How Maryland protected hallowed ground

Lincoln at Antietam

In the fall of 1988, a national debate ensued over the approval of a 1.2-million square foot shopping mall on the historic Civil War battlefield north of Manassas. Nationwide concern for the integrity of the Manassas National Battlefield Park was aroused when the Hazel/Peterson Companies obtained approval and began to build the regional shopping mall on this site. In response, the U.S. Congress employed a rarely used procedure called a “legislative taking” to acquire the contested mall site at a cost of $134 million to buy the 550 acres of land from the Virginia development firm. The Manassas Mall controversy is currently taught as a “planning failure” in many planning curriculums. In Virginia, many residents asked, “who would protect ‘hallowed ground’ if local authorities were not inclined to do so?”Fortunately, Maryland elected leaders and state officials took a different approach to Civil War site preservation. That is why tens of thousands of tourists who will visit Antietam and South Mountain over the next couple of weeks will have the opportunity to see and walk ground that remains reasonably true to the original conditions of 150 years ago.

Postcard from the Colorado Front Range: Building transit as fast as they can

Historic Postcard of Colorado State Capitol, Denver, CO

“Build as much as we can, as fast as we can, until it’s all done!”

That’s the mantra of Colorado’s FasTracks program.

A rural icon inside the Beltway

Maryland Planning Secretary Richard Eberhart Hall and Mildred Ridgley Gray, founder of the Mildred Ridgley Gray Charitable Trust Inc., at the 2012 Maryland Preservation Awards ceremony (Credit: Armeta Gray)

The Maryland Historical Trust (MHT) recently announced 14 projects, organizations and individuals to receive the 2012 Maryland Preservation Awards. It is the highest level of recognition for historic preservation and heritage education projects in Maryland.

The winners came from all across Maryland. They represented Allegany, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Carroll, Charles, Dorchester, Frederick, Harford, Kent, Prince George’s, Montgomery and Washington counties. All were very worthy.

Here’s a tale of one of them, the rehabilitation of the Ridgeley* Rosenwald School in Prince George’s County.  It is an icon of Maryland’s storied rural past even though it lies in a growing community within the Capital Beltway.

Returning to the Scene of the Find

We grasped that it was a big deal when Nichole Doub, head conservator at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory (MAC Lab), was invited to speak about the lab’s recent work before the New York Academy of Sciences. But we were even more impressed when we realized that the academy’s members over the years included, to name a few,  Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson and Margaret Mead. No small amount of brain power there.

Christmas morning at the MAC Lab

It’s not “Toy Story 3,” but inside the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, inanimate objects come to life.

Remnants from Queen Anne’s Revenge, the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, are drying in one area near planks from an 18th century pier from South Carolina visited by Blackbeard, so it’s likely those pieces of wood had ”met in another life,” as lab educator Kathy Concannon put it. In another room sits a large, decayed wooden “acorn” that sat atop the Maryland State House for more than 200 years until the mid-1990s. When conservators peeled back layers of the acorn, they discovered carved hearts and initials from as far back as 1789 and now trying to determine whose initials they might be. It’s somehow comforting to know that, with or without Facebook, teen-agers in love have carved initials and hearts for hundreds of years.