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a grand time at grandview

1/24/2022

 
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When I first began my AmeriCorps service term at the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve in September, I immediately began helping with a preservation project at Grandview, one of the most popular areas of the Park. This project primarily involved restoring 30 stone hearths, a handful of which were built in the 1940s by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Concurrent work was also performed on Grandview’s entrance pylons, culvert, and shelter 1 with its respective CCC built fireplace and chimney. This undertaking began as a project proposal by the Gorge’s 2020-2021 AmeriCorps member, Moira Gasior. The project was soon backed by the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center (HPTC), who, on September 13th 2021, sent a masonry crew to the site to provide professional support. 

Following initial condition assessments and documentation, preservation of the hearths began with demolition, a phase of treatment where obstructive mortar and poor joints were chiseled away. The stones were then repointed and, if need be, reset. New fireboxes were reconstructed at an angle to promote water runoff and mitigate future moisture damage. Lastly, new grills were anchored and installed. Intentional removal of biological growth on the surface of the stones was avoided so as not to disturb the natural patina of moss and lichen which had accumulated over time. Depending on the severity of deterioration, preservation of one hearth could take up to a week to complete, not including the 10 days of covered curing time afterwards. Some hearths required minimal intervention, with only the removal and repointing of shallow cracked joints and the relaying of fireboxes. Others, however, quickly fell apart due to failed joints and missing mortar, sometimes requiring multiple stones to be reset. 
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A hearth before restoration work
Two weeks into the project, a voluntary week-long workshop was sponsored by HPTC at Grandview for members of NERI staff and other National Park Service affiliates. Participants engaged in lectures and learning modules and were provided hands-on guidance by experts in the field of historic brick and stone masonry. 
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This project was initially expected to take six weeks but was extended to accommodate the preservation of additional fireplaces. After nearly two months at Grandview, work officially concluded the week of October 25th.
PictureA restored hearth
Not only do these hearths have historic significance as CCC built structures, but there is also a great deal of public sentiment towards them. During this project, I heard recollections from visitors who had come to Grandview back in its heyday - when the shelters were always busy, the trails were lively, and every hearth had an occupant. It was an extremely popular excursion for families and friends. In expectation of spending the whole day there, groups would have to get to the Park early to secure a good spot. However, as time progressed and tourism within the Park decreased, so did the use of these hearths. This led to a lack of maintenance, causing many of them to fall into disrepair. Some of the hearths were forgotten entirely as they resided farther in the woods and eventually became reclaimed by nature. 

According to reports, tourism at Grandview increased by 300% last summer, likely due to the Gorge’s newly obtained designation as a National Park. To this effect, there was no better time for this project to happen. Our daily work at Grandview never saw a shortage of visitors, many of whom showed interest and appreciation at our efforts. People would often approach us with questions or comments about the work. Some of the hearths which were freshly preserved saw use almost immediately after being uncovered. Overall, the consensus about this project from both the Park and public seemed to be an air of excitement at the possibility of reviving what once was. 

​Kate Caplinger

Kate Caplinger served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member for the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve during the 2021-2022 program year.

If these bricks could talk

1/18/2022

 
On a brisk cold fall night, walking down the brick paved streets that make up Main Street, you can hear the Elk River flowing. This leads me to imagine what it would be like to live in Sutton when it was the most productive and the town was thriving. I can imagine our little town bustling with the sound of horse hooves hitting the brick, industry, and people. The very people who created the foundation of what I call home, Sutton West Virginia. The rich history and events that took place in this small community are much more than a recollection, but a story that begins with the very bricks I stand on. 

Sutton was first settled in 1792 by Adam O’ Brien and is the geographical center of the state, only to be burned to the ground nearly 50 years later. The fire left destruction and only six buildings with structure intact. Rebuilding almost from scratch, Sutton remained a small county seat until the timber industry developed and Sutton became a commercial center. Throughout the years Sutton has been home to many businesses. The store fronts thrived with businesses such as pharmacies, restaurants, retail shops, banks and even motels. 

Among some of the first settlers to Sutton were the Carpenters. Jeremiah and Benjamin Carpenter settled in Sutton and shortly after were killed by American Indians. To this day and many generations later the Carpenter family still reside in Sutton and have owned the motel that resides in the historic district. ​
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Sutton's Main Street is filled with original buildings and a lot of them are still being used today. Specifically, the courthouse which is for the entire county and is in the center of downtown. Built in 1882, this is one of the earliest remaining courthouses in West Virginia. It was the second brick building built in town. Across from the courthouse is home to the Landmark Studios of the Arts Community Theatre, built in 1886 as a Methodist church and renovated as a theatre in 1988. 

Sutton's historic district has always held importance to the community and consists of eleven square blocks. Residences date predominantly from the mid-19th century to early 20th century. Sutton's historic district was hit with yet another devastating fire in 2005. It destroyed 3 major buildings, one of those being the Braxton Newspaper. The privately owned buildings were donated to the town with hopes of restoration. It is our hope to use the building's façade and build a community park within the structure. Plans have been started and grants have been applied for. The community park would be such a great asset for our community while keeping the historic district intact and as beautiful as it once was. Whether it be the beloved courthouse or a building that has no great significance other than the bones itself, each one comes with history and the longing to be found and appreciated again.

briar williams

​Briar Williams served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member for the Sutton Community Development Corporation during the 2020-2021 program year.

painting our town red

1/12/2022

 
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Volunteers painting the Braxton Democrat building.
The Braxton Democrat became the first newspaper to serve Sutton, West Virginia but most importantly it served Braxton County. It worked as the main communication source and news outlet for many years. In a time where technology barely existed, and information sharing was difficult, our newspaper was the foundation of communication for our county. Although the name Braxton Democrat was officially in 1982 the newspaper dates to the early 1900s. 

 Beautifying and enhancing parts of the historic district has been a focus and interest of mine as an AmeriCorps member “the old democrat” as our town people call it is located right in the center of our historic district. It is two stories and concrete and wood. Through out the years and many great articles in between the building has seen its better days. 

I have struggled on how to start beautifying my town and helping our progress. What can I do? What can my town do? Picking up trash from our littered sidewalks, planting flowers in our garden and decorating the pots in town can only do so much when the actual eye sores come from the abandoned buildings that fill our downtown. 

The month of May is West Virginia’s statewide clean up month. During the clean up myself and volunteers took the entire day to bring the “old democrat” building back to life. The building was consumed with chipped paint and dirt and was getting lost in the eye of passing traffic. Before our day started the building was dark gloomy grey and a lime green that could make your stomach turn just by looking at it. We decided it needed to be a bright welcoming color and historically correct. Choosing paints we chose a concrete grey and a barn red. The red covered the grey beautifully. A lot of citizens stopped to admire our work and to praise us for our efforts. 
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It is my hope that with a little bit of hope, elbow grease and paint we can save each building one by one and bring it back to its original potential. I believe that business owners who are in search of properties are more likely interested in buildings that look fresh and show future potential before walking inside. We need to renovate the outside of the buildings and business as much as possible in Sutton to draw in more tourists and new neighbors.  It all starts with an idea and ends with some paint. 

briar williams

Briar Williams served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member for the Sutton Community Development Corporation during the 2020-2021 program year.

Coming Together in a Virtual World

10/13/2021

 
Conference logo
Beginning a service year in September 2020, in the height of a COVID-19 uncertain world, was a challenge. Having served a year as an AmeriCorps previously, part of my service that I loved was getting immersed in a community and connecting with folks on a face level. Serving with the West Virginia Association of Museums (WVAM), I was excited to get to know museum and art professionals from around the state and explore sites that were beyond my Mountaineer Country-centric world. The big yearly gathering for WVAM is the annual conference, which is held in a different West Virginia town each year. This conference is a time for museum workers around the state to network, grow professionally, and also to relax and get to know their colleagues at other sites. By the time I started my service, the 2020 conference had been cancelled and 2021 was up in the air. 

    It was eventually decided that the safest course of action would be to host our annual conference virtually, much like a lot of other events around the country. This was unchartered territory for all of us at WVAM. We had to figure out the technical aspects, while also crafting a virtual experience that would still be worthwhile and engaging for our members and other professionals. We had to cancel some fun aspects of previous conferences - like the annual banquet and raffle dinner, and the pre-conference excursions to local museums and cultural sites. 

    Altogether, we were able to craft educational and social sessions throughout the week of March 22nd-26th, ranging in topics including grant writing, public arts, paper conservation, black COVID-19’s impact on museums in West Virginia, and more. One of my favorite sessions of the week was the session hosted by Black in Appalachia. I’ve admired their organization and the important work they do, and it was a great opportunity to work with them and bring them to a virtual audience in West Virginia that is equally excited about the work they’re doing. 

   I also really enjoyed one of the social sessions I led, the “Artifact Show & Tell.” We wanted to replace some of the networking and socializing opportunities that are normally present at a conference with light-hearted evening social sessions. While it was a bit awkward at first to adjust to a virtual format, the show and tell session ended up being a fun way for art and history nerds to show off items in their personal collection or at work that they find fascinating, weird, or just plain interesting. 

    After the conference was over, we sent out a survey and collected feedback to see how the conference was received by the attendees. From the responses we got, most folks were very pleased with the conference, which was a huge relief. Here’s some comments that we received: 

“I appreciated the great variety of sessions and that they were strung out over a week, which made it easier to work into my busy schedule. I also liked the social activities--it is what I miss most about conferences.”

“It was much easier for me to access because it was virtual. I would not have been able to attend an in-person conference. It tends to be too far from the Eastern Panhandle.”

“I attended multiple sessions for the West Virginia Association of Museums Virtual Conference and enjoyed them all, but 'Black Narratives, Exhibition, and Engagement' stood out in particular. The erasure of Black histories in Appalachia makes researching, understanding, and interpreting sites associated with Black communities difficult. The resident-driven work that Black in Appalachia does is remarkable”

“This year's WVAM conference was a great mix of practically and theoretically based sessions that helped to round out my current studies at WVU and my continuing field work outside of the classroom.”

   Planning and organizing this conference was a lot, but it was a relief to see the feedback and know that folks enjoyed and benefited from it. Personally, it was a great learning experience for me to see what goes on behind the scenes at a large event like this - marketing, session planning, schedule coordinating, and registration - it can be a lot. Add on top of that technical issues, and things can get a little hectic. Although COVID-19 forced our hand into hosting a virtual event, I think there are a lot of benefits to virtual gatherings that we discovered. It can be easier and more accessible for folks to attend due to costs and the time commitment, and we were able to invite speakers from outside of the state that maybe wouldn’t have been able to attend an in-person one. Although my service year is ending with WVAM, I am looking forward to following how the 2022 conference (which might be in-person!) develops and hopefully will be able to attend myself. 

LAUREN GRIFFIN

Lauren served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member for the West Virginia Association of Museums during the 2020-2021 service year.

Preserve WV AmeriCorps Finds & Preserves Original West Virginia Land Deed

10/5/2021

 
During the past year, I made several trips to Ronceverte to help organize the city museum at its new location on the second floor of the Clifford Recreation and Community Center, following the sudden passing of Doug Hinton, the long-time curator of the museum. My primary objective was to inspect more than 50 boxes of artifacts and documents and prepare a computerized catalogue of the contents, which I completed.
 
In a random box, I discovered an incredible, priceless piece of West Virginia history: a 1796 land deed from the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia to Alexander Robison of Greenbrier County! It was folded firmly and stored in an envelope for many years, and I refused to harm a 200+ year old document by attempting to unfold it. Instead, I found a donor and researched a firm that could safely unfold, flatten, and frame the deed. I found a professional artifact restoration firm in Ohio, Old World Restorations in Cincinnati. They did an amazing job of safely unfolding the deed document, flattening it, and framing it in archival glass. I was proud to hand-deliver the framed deed to Mayor Smith in Ronceverte in April 2021.
 
I discovered many other gems in the Ronceverte Museum’s collection. Highlights from the 50+ boxes include the following:

1. 3 body tags with wire attached with notes from coroner; two have no date, but one is marked 'found May 23, 1963.' 
 
2. 1880 Two small original photographs of West Virginia native Pearl S. Buck's parents Reverend Absalom Sydenstricker and Mrs. Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker in 1880.
 
3. "Good for 5 cent" tokens, five total. Rare. Often called trade coins, they were especially used after the Civil War as a substitute medium of exchange instead of nickels; they had limited use and were often issued by a private company, group, association or individual.
 
4. 1890s-1902, Set of funeral home or cemetery plot records in delicate, damaged condition. Interesting look into what people died of in Ronceverte in the late 19th and early 20th century. One page has a record of a black man who was killed, but he was not given the dignity of his name, age, date of death and location like the white West Virginians on the other pages..
 
5. 1881-1889, book of State of West Virginia court judgements. If you take the time to read the handwriting, it has an interesting look into what was brought to court in late 19th century West Virginia.
 
6. 1885-1887, three autograph books; two of Nellie Longfellow, one of Laura Forgelson. Very cute entries from school friends and family members.
 
7. Some kind of Ronceverte athletic uniform from the 1950s-1970s of a top and shorts, jockstrap included!
 
8. White folder with material relating to petitioning Colonel Clifford of Ronceverte for the Medal of Honor. He served with distinction in World War II and the community center housing the Ronceverte museum is named after him. It is worth noting because not many people know about what goes into the process of petitioning for a Medal of Honor.
 
9. Register of Hotel Dickson, Ronceverte 1888, including a signature of President Glover Cleveland with a cute notation “and Mrs. C” from October 11th, 1888!
 
During my final visit to Ronceverte at the end of my AmeriCorps term, I cleaned all the exhibit cabinets, window wells, and floor. I compiled all my work and ideas for the future of the museum into a Final Report, which I presented to Ronceverte City Administrator Pam Mentz. The report includes suggestions on how the city can engage the local schools and further preserve their collection. The Ronceverte Museum has great potential, and the Final Report for the next AmeriCorps member assigned to Ronceverte will help them build off of my service.
 
            It was my sincere pleasure to work with the city of Ronceverte and discover the jewels contained in its museum.  

Megan Ksenia bradner

Megan Ksenia Bradner served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member with the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia during the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

Preserve WV AmeriCorps tells the story of two historic churches through new interpretive signs

9/15/2021

 
​The Monroe County Historical Society was awarded a grant from the West Virginia Humanities Council for the creation and installation of interpretive signs for the two historic church buildings owned by the society in Union.  Both buildings have undergone extensive repairs over the past two decades.  Ames Clair Hall, formerly the Ames Methodist Episcopal Church, is available for use as a performance and meeting space.  The First Baptist Church building still requires extensive repairs before it can opened to the public.
 
Both of these churches were originally built for the white congregations and after the Civil War were purchased by the African-American members of the congregation.  One man, James Clair, and his descendants were instrumental to the formation and success of both the Baptist and Methodist congregations and these churches.  James Clair was baptized into membership at the First Baptist Church in Union in 1868.  His family remained active in the community.  His son, James Clair Jr. was also baptized into the First Baptist Church.   His grandson, Matthew Clair, became one of the first two African-American bishops of the Methodist Church.
 
The slave James Clair was born in 1810 and was purchased in Richmond Virginia by the owners of the Salt Sulphur Springs resort to work at this resort in Monroe County.  While the owners of the resort rode horses back to Monroe County, the slaves had to walk about two hundred miles to the “Salt”.  Mrs. Kate Clair, a daughter-in-law, relates that the slaves were guided on their journey by forked sticks placed at the forks in the road to indicate which way their owners had taken.
 
Generations of church members have worshipped in these two historic churches.  Both buildings were deeded to the Historical Society after membership declined.
 
Justine Nall, of Union, got the project started.  Her father, Russell Newsome played the organ for services when Ames Clair Hall was the Ames Memorial Methodist Church.  Marilyn Adamson provided information about the First Baptist Church where she, her great-grandmother, grandmother, and parents worshipped.  
 
Photos show the interpretive signs installed.  The signs will help expand the knowledge of the buildings and the importance of the church community on the wider community for the people of Monroe County and surrounding areas.  This project received financial assistance from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations do not necessarily represent those of the West Virginia Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.  
Picture - New Sign outside First Baptist Church
New interpretive sign installed outside the First Baptist Church in Union.
Picture - sign outside Ames Clair Hall
New interpretive sign outside Ames Clair Hall in Union.

Vernessa Pontius

Vernessa served as a Preserve WV AmeriCorps member with the Monroe County Historical Society in Union during the 2020-2021 service year.

The Mysteries of Mabel

8/12/2021

 
PictureMabel Hull’s Scrapbooks with her clippings from The Wheeling News-Register and the Pittsburgh Courier (OCPL Archives, Photo taken by Emma Wiley)
For months, I looked for evidence of a Mabel Hull in Wheeling, and came away with only scraps of information--until I finally found her family. 

Mabel Hull was an African American newspaper columnist, working woman, and mother who lived in Wheeling, WV during the mid-20th century. I became interested in her story after browsing several scrapbooks of her newspaper clippings that had been sitting in the Ohio County Public Library Archives, gathering metaphorical dust. Mabel’s columns ranged in topics from society news to local events, painting a vivid picture of a vibrant Black community in Jim Crow Wheeling. 

Female journalists--let alone Black female journalists--were underrepresented in the mid-20th century, so I decided to find out more about Mabel with the intention of doing a relatively quick article about her history and work. I scoured censuses, archival material, newspapers, and other records and could only find bits and pieces here and there. I asked people who seem to always know everyone in Wheeling, past and present, and they had never even heard of Mabel. She felt like a ghost. My last ditch attempt was to find her descendents, but I wasn’t hopeful, considering the majority of her six children were dead. 

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Mabel Hull’s profile picture that accompanied her Wheeling News-Register column (Mabel M. Hull Scrapbook Collection, Ohio County Public Library, Wheeling, WV)
Through a son’s obituary, I managed to track down an email and decided to shoot my shot--within 24 hours, I was in touch with several of Mabel’s grandchildren and her only living daughter, who made Mabel come alive. They shared stories, memories, anecdotes, and photos that quadrupled my understanding of Mabel and opened new doors to historical documentation I didn’t even know to look for. 

Apart from the scrapbooks sitting in the basement archives of the Library, there is very little trace of Mabel left in Wheeling. The street where she lived, Morrow Street, no longer exists due to urban renewal, none of her direct descendents live in Wheeling anymore, and the department stores she worked at closed long ago. After researching and learning Mabel’s history, I used my platform to share her almost-forgotten story with the Wheeling community through an article on Weelunk and a public lecture at the Library--yards away from where her scrapbooks lived.  

The reception of Mabel’s story was amazing. Community members at the lecture questioned why her story has been covered up for so long in a town that loves to explore its local history--I encouraged them to continue to search for others like Mabel, amazing histories that have gone untold. Some of Mabel’s descendants watched the livestream of the lecture and Gina Stewart, Mabel’s granddaughter and strongest advocate, told me that I had found “the pearl in the shell” because she never stopped believing that her grandmother’s story was worth telling. 

Emma Wiley

Emma is the Preserve WV AmeriCorps member serving with Wheeling Heritage during the 2020-2021 program year.

Volunteer for Oak Grove Cemetery Work Day

6/28/2021

 
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The Patchwork Church - Windowsill Restoration at Pleasant Green Methodist Episcopal Church in Hillsboro, WV

6/22/2021

 
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Hillsboro, WV, is a small town that packs a big historical punch. It’s home to the Pearl S. Buck House, Watoga State Park, and another lesser known gem – the Pleasant Green Methodist Episcopal Church. This historic African American church is so modest and unassuming that most passersby probably barely even realize that it’s there, but I’ve been fortunate enough to learn its heartwarming history and assist in its restoration during my time as an AmeriCorps Member here in West Virginia.

I was first introduced to Pleasant Green in October 2019 while serving with the Appalachian Forest National Heritage Area’s Hands On Preservation Team. It was the first month of our service term and my first time doing official preservation work in the field, so I knew almost nothing about what I was doing and even less about the site itself. We were greeted by Ruth Taylor, Secretary of the Pocahontas County Historic Landmarks Commission and the church’s next-door neighbor, who told us all about Pleasant Green’s history.
Built in 1888, the site was specifically designated at the time of sale for use as a church and school for the growing number of black families in and around Hillsboro. Pleasant Green was a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church, an African American-based denomination founded in Philadelphia in the late 1700s that grew popular throughout West Virginia following the Civil War. The congregation built and maintained the structure themselves with any materials they could scrape together, making Pleasant Green a true testament to people doing the best they could with what they had.

The church remained a cornerstone for the local black community all the way up through the 1970s, acting as a place of social gathering and of education as well as one of worship. The adjacent cemetery became the final resting place for most of the congregation as well, with approximately 50 marked graves and many more unmarked ones suspected. Two of the people buried there were not just beloved community members but notable historical figures: “Miz Eddy” Washington, a well-known cook at Watoga State Park and former employee of the family of WV Governor Wallace Barron, and Gordon Scott, the first African American to become Superintendent of a WV State Park.

Over the years, as families moved and the once-thriving congregation dwindled away, the church unfortunately fell into disrepair. On top of the chipped paint, rotting wood, pest damage, and other woes that typically plague old buildings, a fierce hailstorm in 2016 broke the glass in almost every one of the windows. The hail damage was especially disheartening, as it left the interior extremely vulnerable and destroyed multiple panes of rippled, amber-tinted “rootbeer glass” – a simple but beautiful decorative element that would have been very costly for the congregation and a point of pride on the otherwise unadorned structure.
Luckily, Ruth was able to have the Hands On Team come in to repair and reglaze the historic wooden window sashes (saving and reusing all the surviving rootbeer glass in the process). At that time, however, the team and I were not able to carry out some additional work that we realized needed to be done to the windowsills. So, when I finished that service year and began my current one with the Preservation Alliance of West Virginia, I already had a plan in place to return to Hillsboro for my upcoming civic service project.

There are four large windows on the body of the church and two very small windows on either side of a vestibule that was added to the front façade at a later date. Because the larger windows were paired with equally large sills cut from single pieces of old growth hardwood, those four sills all remained in relatively good condition. These simply needed to be scraped, treated with consolidant to reharden the “punky” (or softened) wood, and repainted. The sills for the smaller windows, on the other hand, were much worse. The vestibule was a poorly constructed addition using lower quality materials and has not aged well as a result. Nearly one third of each of these two sills had completely rotted away, making a full replacement necessary for both. Fortunately, these sills were only 1-inch thick boards inserted very simply into the overall frame, so replacing them wouldn’t be very difficult (I hoped).

After visiting the church to make this assessment in Fall of 2020, Ruth and I planned for me to come back and complete the project in conjunction with a cemetery cleanup event to be held on Earth Day of 2021. I then spent the rest of the Winter being anxious and concerned that I might have committed to a project too big for one novice preservationist to successfully complete solo (since, as anyone who has ever worked on an old building can tell you, you never know what you’re going to find when you start poking around and even the simplest-seeming projects can quickly turn more complicated). Thankfully, Ruth helped put my mind at ease by reminding me that Pleasant Green has always been what she lovingly calls a “patchwork church” – it’s not all perfect, and it doesn’t all match, but everybody doing their small part to keep it stitched together over the years is what the true spirit of this place is all about.
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So, with that reassurance in mind, I returned to Hillsboro this past April and got to work. Everything miraculously went according to plan, and I was even lucky enough to be joined by another volunteer who was a master carpenter and could help me make the cuts on the new replacement sills. As I worked on the sills, other folks cleared away the overgrown brush from the cemetery or cleaned up the inside of the church to turn it into a community space once again. At the end of the day, as I stood back and looked around at all the progress that had been made, I couldn’t help but remember how the site looked when I first arrived to work on the windows two years before. The church’s restoration and continuing survival is truly a product of 130 years of collaboration and faith, and I’m so proud to have been a part of it. 

Kelsey Romer

Kelsey Romer is the Preserve WV AmeriCorps member serving with the West Virginia Brownfields Assistance Center's BAD Buildings Program during the 2021-2022 service term.

Solving History’s Mysteries: A Crowdsourcing Project

5/19/2021

 
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How do you engage the community with history during the time of COVID and social distancing? As more of the population gets vaccinated and the country starts to open up, many historical institutions and organizations are itching to restart in-person programming and events. However, the pandemic and the shift to everything virtual opened a door to creatively exploring ways to get communities to participate in local history. 

History’s Mysteries is a digital crowdsourcing partnership project between Weelunk, Archiving Wheeling, and the Ohio County Public Library, that solicits photo identification help from the Wheeling community. As the primary history collecting archive in the county, the Library has hundreds of photos of Wheeling people, places, and events that are unidentified. While these photos are important snapshots of Wheeling’s history, our knowledge is limited when they are unidentified. Once a month, we choose five photos based on a theme from the Library Archive to feature on Weelunk with an entry form where people can submit identification information. 

Our two goals were: 1) to get photos identified and therefore enrich the historical record, and 2) to engage the local community in the history that it has created. The reason for including the community in this form of creating history is because “historians have an important job of verifying, analyzing, and interpreting history, but it is the entire community that is responsible for maintaining and expanding the stories, records, and narratives that create the foundations of their society. Sometimes history’s mysteries just need someone with the right key.” Through History’s Mysteries, people who had never stepped foot into the Library recognized their mother or grandmother online--in some cases, they were photos they had never seen before. 

Expansion of the internet and digital technology has made it possible to reach a wider audience and engage with people who may not walk into the physical space of the Library. To increase our chances of identifications, we leveraged social media to get the project in front of as many people as possible. In addition, since many of the photos are older and therefore would only be able to be identified by the older population who is less likely to be on social media, the Library printed and distributed brochures with the photos for those who prefer paper. Not only does History’s Mysteries allow us to restore identities to the unnamed, but it educates the community on the resources and services the Library provides. 

When we started this project, we told ourselves that even just one identification would make this project a success in our book. One identity, one story, one life remembered would be worth it. Yet, we are pleased to report that with three monthly editions of History’s Mysteries under our belt, we have identified twenty-eight people so far! 

If you know anyone with connections to Wheeling, please forward them our History’s Mysteries Project--we are always trying to fill in the gaps!

Emma Wiley

Emma Wiley is the Preserve WV AmeriCorps member serving with Wheeling Heritage during the 2021-2022 program year.

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Preservation Alliance of West Virginia
​421 Davis Avenue, #4  |  Elkins, WV 26241
​Email: info@pawv.org
Phone: 304-345-6005
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