition galleries, through the arcaded courtyard with its planted beds, visitors approach the neo-Gothic interior of the Rideau Street Convent Chapel predisposed to enjoy a space of tranquility and spirituality. The chapel, or more precisely, the interior of the chapel, is an immensely popular installation in the National Gallery of Canada. It is also one of Ottawa’s great heritage success stories. The Chapel of the Convent of the Sacred Heart was rescued from demolition in the early 1970s when the Roman Catholic Grey Nuns of the Cross or Sisters of Charity, a teaching order whose premises had been on Rideau Street since the mid-nineteenth century, sold their property to a developer. Designed by the renowned – although untrained – Canadian architect-priest Georges Bouillon, the neo-Gothic chapel was unique not only in Ottawa but in Canada. It was consecrated in 1888.

Very nearly destroyed along with the rest of the nunnery’s buildings, the chapel was saved by a remarkable coalition of heritage organizations, local heritage groups and federal agencies including the National Capital Commission and the National Gallery of Canada where it would find its final home. Continue reading →

Will digital crowdfunding work for your next project?

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Noah Goodling

Nikola Tesla’s lab building at Wardenclyffe, 1904

In August, 2012, an extraordinary thing happened: a small museum, dubbed the Friends of Science East (FSE, now the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe), which was being run out of two unused classrooms in a local high school on Long Island, began an online fundraising campaign which raised over $1 million in just over a week. The money was to be used to buy a local historical site, a laboratory utilized by the 19th century inventor Nikola Tesla called Wardenclyffe; the museum planned to repair the site and convert it into a science and technology museum to honor Tesla’s legacy. The story quickly went viral on the Internet, as journalists and bloggers asked the same set of questions: How did a small, virtually unknown museum manage to marshal such incredible resources so quickly? And what implications does this success carry for fundraising for public historians? Continue reading →

Project Showcase: Vermont Marble Museum and the Preservation Trust of Vermont

Posted on January 22, 2013 by editors

The Vermont Marble Museum in Proctor, Vermont

Located in Proctor, Vermont, The Vermont Marble Museum tells the story of the Vermont Marble Company — once the largest marble company in the world. Prominent buildings and monuments all over the United States and the world were made by the Vermont Marble Company including the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, the US Supreme Court Building and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

In the spring of 2012, after many years of operations, the current owners decided to close the Museum and sell the collection. The Preservation Trust stepped in, hoping to raise enough money to purchase the entire operation with the ultimate goal of keeping the collection intact and finding a new non-profit owner to run the museum in its current location in Proctor.

As of December 31, 2012, the Preservation Trust had successfully raised $250,000 to complete Phase I of the project, taking a significant step forward on the path to saving this irreplaceable piece of our heritage. This phase includes the acquisition of the museum collection and displays, including the 2000+ rare glass plate negative collection, and the gift shop.

The Preservation Trust is now beginning Phase II which includes raising $480,000 for the acquisition of the museum building. Additionally, we are actively seeking a new non-profit owner and operator for the museum.

For more information, please visit the Preservation Trust of Vermont website or contact Paul Bruhn at the Preservation Trust of Vermont: (802) 343-0595 or paul@ptvermont.org.

~ Paul Bruhn
Executive Director
Preservation Trust of Vermont

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 2)

Posted on December 24, 2012 by Joseph Cialdella

To address the issue of how to make historic designation and documentation a part of Cliveden’s ongoing dialogue with its various publics, the site sponsored a forum themed around the question “Do National Historic Landmarks Represent Our Historic Values?” This event was an opportunity to bring together community members, museum professionals, and preservationists from the Germantown area to discuss the NHL process, our research for the nomination, and moreover the changing meaning of Cliveden’s history today, all while enlivening what can otherwise seem on the surface to be a closed and static process of filling out a bureaucratic form. Continue reading →

Unfamiliar terrain: Reevaluating a landmark’s past (Part 1)

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Joseph Cialdella

Cliveden is best known for its associations with the Battle of Germantown during the Revolutionary War.

Through the support of the Arts of Citizenship Program at the University of Michigan, I recently found myself, along with my team of colleagues, navigating unfamiliar territory in the form of partnership with Cliveden of the National Trust to update the site’s National Historic Landmark (NHL) nomination. The collaboration presented us with many challenges, but two problems we encountered seem particularly relevant to the work of historic sites and historians today. First, could the somewhat bureaucratic process of updating NHL documents be aligned with more public conversations about the meanings of the past? And second, what role could we, as experts but outsiders, play in this process? Continue reading →

The Ruskin College records: Destroying a radical past

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Hilda Kean

The Walton Street site of Ruskin College, where Raphael Samuel and others founded the History Workshop movement in 1966.

In the course of moving Ruskin College, the trade union and labour movement college founded in central Oxford in 1899, from its prime location to a site on the outskirts of the city, the college has been re-branded and much of its archive destroyed or dispersed to other institutions. Most importantly, thousands of historic student records from the first years of the college until the last few years have been shredded. Continue reading →

Project Showcase: South Carolina’s Equalization Schools

Posted on November 23, 2012 by editors

Baptist Hill School, Charleston County, built in 1953 (Photo: Charleston County School District)

In the 1950s, South Carolina embarked on a massive statewide building spree in an effort to provide “separate but equal” schools for its African American and white students. Hundreds of new elementary and high schools in the Modern style sprung up across the state. Over time, the history of this building program and the schools it produced became only a footnote in history. I was lucky to “discover” this history during my master’s in public history program at the University of South Carolina. Early research into what I call “equalization schools” led to a survey of existing schools in Charleston County and a master’s thesis on the school construction program.

I decided to use digital media to publish my thesis and a few years after graduation, I began a website to spread the history of the equalization school program and to serve as an archive of all the known equalization schools in South Carolina. The project took off. People sent me information about the schools they attended, or equalization schools in their communities. Newspapers wrote stories about the program. A local high school history teacher found the site and began crossing the state to photograph equalization schools. A student at Furman University used the information on the site to create a “historical episode” for The History Engine.

Using the input of the visitors to the site and local volunteers, we have recorded over 130 equalization schools for the South Carolina Statewide Survey of Historic Resources. The Charleston County School District is planning a local exhibit on equalization schools to open in the near future. Find us on Flickr, too!

~ Rebekah Dobrasko

Project Showcase: “All of Us Will Walk Together” at St. Mary’s City, Maryland

Posted on October 17, 2012 by editors

A c. late 19th century photo shows the last two remaining St. Mary’s Manor slave quarters out of seven listed in the 1840 census. The building on the left was moved with the manor house to its current location in 1994; the one on the right was demolished.

Although the central story of Historic St. Mary’s City is about its time as the first capital of Maryland in the 17th century, its space contains many more stories from later eras. One is the 19th-century story of slavery and freedom at a large slave plantation. This story is being told in a digital exhibit and blog, All of Us Will Walk Together, published by Michigan State University doctoral candidate Terry Peterkin Brock.

Brock is studying the lives of the slaves and tenant farmers who lived at the St. Mary’s Manor Plantation, which stood in what once was the heart of St. Mary’s City. His objective is to open a window into lives that have often been neglected in the history of St. Mary’s City, yet were vital to the sustainability of its land and people. Brock traces these African American laborers from the erection of the slave quarters in 1840 through the Civil War and into the post-slavery era, when they lived and worked as tenant farmers. One building, a duplex quarter, continued to serve as a tenant home until 1950. St. Mary’s City is currently in the process of turning this structure into a physical exhibit through funding from the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture and the Maryland Historical Trust. The digital exhibit and blog will include a discussion of the process. The website and blog are designed for audience participation.

For more information about the project, please contact the researchers and follow the project on Twitter @WalkTogethr. More details about Brock’s project can be found in this article.

~ Regina Faden, Executive Director, History St. Mary’s

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