Introduction

[Stephen Israel] Big picture questions in public history and historic preservation can sometimes be intimidating to think about. What should the public expect from the historic institutions? How do public history sites remain relevant in a world that seems to change more and more every year? Fortunately, there are people out there like today’s guest, Dr. Taylor Stoermer. Taylor is an academic who knows how to bring history to the people whether that be as the Chief Historian at Colonial Williamsburg, a professor at Harvard and John Hopkins, an adviser to Disney on their revamped Hall of Presidents or on Twitter as the History Doctor. He may be an actual MD but his home state is Maryland. This is PreserveCast.

From Preservation Maryland Studios in the historic podcast district of Baltimore, this is PreserveCast.

[Nick Redding] This is Nick Redding. You’re listening to PreserveCast. We’re joined today by Dr. Taylor Stoermer who was born and raised in Baltimore and is a John Hopkins alumnus. Dr. Stoermer teaches public history at Hopkins as a lecturer in the Museum Studies program and he’s also an adviser to Disney and C-SPAN. Before joining and returning to Hopkins, he was an instructor of public history at Harvard, chief historian at Colonial Williamsburg, invited research scholar at Brown, a fellow at Yale, a lecturer in history at the University of Virginia. The accolades go on and on; and it was at UVA where he learned his PhD. in History with a focus on the American Revolution. He is an alumnus of Harvard and the University of the Redlands, and also an author of Colonial Williamsburg: The Official Guide as well as a forthcoming book called Public History: A Field Guide. So we want to talk to you today, Taylor, about all things public history and all the great work that you get into. And if anyone hears a little bit of background noise on today’s episode, we’re actually talking to you from somewhere in Disney Studios, I guess. The Imagineers are just all around you, buzzing about working on interesting aspects of Disney’s work. But before we get into all of that, what got you so involved in history? Where does this love of history come from?

[TS] I got into history mostly – actually almost entirely because of my grandmother. Growing up in the middle of Baltimore in the 1970s, my grandmother impressed upon me the one single notion that who we are is who we were. And we need to understand all of the complex components of that in order to figure out how we fit into the world around us. She impressed upon me this real understanding that we need to know not just the genealogy but also the broader community of which we’re a part. I have not known a moment in which that wasn’t important to me.

[NR] But it wasn’t always in the cards that you were going to become the History Doctor, I guess?

[TS] No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t. One of the things is about understanding how you relate to other people both in terms of your immediate community but also in terms of your historical community. The other part was how do you apply that? In my family, we applied that in action. We applied that in military service. We applied that in political service. We applied that in all kinds of philanthropic ways. How do you go ahead and take the advantages that you’ve been given and apply that right now to make your world a better place? That was always a big thing for – and really a major motivating component for my family. So I took the political route for that. So I went to law school, and I went into politics, and I went to Capitol Hill, and I was looking for a United States senator. And that was my idea of applied history, which is a term that we know now is a basic fundamental element of public history. I didn’t know that then. What I knew then was that applied history was going into politics and taking what we knew about the foundations of the country and applying it to what we were doing in Congress to make the country a better place every day. So I thought that that was… I thought that was public history – was politics in Congress. So I thought that I had achieved what I wanted to achieve when I got to the U.S. Senate and was working as a staffer there.

[NR] So what changed your mind?

[TS] What changed my mind was the 2000 election. [laughter] I thought that there was a moment that I was asked, when the 2000 cycle was approaching, whether or not I was going to stay in politics, working at a fairly senior position that I was in at the time or whether I was going to do what I really wanted to do.

I had started to look more and more… Well, frankly – and this might sound cliche, but it was true – at what the point of it all was. So I started reading Pauline Maier’s From Resistance to Revolution, Jack Greene’s books, Pursuits of Happiness. And I really wanted to understand what I was doing in Congress, what I was doing in politics. And I thought that the more I looked at that, that I really was confused about the connection between what the Founders’ intents were and how we were applying them in Congress. So I did something that I was kind of known for at the time and certainly known for now, but I contacted Pauline and I talked to Jack. While I was working in politics, I struck up relationships with them. And I started asking them about the concepts of America’s founding and its relationship with America today and how the two are related – or aren’t. And in my discussions with them, I realized that the two were not connected. So I thought that, well, to be true to my grandmother, who had passed away by then, and to really be true to my own beliefs and to them that I kind of needed to get out of politics and I wanted to go into being a proper academic and historian. I wanted to figure out what the point was – why American political culture had evolved to the point at which it was, and to be able to figure out what these influences were that we could – that we could manage.

[NR] And it’s interesting to hear you say that about the 2000 election, and that what’s made you stop and have pause. I can only imagine what you felt like after the 2016 election if you feel as if we had become unmoored in 2000. Perhaps that’s the content for a different podcast but –

[TS] It would be a good podcast, actually.

[NR] It would be a very good. We could probably do a whole season on that. So that took you back to become what you could describe as “the proper academic.” And then, fast forward. You’re working with Disney. You’re at Hopkins. You’ve previously been chief historian of Colonial Williamsburg. So you’ve had sort of a fantastic track record working on the public side. So then at some point you also made the decision that you weren’t going to become – sort of a classic academic. You were going to become a public academic in a sense, I guess. Was that the plan from the beginning or did that evolve as well?

[TS] That was never the plan. That happened by accident. I was made a public historian and I didn’t decide to be a public historian. I really thought that I was going to follow my mentor and my supervisor Jack Green as an academic historian. I loved being his student. I loved the way that he thought about history and I wanted nothing more than to follow his legacy. I’m his last student of [1988] and I thought that I was going to continue his focus on history in my career. I focused on loyalists and the American Revolution. I thought that was going to be me. But my first job was one that was arranged for me coming right out of graduate school, which was to be chief historian of Colonial Williamsburg.

[NR] How does that happen by the way? I have to jump in because everyone listening to this podcast is like, “Wait, how did…?” You were arranged to become the chief historian out of graduate school? How does that befall someone?

[TS] All because of one devoted historian named Jim Horn. Jim Horn was, at the time, the vice president of the Historic Area and Historic Interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg. But Jim was the historian of seventeenth century Virginia, of Jamestown where he is now the head of Jamestown Rediscovery, a great place for him. But I was sent there when I was still in graduate school.

I was sent to Colonial Williamsburg by Johns Hopkins just as an intern and as a fellow for a brief time. And Jim talks to me about wanting to go ahead and make Colonial Williamsburg – which has fallen off a little bit in terms of its academic structure – wanted to turn it into a more academically, authentically-founded public history program. Now I didn’t know anything about public history at the time. What I had known was, as a kid, I had been a re-enactor in a family so I’d put on the funny clothes used in Civil War period. So I kind of did that but I really didn’t know about public history. I’ve never thought about it in, like, ten years. But he talked to me then in my first year in graduate school about creating a public history program that was founded upon solid academic history. And there were very few people at the time who were working on Revolutionary Virginia as their main subject of study. And that was me. And so he said that “Well, when you are ready, this is what I want to do.” And Jim who, like I said, is a wonderful guy, was true to his word. He said that “When you are done with your graduate study, give me a call. I want to go ahead and do this.” When I was done, I had a couple of options. My dream was always to work as the chief historian of Colonial Williamsburg. It was my dream job. I loved the place. We had gone there every year. I adored the immersive experience. So when he offered me this job right out of graduate school, I couldn’t not take it. So it was really me hitting a home run. I made sure that I was working with the right people, I was so fortunate in order to be able to get the job I always wanted to have.

[NR] So I think part of what you said there, you kind of buried it I guess, where you mentioned how Colonial Williamsburg isn’t quite as academic or as rigorous as they once were, and that kind of maybe brings this story and this conversation – sort of fast-forwards it to where we are today. We want to know more about some of the other things you’ve worked on, particularly you work with Disney, which is pretty interesting. But public history, I feel like, along with preservation and the museum field, we’re all sort of at this crossroads where we’re trying to prove we still are relevant and trying to find ways to maintain that relevance with public that has a lot of different choices about where they’re going to spend their charitable dollar. Where they’re going to spend their tourism dollar, where they’re going to invest their time, let alone their money.

What about Williamsburg? Where is Williamsburg now? You made that mention of that. Do you have any feelings on that or just sort of broader sense of where public history is and the relevance of that? I mean, I know that’s a giant question to throw to a PhD historian. We can end up with an entire dissertation, probably, as an answer. But I am just kind of curious of where you feel as, just sort of a feel of where this is all headed. Do you have good vibes? Are you worried about places like Williamsburg?

[TS] I am worried about places like Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s not saying the same thing that I’m worried about public history.

[NR] Okay.

[TS] I think that, unfortunately, that places like Colonial Williamsburg or Old Suffrage Village, that there are these places that were born out of kind of the tourist boom of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s that are now really more about a different kind of tourism and they’re making decisions about how to generate revenue – generate revenue from guests, generate revenue from merchandising. That that is one kind of question. That they have divorced themselves from public history – from really creating an authentic experience that I think public history is about. Which is provoking and informing and engaging people to ask questions about the past that informs their decisions they’re making in the present that can then shape the future.

We had a brief moment at Colonial Williamsburg where we did that, but when you break off from that… When you really start thinking about numbers in a binal sense rather than in a really fundamental sense about what is sustainable and how you build on it; that’s a bigger problem. So to really answer your question, I think that public history is in a challenging point right now. And with public history sites, like a lot of the Six-to-Fix sites that [Preservation Maryland] works on and trying to connect people from their past to their present, that’s one question that we need to have a discussion about. We need to leverage our resources. We need to make sure that people are not, and that these sights are not out there alone. We are connecting these networks together in the Chesapeake to be able to tell these stories and these narratives that need to be discussed. That’s one thing. Then there are the ones that actually are stepping out of public history and going into a different kind of tourism that just want to generate numbers, and that’s what Colonial Williamsburg has done.

[NR] And do you think the public cares?

[TS] Yes, I do think they care. I think that there are different audiences. I don’t think that it really matters whether or not Colonial Williamsburg, this year, has had a flat number of guest revenue because there are different kinds of guests and you have to pay more to get those guests. So this year according to Williamsburg, has lost almost $11 million in their last reporting. Has lost $11 million to stay relatively flat in terms of their guest revenue. That’s because they’re getting different kinds of guests. They’re not getting the historical guests they have – and I’m using historical in this sense not in the people that are interested in history, but in people who have always gone there and you can really base a level of support around. They’ve lost those people. They’ve turned themselves into a place where they’re looking for leisure tourists; people who want to come and see people in very pretty clothing, which is why there are not quite so dealing with the really tough topics. They wore pretty clothing and pretty music and these kinds of things, but that is not what public history does. That is what a theme park does. And trust me, I worked for Disney, I know what a theme park does.

[NR] I was going to say, if anybody knows, you probably do. I mean, it’s interesting to hear about that distinction.

[TS] It’s an extraordinary distinction because one of the things that Disney is so clear about – and it’s from Walt Disney himself – is that we want people to have an authentic experience and an authentic experience doesn’t have to be a historical one. What an authentic experience has to be, not to be redundant, it has to be real. You’ve got to have that kind of inner connection to truth. You can’t just present things that aren’t engaging the gray matter that are between your ears. The tough stuff is what’s going to bring people back and what’s going to create an experience that will change them. And it’s the change that you want to see. It’s not just the entertainment. You can go to a place and you can have fun. And we know from studies, what the kind of stuff that Colleen Dillon Snyder so nicely reports on is what really takes people to historic sites. It’s about reputation and about fun. But you know what? What brings them back and what makes it matter is change. Is it what makes people have a complete shift in their positions from when they arrived to when they leave. That’s the fun part, and when you wanna really get into that, that always ends up being extraordinary.

So you can always do that whether or not you’re talking about somebody like Rapunzel [laughter] But you know what? You can do that, especially where I learned all of this which is from the wonderful people I worked with at Colonial Williamsburg, when I shifted from being an academic historian to straddling the line to being a public historian and an academic historian. And I’m still trying to straddle that line, which is not as easy as it might sound.

[NR] Well, why don’t we take a quick break right here? And then when we come back let’s talk about straddling that a little bit more, what you’re working on now at Hopkins, as well as your work at Disney. I think people would find that interesting. And then maybe also talk about, you know – we talked about maybe sites that that aren’t headed in what your opinion is “the right direction.” Maybe talk about some that you think are really bright spots; but we’ll do all that when we come back right here on Preserve Cast.

And now it’s time for a Preservation Explanation

[Stephen Israel] You’re going to hear a little more a out it later on, but Taylor is talking to Nick from the house that the mouse built; Disney Studios. But that is by no means the only thing tying the Disney name to the world of historic preservation. Like many famous people, there are multiple rumors that have made their way around the merry-go-round of e-mail forwards, memes, and Snopes.com articles about the circumstances in place about Walt Disney’s birth.

The fact is that Walt Disney was born in 1901 in a small wooden home just south of Chicago, Illinois. Built by his carpenter father Elias Disney from a plan designed by his mother Flora, Walter Disney spent his formative years in the corner of Tripp Avenue and Palmer Street in what remains a working-class neighborhood to this day. It’s no surprise that people have a lot of curiosity about Walt’s childhood and where he grew up because the man went on to have such an immense impact on the experience of children around the world.

Despite the value that many people place on the building and attempts to get it listed as a landmark in the 80’s and 90’s, for most of its over 100-year existence, the house has remained a residence with multiple additions tacked on over the years. But in the past few years, Dina Benadon and Brent Young have purchased the property and sought to restore it and open it as a private museum. Their goal is not only to return the house to what it was like visually in Disney’s youth but also to try and capture some of what it must have been like creatively with plans in the works to make the house a center for early childhood development. The Superbowl MVP might be headed to Disney world but he might want to check out the birthplace too. This is Preserve Cast.

Do you have questions? We may have answers. Is there any point during this podcast you thought of a question that you have for us or maybe one of our guests, we’d love to hear about it. You can send an email to podcast@presmd.org and we’ll try an answer it right here on the air on the next episode of Preserve Cast.

[NR] This is Nick Redding you’re listening to PreserveCast. We’re joined today by Dr. Taylor Stoermer who is currently a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, working in their Museum’s Studies program. He’s born and raised here in Baltimore and has had a variety of different experiences from working on Capitol Hill to his public history work at Colonial Williamsburg. And is now currently working in addition to Hopkins, working with the folks at Disney. And that was something we wanted to jump into, which I think would raise a lot of eyebrows and get people interested. How do you end up becoming a consulting historian at Disney and what exactly does a consulting historian at Disney do?

[TS] One of the great things about it is that its the history that got me interested. And a lot of people raise their eyebrows at the Disney  particularly because of what Disney 20 years ago had tried to do in Northern Virginia. It was creating a Civil War theme park. But its a different kind of Disney now. And so what Disney is trying to do and what they brought me on board was in immersive experiences. Immersive authentic experiences that were able to communicate a level of civic engagement. So the first thing that I did that they were asking me to do, and this was when I was still at Harvard, was asking if I would be involved in redoing [laughter] the Hall of Presidents experience given the upcoming election.

[NR] Ah.

[TS] Which was an extraordinary experience. So I obviously being a big Disney fan made – despite the more problematic components that they have with history and Pocahontas and things like that – this is the the one place where you know that they want to get things right. They might not know how to get things right and people might complain how they get things wrong, but they want to get them right. And so them asking me to help them get things right, to me, was an extraordinary honor. And not having to give up my integrity in order to do it was even more of a proving ground of their intent and their integrity behind it.

So my first job, they asked me to help with what’s called “Citizen Disney,” which is a corporate citizenship program to have all of the Disney companies try to make the world a better place, whether it was mostly in environmental protection or things like that. But in corporate citizenship they moved into making people better political citizens; and they reached out for me to help them to do that. So the first thing that I did was to help them redo the Hall of Presidents in Walt Disney World. And we completely re-did the whole thing. We knew we had a new President, a new political world [laughter] so to speak, and so we re-did the entire introduction materials. Because here is a place – and this impressed me so importantly, and it was a lot like my experience at Colonial Williamsburg – that I could be in the classroom, and I could be talking to fifteen students in a seminar or 100 students in a lecture or one student in a tutorial. But I could also be, through my influence, I could be communicating our past in a meaningful way to 5,000 people a day going through the streets of Colonial Williamsburg. Or at Disney through the 15,000 people a day that would go through Hall of Presidents. So how do you make sure that you’re able to communicate exactly what you want to through that wonderful opportunity that is both full of Americans and people from other countries. You’ve got this one chance. How do you take that chance?

[NR] Yea, it doesn’t get more public than 15,000 people a day. That might be the most public of public histories.

[TS] It really is, and being asked to do that was both humbling but it was invigorating.

[NR] So how do you feel you did?

[TS] I haven’t the faintest idea. I think I did okay in one way, because I can’t possibly be the judge of this. But I think… I  followed Bill Weldon at Colonial Williamsburg, as probably my greatest teacher. Him and Jim Horn, I learned so much from them about how they connect with other people. But Bill Weldon is a legend in terms of making sure that immersive programming and interpreters were really connecting with others. I learned so much from him that I took that idea that, first and foremost, it’s not about you. It’s about them. It’s about these people and what you want to get out of them.

And the first thing – you start with the end, and you work your way backwards. And so I started off with the ending point, which was “I want people to walk out of that experience with questions, but with informed questions.” What really is the presidency about? Before we did this entire reconfiguration of that experience, it was really about “Does the Presidency represent a member of the people? Is it really just the ultimate expression of democracy?” Well, after the last election, we thought that there was a different narrative. And that the narrative I thought was really about “Is the Presidency, because it is based upon an individual unlike a lot of other… We consider ourselves a democracy but we’re really a Republic and there are different ways in which that Republic is expressed. But if that is really about the character of the presidency and president involved, that her or him is entirely based upon his or her character. So we’re going to reshape the whole thing to be based upon having people understand that the person that they vote for has to be a reflection of her or his character. Draw your own conclusions from that.

[NR] Yeah, just a minor task. That’s simple stuff, what you’re working on there right? [laughter] You know, just fundamental questions about the American Republic but you know just all in a day’s work for the History Doctor. [laughter]

[TS] Yeah but, Nick, you’ve done these kinds of things. I mean when you’ve been at… When you’ve been a park ranger, when you’ve been at Long Branch, I mean you’ve dealt with folks who you really want to make sure that you understand what you want to go ahead and leave your encounter with.

[NR] Right.

[TS] Whether or not you’re dealing with 15,000 people or one, it’s the same question and you’ve done that. And I know you’ve done this well. So when we’re really talking about this, that is what we wanted to leave people with. Not with a conclusion, but with a question.

[NR] Yeah.

[TS] And we wanted to leave politics aside and put intellect into it. Think about what you want your president to do, what you want your president to be. You want your president to be a reflection of her or his character and her or his ability to handle tough situations. Because the presidency is not a bit about character, it’s entirely about character. So we’re not going to present to you this view about what a president should be. We’re going to present to you a level of questions you should ask yourself when you leave that Hall of Presidents. I don’t care whether you’re going outside and you’re going to listen to the Muppets because the Muppets are going to present to you a very particular way. But if you’re going to leave that, you’re going to leave it with questions not with prepackaged assets. And to me that is the essence of public history.

[NR] Yeah, I was going to say that kind of distills it down. This kind of summarizes the whole conversation we’ve had that public history – was it Freeman Tilden who did a lot of that groundbreaking work for the Park Service back in the 60s – talked about it not being the fire but it’s sort of the spark, right? It’s the idea that you want people to leave with perhaps more questions or different questions than they had in the first place. And I feel like we could sit here and talk all day. And it is kind of humorous that we’re interviewing someone who teaches at Hopkins while he’s in Florida; but, hopefully, we can have you into the studio as it were to maybe continue this conversation at a future date and time.

But with the constraints of time and respecting your schedule as we sort of move here to a conclusion on this conversation, what’s next? I mean, you know we’ve gone from Williamsburg to Disney to Hopkins, Yale, Harvard. I mean, you name it, you’ve been there. What are you working on at Hopkins? What can people expect from you next? What should we be looking for?

[TS] There are just a couple of things. All that sounds really good, but I think that we’re really talking about the challenges of public history moving forward. The kind of things that you’ve done with historic preservation in Maryland, I think is the kind of things that we need to move on with. Not just no more regional but no more global perspective. Personally, I’m writing the book that is a field guide. It is public history that is my way of – with Rowman & Littlefield  – about talking about how public history should be practiced in the twenty-first century from interpretation to fundraising.

There’s that, and there’s also this incredible program that’s going on at Johns Hopkins. I am the first public history teacher in the Johns Hopkins Museum Studies program in order to be able to make sure that we are introducing what’s going on with the practice of public history to professionals in the field and students who really want to work in the sustainable field. I’m thankful to go ahead and move from Harvard to Hopkins, to go ahead and build a new program and doing that where I’m from.

But the other part of it, though, I think the bigger part of it is where does public history go from here? Where do we really need to engage folks from here? I think that the folks who are working on public history need to know two things. The first one is that public history is first and foremost about activism and it is about making sure that people are using the past today to shape their views of the future, to shape the decisions they’re talking about what comes next. I desperately think that that’s what public historians and public history sites need to focus on. There is a discussion about relevance that’s going on, but that is really where the rubber meets the road in terms of relevance. How does it matter? You make sure that you are having discussions that people can use.

[NR] I think to some extent a lot of institutions are scared of that, and it can feel scary to kind of get out in some of those places but, like you said, if you want to remain relevant then you need to be part of relevant discussions.

[TS] You couldn’t be more right. I think those people are scared. I think people don’t want to provoke. I think people don’t want to go ahead and get out there on the edge but I think right now the edge is where we all need to be, and that we can share the fear of being on the edge by making sure that we’re leveraging resources. That particularly among small sites the Six-to-Fix program is amazing, that you’re doing. And I think particularly the Harriet Tubman program and – helping small sites work together in order to figure out how they can maximize their potential, and maximize their resources. I think that too many small sites are working in a vacuum and thinking that it’s a zero-sum game rather than working together to understand that somebody might have a strength in research, another person might have a strength in material culture, another might have a strength in collections management, might have a strength in fundraising understanding. That we need to go ahead and find ways to help these sites work together in order to maximize and leverage those resources.

[NR] It’s the rising tide philosophy and I think that that’s something that we definitely, definitely subscribe to. Well, I feel like you and I could go on and on and I think that we’re looking at a part two here in the near future, which if you’re up for it… If people want to hear more from you, follow you, what’s the best way? Twitter the best way to find you?

[TS] Actually, I think if you’re up for it, I’m all yours. PreserveCast and Preservation Maryland is a great way. @History_Doctor on Twitter is fine. Stoermer@JHU.edu is good. One of the things that I like doing that earned me, I think, the History Doctor moniker was when I was at Colonial Williamsburg and I first started working at C-SPAN was I made sure that I worked with small historical sites, donating my time trying to fix them, trying to diagnose them and help them, and so a C-SPAN colleague told me, “Well, then you’re the History Doctor”, [laughter] and it just kind of stuck. So then it ended up being my Twitter feed and it ended up being essentially me. I’m fine with that. And so now I’m not a consultant, I don’t like being called a consultant because I do it for free. I think that we’re all in this together in terms of public history and that that’s, I think, a more collaborative and collective approach. It’s the way we all need to go but we need to tackle those tough issues the best possible way, and I think that Preservation Maryland is doing it. You’re obviously doing it and that if you want to get to me, get to the people who are doing the tough work and I’m always there and you’re certainly doing that.

[NR] Well, appreciate that and if we have a history ailment we’ll be sure to tweet you. [laughter] Toughest question before we part ways here, we ask everybody favorite historic building or place, particularly for people working in this field they hem and haw. People try and give us two or three answers but what is it?

[TS] Point of Fort McHenry, period.

[NR] There we go. We like the decisiveness.

[TS] So, right there. Yeah, right there at the point of Fort McHenry in the bay, right out there. My fourth great-grandfather was 14 years old, ran off to join a Baltimore Artillery Unit, was at Fort McHenry in September of 1814 during the rockets’ red glare. But I love being on that point looking out on our bay, out across that bridge, thinking about that whole scene and about our whole city and about our whole state. To me, there is no better place to think about Chesapeake history and to think about our place in our world than that spot. So it’s got to be Fort McHenry.

[NR] Well, we love it, we’ll take it. Sounds good to us! Taylor, this has been fantastic, we’ve enjoyed having you with us. [We] enjoy what you’re doing, what you’re working on and look forward to talking with you again in the future. Thanks so much.

[TS] All right, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Credits

You don’t need to open a history book to find us. Available online from iTunes and their Google Play Store as well as our website: PresMD.org. This is PreserveCast.

This podcast was developed under a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training, a unit of the National Park Service. Its contents are the sole responsibility of Preservation Maryland and the Maryland Milestones Heritage Area and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the National Park Service or the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training.

This week’s episode was produced and engineered by Stephen Israel. Our executive producer is Aaron Marcavitch. Our theme music is performed by the band Pretty Gritty. You can learn more about them at their website: PrettyGrittyMusic.com, on Facebook, or on Twitter @PG_PrettyGritty.

To learn about Preservation Maryland or this week’s guests, visit: PreservationMaryland.org. While there, you can check out our blog and learn about what’s current in historic preservation. We’re also on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Twitter @PreservationMD. And of course, a very special thank you to our listeners. Keep preserving!