Local Preservationists

Women in Preservation: Girl Scout Julia Bache and the Buck Creek Rosenwald School

Posted on: March 28th, 2013 by Julia Rocchi

 

Julia Bache and homeowner Elaine Taylor in front of the Buck Creek School. Credit: Lisa Bache
Julia Bache and homeowner Elaine Taylor in front of the Buck Creek School

Girls Scouts are well known for selling delicious cookies. But how many of them are known for saving important places?

Julia Bache, a sophomore at Kentucky Country Day School in Louisville, is working hard to earn the Girl Scout Gold Award, Girl Scouting's highest achievement, with a seven-step project to solve a community problem or perform a public service. Her focus: helping to preserve the Buck Creek Rosenwald School.... Read More →

Julia Rocchi

Julia Rocchi

Julia Rocchi is the managing editor for the National Trust. By day she wrangles content; by night (and weekends), she shops local, travels to story-rich places, and walks around looking up at buildings.

Women in Preservation: M. Rosalind Sagara and the California Riverside Chinatown Community

Posted on: March 25th, 2013 by Emily Potter

 

Before 2008, M. Rosalind Sagara didn't know many details about the history of the Chinese community in Riverside, Calif. Now, you could say she is one of the most engaged experts on the story of the area’s early immigrants, as she leads her community’s efforts to preserve the very beginnings of their Chinese American history.

blog_photo_GW Tour
Sagara (center) on the George Wong History Walk in Riverside, Calif. George Wong was the last resident of Riverside’s Chinatown, and the walk takes guests on a tour of his life. ... Read More →

Emily Potter

Emily Potter is a copywriter at the National Trust. She enjoys writing about places of all kinds, the stories that make them special, and the people who love them enough to save them.

Going Against the Grain: Historic Jail Becomes the Maine Grains Grist Mill

Posted on: March 25th, 2013 by Katherine Flynn

 

Lambke and her business partner, Michael Scholz, bought a 5,000-square-foot jail building in 2009 and turned it into a grist mill. Credit: Amber Lambke
Amber Lambke and her business partner, Michael Scholz

When Amber Lambke toured a historic jail building in downtown Skowhegan, Maine, in 2007, she already thought that it seemed like the perfect space for a grist mill that would process grains grown by local farmers. It didn’t matter that the jail would be pricey to renovate, or that, at the time, it was still filled with inmates.

Lambke purchased the 14,000-square-foot building in 2009, beginning a process that she saw as essential to reviving a once-thriving grain economy in central Maine.

“We realized that farmers in our area weren’t really interested in growing grains until they knew who was going to buy them and process them,” Lambke says. She saw the mill as a way to bolster their livelihoods, while at the same time providing residents of Skowhegan and neighboring towns with organic, fresh-milled flour.... Read More →

Katherine Flynn

Katherine Flynn

Katherine Flynn is an editorial assistant at Preservation magazine. Her work has appeared online at the Washington Post and in Consequence of Sound, a music and culture blog.

“Oregon Trail” Comes to Life at the Pioneer Mothers Memorial Cabin

Posted on: March 21st, 2013 by David Robert Weible 5 Comments

 

A school group gathers in front of the Pioneer Mothers Memorial Cabin. Credit: Volunteers of the Pioneer Mothers Memorial Cabin
A school group gathers in front of the Pioneer Mothers Memorial Cabin.

If you spent any portion of your childhood in the 1980s or '90s, then invariably your favorite part of the school day was bucking the lesson plan in computer class and rabidly killing bison, fording rivers, and visiting Chimney Rock in the Oregon Trail video game. If you were unfortunate enough to have missed this phenomenon of modern pedagogy, then suffice it to say that the game, in which the player acted as the wagon master for a family that set out on the Oregon Trail from Missouri, was the greatest video game of all time.

In the video game, once you made it to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where many who traveled the actual Oregon Trail between the 1840s and 1860s settled, you were safe from the dangers of the trail and your educational experience ended. But in the case of the Pioneer Mothers Memorial Cabin, located about 40 minutes southwest of downtown Portland on the banks of the Willamette River, the education and the danger (albeit not from raiding parties or diphtheria), continue today.... Read More →

David Robert Weible

David Robert Weible

David Robert Weible is an assistant editor at Preservation magazine. He came to DC from Cleveland, Ohio, where he wrote for Sailing World and Outside magazines.

[10 on Tuesday] 10 Steps to Start Saving Places

Posted on: March 19th, 2013 by Julia Rocchi

 

We’ve now shared more than 30 Tuesday toolkits on topics ranging from sustainability to social media, but we haven’t yet shared the mother of them all: Saving Places 101.

If you want to protect a place near and dear to your heart, but aren’t sure where to begin, then today’s toolkit is for you. It provides a solid framework for turning your concern for a historic spot into meaningful, lasting action.... Read More →

Julia Rocchi

Julia Rocchi

Julia Rocchi is the managing editor for the National Trust. By day she wrangles content; by night (and weekends), she shops local, travels to story-rich places, and walks around looking up at buildings.