Author: Eli

Eli Pousson started as a Field Officer at Baltimore Heritage in partnership with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in October 2009. Prior to moving to Baltimore, Eli worked for the DC Office of Historic Preservation and completed graduate work in anthropology and historic preservation at the University of Maryland College Park. Eli continues to work with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project and other heritage organizations in Prince George’s County, Maryland.

News: Field Tripping – Getting Historic

Thank you to everyone who came out and joined us for our Bmore Historic 2014 unconference earlier this month. Read Kate Drabinski’s column for a great take on the day or check out the unconference blog for more details.

Field Tripping: Getting Historic, Kate Drabinski, Baltimore City Paper, October 21, 2014.

“Thing is, though, my job also means that this year’s Bmore Historic Unconference is as much a field trip as a work obligation, and I got to spend the day sharing equal parts curiosity and righteous indignation with a wide swath of Baltimore-area history buffs, museum professionals, preservationists, students, and nerds as we asked those good questions of what counts as history, whose histories matter, and what the heck we should do with them…

Other sessions served as skill-building workshops in oral history, DIY genealogy, connecting youth to history and heritage issues, and how to use open-source web resources to curate online archives and collections. Eli Pousson from Baltimore Heritage shared its Explore Baltimore Heritage app that allows users to pull up historic photographs and narratives of sites all over the city from their smartphones. Drawing on her work in oral history as part of University of Baltimore’s Baltimore ’68 project, Elizabeth Nix led a packed workshop on how to do oral histories. Participants shared their ongoing Baltimore-based projects gathering the stories of such wide-ranging groups as veterans, LGBTQ people, youth, elders, laborers, suburbanites, and alt kids. These projects hope to bring out the many different and diverse ways that people have made Baltimore home.”

[We Dig Hampstead Hill] Join Dr. John Bedell for a presentation on the archeology of Patterson Park

Bicentennial Celebration at the Patterson Park Pagoda
Photograph by Friends of Patterson Park, September 14, 2014.

Last month, the We Dig Hampstead Hill project team joined in the celebration of the bicentennial of the Battle of Baltimore. Over 200 visitors stopped by our table in Patterson Park to take a close look at selected artifacts and ask questions from the archeologists. This Saturday, we are hosting archeologist Dr. John Bedell for a lecture and discussion at the Southeast Anchor Branch Library where local residents, volunteers, and others can learn more about the archeology of the site.

Dr. John Bedell, lead archaeologist on the project, will discuss the Battle of Baltimore and its importance for the city’s history, describe the findings of the archeological study, and discuss the role of archeology in public history, historic preservation, and community memory. We also want to listen your thoughts on what how we can continue to protect the archeological resources in the park and continue our successful heritage education programs with local schools next spring.

Please let us know if you are interested in hosting a talk on the War of 1812 in Patterson Park at an upcoming community meeting! Local historians, students and scholars interested in the War of 1812 may also want to join our Battle of Baltimore Wikipedia Workshop & Edit-a-thon earlier in the afternoon on October 25.

Photograph by Friends of Patterson Park, September 14, 2014.
Photograph by Friends of Patterson Park, September 14, 2014.

News: Brutal Reckoning: Developers are anxious to tear down the Mechanic Theatre and McKeldin Fountain, even without a plan (or money) to replace them

Brutal Reckoning: Developers are anxious to tear down the Mechanic Theatre and McKeldin Fountain, even without a plan (or money) to replace them, Fred Scharmen, Baltimore City Paper, October 14, 2014.

The Morris A. Mechanic Theatre is the first victim of what could be seen as a new wave of demolition. “In the end, this mess over the Mechanic represents a growing wave of historic preservation conflicts taking shape across the country. Modernist buildings from the middle of last century are increasingly falling out of fashion and facing the wrecking ball,” Baltimore Heritage’s Executive Director Johns Hopkins told Urbanite in 2010, when discussing plans to destroy the theater. “In the 1940s and ’50s, Victorian buildings like the Engineers Club, the Winans Mansion, and the Marburg Mansion were all considered drop-dead ugly and not worthy of preservation, and those are among our most prized architectural possessions today.”

News: Baltimore blacksmith shop to run nonprofit museum

Baltimore blacksmith shop to run nonprofit museum, Arthur Hirsch, The Baltimore Sun, October 14, 2014.

Sparks started flying at the blacksmith shop on West Saratoga Street when James Madison was president of the United States, and a crew there is still on the job, now operating in a hybrid historical museum and working business…

“It’s not just another museum,” said Johns W. Hopkins Jr., executive director of the preservation organization Baltimore Heritage. “It is highly unusual for many reasons, that combination being one of them.”

[We Dig Hampstead Hill] Volunteers process artifacts from Patterson Park at the Maryland Historical Trust lab in Crownsville

Any archeologist will tell you: the most important part of a dig is not what we find, it is what we find out! Processing artifacts is an essential step to learning more about an archeological site and the stories it may hold. Thanks to support from the Maryland Historical Trust Archeology Lab in Crownsville, project archeologists from Louis Berger, and a great group of fourteen volunteers, we just completed the laboratory processing for the artifacts recovered from Patterson Park this past spring.

Between July 29 and August 27, our volunteers (including seven people who helped out during the dig this spring) washed and labeled artifacts then recorded detailed description in a catalog for the collection. The artifacts included a War of 1812 musket ball, a Civil War belt buckle, and a half-plate made of ironstone. The oldest artifact is the Piscataway point created over 2,000 years ago. We didn’t realize in the field that we had found huge number of pieces of kiln furniture (the protective vessels that held pipes as they were fired in the kiln) or “muffles.” The large number of pieces raises the question of whether a kiln was located at the site or whether they were just brought in as dirt fill.

In the next few weeks, Louis Berger will send the artifacts to Kansas City to be photographed at their own laboratory. They’ll be back in Baltimore in time for the bicentennial celebrations on September 14. In October, we will send the collection to its permanent home at the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, at Jefferson Park and Museum in St. Leonard, Maryland. You can look forward to seeing a selection of artifacts back in Baltimore this spring as part of a new exhibit we are planning at the Patterson Park Observatory with the Friends of Patterson Park.

Photograph by Greg Katz, September 02, 2014.
Photograph by Greg Katz, September 02, 2014.

Learn more about We Dig Hampstead Hill! Searching for the War of 1812 in Patterson Park from our earlier updates or on our project page.