Department of Historic Preservation at Mary Washington

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Department of Historic Preservation at Mary Washington

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Welcome to our site! Please join and ask your HISP friends to join! The following is a guide to our

We are the Department of Historic Preservation at the University of Mary Washington. The department offers an interdisciplinary major that acquaints students with a broad range of activities, methods and theoretical perspectives. Students in the program may emphasize historic architecture, architectural conservation, folklore, archaeology, planning, or museum studies in their course work.

10/23/2026

Students Save the Date! HISP Career Forum
Wednesday, November 4, at 5pm, Combs 009
Come to an informal event to hear about resumes, job searches, and shaping your career from recent alums in many disciplines. The panel will a talk about their experiences and then there will be plenty of time to interact and get your questions answered. Share some pizza and get your questions answered.

10/16/2026

UMW Students come join Gretchen Gorecki '09 and Dr. Lauren McMillan '08 at 5:30 pm on November 10th in Combs 139 for an informal presentation and discussion around opportunities and careers in state parks!

10/14/2026

UMW Students join Dr. Henry and Tom Reger for a Footstone Raising Workshop on Saturday, November 7th from 9 am to 2 pm at 1000 Washington Ave. No experience needed! Sign up now as there are only eight spots!

10/07/2026

Current students join Dr. Henry and Dr. Smith for their Cursive Workshop! Learn the basics of cursive writing and apply it to reading historic documents. There are limited spots so sign up now! 10 am to 12 noon on Saturday, October 17th at the James Monroe Museum and Memorial Library. Breakfast provided.

10/07/2026

Early records, especially inventories, can give us lots of information about how people lived as well as clues to how they built their homes. Spotsylvania County Will Book A, yet again provides some great clues to understanding the early-18th century built environment for the region with Robert Beverly's February 1734 inventory noting "7 panes crown glass 10 in. x 12 in". James Taylor's inventory from September 1727 indicates "100, 5 foot clapboards" a type of riven siding, (sometimes used as roofing and flooring!). The note also describes "400 yards brush fence", like a hedgerow, and also a "dwelling house, 40 x 15, 8 foot pitch". Many such homes were only a single pile deep (no more than 20 feet), but this example at Thomas Jackson's place is longer than many of the other tenant houses on James Taylor's property, for the time. Lastly, we get a mention in the inventory of Joseph Brock's estate in August 1743 of "small HL hinges" as well as "large cross garnet" hinges. The HL hinges were often used for doors in more finished spaces whereas the cross garnet hinge, similar to a strap hinge, could be used in a variety of functions, from a dwelling house door to a dependency.

10/02/2026

Another interesting find when combing through early Spotsylvania County, Virginia, records was the mention of a stump or samp mortar on Charles Cavanaugh's land "in the great fork of the Rappahannock" in October 1729 (WB A p. 108). The device, which had been used by indigenous populations, was used to pulverize corn which was then turned into a dried food called samp. John Strong noted the food in an excerpt from his book, "The Algonquian Peoples of Long Island from Earliest Times to 1700", stating that "sappaen was good eating, even better with Dutch butter, and easily digested (Strong, p. 103)." The Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Council and Museums did a great blog post about samps, https://www.cutchoguenewsuffolkhistory.org/news/when-the-days-grew-shorter-samp-was-on-the-menu-for-colonial-east-enders/ . Also of note is the notation of the 12 x 15 foot house on the property valued at 8 pounds, such buildings seem to have been typical for the period with numerous notations of similar houses in the region during the 1720s and 30s.

10/02/2026

The 2026 Book Prize Lecture is here! Come to Combs 237 at 5 pm on October 7th and listen to Dr. Emily Lieb talk about her book "Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore" and the enormous harm a map alone can do. You can learn about an unfinished interstate highway through Black West Baltimore and neighborhoods, houses, and the people and policy that made them.

This lecture is open to the public so everyone is welcome to join us!

10/01/2026

Recent evaluation of Spotsylvania County, Virginia, Will Book A has led to some interesting discoveries including the mention of "punchined" houses on James Taylor's land (Kelly as a tenant), modern day Orange County, in September of 1725 (WB A p 19). These houses are described in the 1957 publication by Henry Forman, "Virginia Architecture in the Seventeenth Century" where they are noted as being fashioned by "upright timbers or posts, set apart in the ground so that the space between them was the same as the thickness of the timber or post." The space was then filled with "wattle-and-daub" (Forman, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37288/pg37288-images.html ) . A clip of Will Book A indicating the "punchined" house and a clip of Forman's sketch of the building typology are included.

09/21/2026

Current majors bring your lunch and join us at noon on September 23rd for an informal discussion with alum Sam Biggers '16 who will talk about the work of his firm Dominion Traditional Building Group and careers in the masonry trade! We'll see you there in Combs 009!

09/18/2026

Everyone is welcome to join us Sept. 22nd at 5:30 in Combs 139! Come and listen to a lecture from Tramia Jackson the Director of Education Programs at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Her lecture, Bones I Was Never Meant to See: On Return, Refusal, and the Body as Archive, will focus on her trip to Guadeloupe to visit sites of enslavement in 2025 and how her experiences and consideration of body as archive impacts her work at Mount Vernon.

Address

1301 College Avenue
Fredericksburg, VA
22401

Telephone

+15406541315

Website

http://cas.umw.edu/hisp/

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