Ep. 11: Historical Preservation and Historical Architecture w/ Kurtis Rogers

This week we are joined by Kurtis Rogers, a city planner in North Carolina with a focus in historical architecture and preservation. We discuss how historical preservation is important and how it benefits cities. We will be taking a two week break to let students and professors prepare for finals. After the break we will be back for some fun summer episodes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hey everyone and welcome back to the History Over Coffee Podcast, brought to you by Marshall's History Department and Norse by God. Today we are joined by an extra special guest, my brother-in-law, Curtis Rogers. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and what you'll be talking about today?

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hey, my name is Curtis Rogers. I am a planner slash architectural historian slash um historic preservationist. I am currently uh I work for a cultural resource group. Well, no, I actually work for a land use consulting firm. Um that's what I do right now.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Awesome. So I know we discussed you'll be talking about some historical preservation and things like that. How did you become interested in that? And for people who are listening who might not know, can you explain kind of what historical preservation entails and maybe what your focus is?

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Uh yeah, so I actually went to school for museum studies and I took a class in historic preservation. Um, and I interned with the city of Greensboro here in North Carolina. Um, and I kind of I I I liked the idea of historic preservation and the concepts surrounding it and preserving these areas uh of I guess like cultural historic um relevance and significance. And overall, I would say what historic preservation is is it's keeping in mind and creating spaces in towns, cities, counties that kind of want to preserve like a I would say a um authenticity surrounding a certain time period. And I would kind of say that's like kind of like a broader view of like what historic preservation is. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

So have you over the years you've been doing this, have you run into any sort of problems in this process since yeah, all the time.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

So historic preservation in general, um it is a healthy part of a thriving city, town, locality, whatever municipality, it is a part of the ecosystem, and it creates it creates tourism, it's an economic powerhouse. I would say powerhouse, but it is a it is a proponent or a component of uh thriving downtowns. Um but in that vein, um, not everybody, especially developers, don't really like historic preservation because you are locked into certain building materials, um, design criteria, and all that kind of stuff. And it's usually more expensive. So, and um I in my current work, uh, I usually deal with uh historic historic downtowns or districts within those districts. Um, it just really depends on how robust is zoning ordinance or um the zoning ordinance or like the locality's um regulatory measures uh for buildings. I mean, when I was in Greensboro, uh when I was interning there, there was a historic home that was about 150 years old, and it was demoed by a famous um by a famous NFL player that was buying property in the area, and it was a big stink about it. So um, yes, there are always problems with it because one from the developers and two communities trying to save these historic resources. Um and it's for either cultural reasons or it's hey, it's a Queen Anne that's located in downtown wherever that's like maybe the like the last one standing, and and if it was like part of maybe it was part of like a mill village, and this was like where this the where the the main boss was like located for this mill village. So it's just there are always problems in historic preservation. I mean you can look at the White House right now, you know.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

So take us through kind of what your day-to-day looks like, specifically say like someone calls you about an a certain area or house, how does that process look for you?

SPEAKER_01 4:49

So it really just depends on like the locality itself and like if they actually have regulatory measures to protect resources, and if they don't, then it's like well uh we don't really have anything for that, and then uh usually it might like the city of Greensboro, uh a historic house was demoed, and I don't even think the town or the city knew about it, and uh it got demoed anyways, and everybody was mad. But um usually in historic preservation, if anybody has a question about if they if they live in a historic district, um, and they have questions about like, hey, I want to do an addition on my house, okay, great. You're gonna have to go through an architectural review board or some type of board that is um as a regulatory um body that usually um determines and it's usually called a certificate in appropriateness uh for whatever whatever you want to do to your house. If you're wanting to change your German weatherboard that was originally there in the 1920s, and you're wanting to replace it with, hey, I'm gonna replace it with vinyl because I just bought this this new house, and I just want to replace it with vinyl or brick, or if I want to paint this brick, usually you don't want to do that. So um that's usually in a normal play, like if a more setup like um locality that has that. It's just like okay, you you go through a board and they say yes or no, and then I usually am the one that takes it all in and kind of determines what needs to be done.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Gotcha. So I know you lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, which has a lot of historical context around it. Um when you were working up there, were you involved in sort of preservation there or were you focused on other areas?

SPEAKER_01 7:01

So when I lived in Fredericksburg, I worked for a CRM group, a cultural resource management group, and there I did surveys and nominations for um historic resources. So say if there was a developer that wanted to build condos on this like open lot that was kind of on the outskirts of Fredericksburg. Granted, that's not really good. I mean, there are, but there aren't at the same time uh in the city. So um in that case, I would do from a state level, there are state requirements and local requirements, and I usually followed both. So the state, the DHR office, department of historical resources has like these standards, and I would follow these standards and go review this this battlefield or like this area that's probably associated with the battlefield, and we go study it, we catalog all the resources surrounding it, and then we provide a report to DHR, which um it's always interesting. Uh DHR has like um there's all kinds of different things that you have to do from a state resource management uh I guess uh standards, um, and you just provide your nomination or you provide your recommendation to them, and then they determine what needs to be done. Um there are some one of um there was a there was a project that we helped out on, and it was actually a hospital, or it was a building that no one knew that served as a hospital for the Confederate forces, and there was just a bunch of there was like a mass grave that was underneath this like building. And we found it, and there was a bunch of um historical, I mean there was bullets, uh garbage. You'd be surprised at how much garbage, like historical garbage there is in cities, and you're like, oh, that's interesting. Blast bottles, whatever, bam. But Fredericksburg has like six battlefields in it, so it's kind of like you're you can throw a rock and find a bullet somewhere or a cannonball.

SPEAKER_00 9:25

You mentioned finding that mass grave. Would you say that your job typically consists of finding cool things like that or dealing with the mundane?

SPEAKER_01 9:35

No, no. So whenever I did historic whenever I did CRM work is not that like that's like your that's your white whale. You're like, oh, that's that's sweet. Majority of the time you might find like a singular uh uh musket ball or something like that, and that's about it. Or you might find your garbage, like your um, yeah, that's about it. And usually like historic preservation didn't start until like the 1960s, so um it's some of these resources that we're like looking at, they're it's they're all vernacular structures, it's like common stuff that's not really anything too noteworthy as of right now.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

So I know you've lived in several different places, and maybe it is the mass grave, but have you run into any other interesting cases or interesting places that have been brought up?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Um I reviewed so there was a military installation. Can't really talk a lot about it, but there was a military installation that I had to that I had to review. And um I went there and I had to be like I had to be ex uh escorted by an individual I couldn't know his name. Uh and the only thing that they were it's it was located the the site was located near a historic resource that triggered section 106 kind of review, um which is a federal state law. I mean, yeah, federal state law kind of what historic preservation is kind of about in general. So we had to do this review for this military installation. The military installation was probably built in like the 80s or something like that, and they were wanting to do um in addition. There, I we didn't find anything, it was mostly just like the the interaction between like hey, I'm just some random guy that just like graduated, like I just like went to grad school, and now I'm being this this guy was armed. It wasn't like hey, uh this guy just he just has the normal military, like he was fully decked out and like stuff, and I was like, Oh, okay, cool. But um, no, not your archaeologists find all the cool stuff. Archaeologists that was on that were on my team, they found cannonballs and cannonballs that are live ordinance you have to report.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

You bring up these interesting uh scenarios, um, and this is kind of a two-part question. What got you interested in historical preservation? And then, secondly, we see historical preservation around us every day. Why do you think other people should care about historical preservation?

SPEAKER_01 12:51

Historic preserv okay, so I would say like historic districts, uh monuments. Pretty, I mean, like anything that reminds of the us of the past is important for our like cultural history or like just culture, history, everything. Um, I think that historic preservation is important, and that's what kind of like drug me into um the field for a little bit. Um one of my favorite historians, David Blight, he um he says that these historic structures, these monuments are like totems and like how social history and how we remember history, and how we remember history is like super, super important. And historic preservation is kind of doing that. Um it provides storytelling, it provides like how things used to be. Like if you go downtown Winston, I mean you go to um you go to old Salem and they like they teach you how to do all these like really cool things that were like done in the past. It's like, oh that's cool, great, that's awesome. I mean, that's historic preserv, that's historic preservation. That's that is preserving how things used to be and how things used to look, and that's why I got into it. Um but it is a field that is you do kind of feel like a checkbox at the end of the day sometimes. I mean, if you're following anything for like federal guidelines, that's what it is. But historic preserv his historic preservation and keeping these historic areas like authentic, but authenticity is kind of up to the eye of the beholder, honestly, because your viewpoint of what Charleston looked like and somebody else's viewpoint of what Charleston looked like and what it stood for in our nation's history is probably gonna be different, you know. So I i I think historic preservation um could be like an echo chamber kind of like oh well, yeah, you have to do this, this, this, and this. Like that's this is the way it is, but um it's a good it's a good field. Oh I like it.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Have you noticed more problems arising in the field of historical preservation with more like housing developments and less of a focus on maybe historical past? Has it has it affected your job at all or have you noticed some sort of negative pattern?

SPEAKER_01 15:34

So uh what I do now is like land use consulting. So I usually if you do anything with land use, it's in like zoning, rezoning, special like any type of zoning action. Zoning and historic preservation are pretty like hand in hand. Um with the nation's like housing problem and affordability problem, the only way to fix this is in is incentives and building new housing. Um historic preservation kind of not you you you want you want the area to be stuck in a certain time frame, you know, you which build that costs money, that costs lots of money. So uh that's the only problem that I see. Historic preservation can see when I was at Greensboro, it it was a it's kind of a hindrance. Like people would uh developers would come in and they would have wanna do a renovation of an old historic home that had like six bedrooms in it, and it was owned by a widow, like a widow, and they sold it. It's like okay, that person doesn't need six home like six bedrooms. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna convert it. So that's part of this like missing middle housing that um planning is trying to address, which is like not every we don't need to build 250 single-family dwellings whenever we have a building stock of these older historic homes that are just 3,000, 5,000 square feet, you know. So um develop housing development and historic preservation is usually unless the money's there or there's incentives surrounding it, historic preservation is kind of hinder is it is a hindrance for housing development. Um but housing development is needed. So the expansion uh the expansion of like historic districts and stuff like that, um needs to be mindful about uh about land use and what's allowed.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Well, I appreciate your time today and joining us. Um kind of I like to wrap up with a fun question. So my question for you is what's your favorite historical site you've visited or maybe would want to visit in the future?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

Historic site.

SPEAKER_01 18:20

Um Petersburg, I guess, like the crater, you know? I that's pretty fun. Any historic like um battlefields like really interesting. Um there's like several battlefields in Fredericksburg that are inside the actual city, obviously, because the city like transferred I wouldn't say ownership, allegiance, whatever. Uh and it's just like super interesting. I liked all the battlefields in Fredericksburg because the history surrounding us is like super interesting in the city and the major fires that were that happened there, um, and like reshaped the city, and you can kind of still see like there was an old bank that's now a restaurant, um, and there were cannonballs inside the um the actual structure, the building of it. It's pretty interesting. But yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:25

You said earlier that those are that those have to be removed. So were those removed.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

Yeah, so they yeah, they I think they have like I think they uh got I don't think they're original anymore. I think they just like put them back there or something because you have to take out the mechanism inside the cannonball or something. I don't know. I'm not a cannonball yet.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

Gotcha. Well, again, I appreciate you joining us today. Um for our listeners. We will be taking a short two break two-week hiatus uh so our professors and students can deal with finals and exams and projects like that. But we will see you back after that break. In the meantime, if you want to listen to any of the other podcasts or look at Marshall's History Department, you can go to Marshall History Department on Instagram or Facebook. You can also go to NorsebyGod.com, and that's the same tag for Facebook and Instagram as well to find out more information on medieval and Viking history. But until then, thank you guys for listening, and we will see you after the break.