If these walls could talk is an old refrain used by lovers of historic places and buildings, and thanks to the in-depth research and loving care of today’s guest, a historic log cabin in West Virginia’s historic panhandle is talking again. Joe Goss is a somewhat unlikely preservationist – an engineer with decades of experience in large-scale infrastructure projects – but the purchase of a historic, circa 1780 log home in Shepherdstown, West Virginia tested his skills and critical thinking to the utmost. On this week’s PreserveCast we’re talking preservation, research and logs with a passionate advocate for one home’s story.

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Joe Goss earned a B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1967 from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Peace Corps the same year and worked at the Ministry of Agriculture in Kabul, Afghanistan. After Peace Corps, he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development installing gauging stations on the irrigation canals of Helmand and Kandahar Provinces. Returning to California in 1970, Joe met his future wife, Lynne Fleming, of New York. He worked for the U.S. Geological Survey in Eureka and Menlo Park, California, for the next two years. Joe earned an M.S. in environmental engineering from Stanford University in 1973. After Stanford, he and Lynne moved to the Boston area where they raised their two children. He worked for several New England engineering firms for over two decades, then moved to the Washington, D.C., region. There he worked to rehabilitate the region’s aging water and sewer infrastructure for twenty more years, which he continues on a part-time basis. Joe and Lynne began to devote time to the preservation of and building a major addition to a circa 1780 log house they purchased in 2011 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. They now divide their time between Shepherdstown and Gaithersburg, Maryland.