Thursday, February 19th, 2015

1. Please send RSVP to the Co-Chairs no later than February 13th
.
Co-Chairs: Eric Benson ebenson@mountvernon.org & Luke Pecoraro lpecoraro@mountvernon.org
Mount Vernon Regional GIS Symposium for Historical Resources
Thursday, February 19th, 2015
Schedule
9:00 – 9:30: Arrival / Coffee
9:30 – 10:00: Opening remarks – Introductions
10:00 – 10:30: Protecting the James River Viewshed using GIS & 3D Visualizations — Sharee
Williamson, National Trust for Historic Preservation; Brady Hoak, ESRI.
10:30 – 11:00: Mapping Segregation: How Racially Restricted Housing Shaped Washington DC,
1900-1948 — Sarah Shoenfeld and Mara Cherkasky, Prologue DC; Brian Kraft, JMT
Technology Group.
11:00 – 11:15: Break
11:15 – 11:45: Tracing the General's Way: GIS in the Reconstruction of MD 178's Original
Track — W. Brett Arnold & Anastasia Poulos, Anne Arundel County.
11:45 – 1:00: Lunch/Networking. A boxed lunch will be provided free of charge.
1:00 – 1:30: Future of Historic Resource Surveying: Mobile Data Collection Applications —
Deidre McCarthy & Megan Brown, National Park Service; Michele Oaks & Mary C.
Collins, City of Alexandria.
1:30 – 2:00: Visualizing Antebellum Richmond by Constructing a Historical 3D City — Justin
Madron, University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.
2:00 – 2:15: Break
2:15 – 2:45: Building a Historic Building Information Model at Mount Vernon — Tom Reinhart
& Eric Benson, MVLA; Patrick Gahagan, ESRI.
2:45 – 3:00: Closing remarks/adjournment
3:00: Optional tour to the Mansion's east lawn to view the Mount Vernon Viewshed. Feel
free to continue visiting the mansion and grounds until closing at 4:00.

2. Protecting the James River Viewshed using GIS & 3D Visualizations
- Brady Hoak, ESRI.
Earlier this year the National Trust named the James River at Jamestown to our list of National Treasures
deserving protection. The threat facing the James River is Dominion Virginia Power’s plans to build a high
voltage transmission line that would be visible from Jamestown Island, the Colonial Parkway, and other
resources located in the heart of Virginia’s Historic Triangle.
Additionally, the James River itself is part of the first congressionally designated national water trail -- the
Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail -- which traces the history of the Chesapeake from the
17th century.
With the theory that a picture is worth a thousand words, the National Trust put together a story map using
GIS technology to help the public better understand and visualize the threat posed by the transmission line.
The National Trust also developed a 3D model that depicts the view of the transmission towers from different
vantage points. This model was developed using LiDAR and tree cover data produced by the federal
government.
Mapping Segregation: How Racially Restricted Housing Shaped Washington DC, 1900-1948
- Sarah Shoenfeld & Mara Cherkasky, Prologue DC; Brian Kraft, JMT Technology Group.
Mapping Segregation is a historical research and mapping project that will result in a layered, dynamic,
interactive online map showing the historic segregation of Washington DC’s housing, schools, recreational
facilities, and other public venues. This long-term project is a collaboration among historians Sarah Shoenfeld
and Mara Cherkasky of Prologue DC and GIS specialist Brian Kraft of JMT Technology Group. A DC Humanities
Council grant is funding stipends for UDC student interns in the project’s first year, during which we are
focusing primarily on two neighborhoods: Pleasant Plains and Bloomingdale.
The rise of housing segregation during the first half of the 20th century coincided with a transformative period
in the city’s history. The exodus of African Americans from the South, combined with employment
opportunities in DC, resulted in massive population growth here. Racially restrictive covenants served to
confine DC’s rapidly expanding black population to substandard, overcrowded areas and to preserve racial
homogeneity in neighborhoods marketed to whites.
The maps we’ve developed thus far display the location of properties with restrictive covenants in their deeds
combined with demographic data showing the relationship between covenants and the shifting racial identity
of individual blocks and whole neighborhoods. In addition, we’ve mapped the location of houses that were the
subject of covenant-related legal battles in the 1920s-1940s, revealing that most of these cases arose near
racial dividing lines. We are currently developing an interactive map that tells the stories behind these cases,
and will have it completed for the Mt. Vernon symposium.

3. Tracing the General's Way: GIS in the Reconstruction of MD 178's Original Track
- W. Brett Arnold & Anastasia Poulos, Anne Arundel County.
Over the last year, archaeologists and GIS analysts with Anne Arundel County and the Maryland State Highway
Administration have been engaged in an intensive cultural resources survey of the Generals Highway (MD 178)
corridor. One of the project’s stated goals is to identify the path the road took before it was widened and
straightened in 1940, as part of an effort to give context to other properties surveyed in the project area by
reconstructing the eighteenth and nineteenth century cultural landscape.
We have worked toward fulfilling this goal by using GIS to compare georeferenced historic maps to modern
parcel data, topographic data, aerial photography, LIDAR, and IR imagery. This resulted in a preliminary
reconstruction of the road bed, which will later be identified on the ground and traced with mobile-based GPS
tools in an attempt to assess the viability of using modern mobile devices for this type of cultural landscape
reconstruction. The end result of this project will be added to a GIS research tool that details the cultural
resources landscape of the corridor over time—including the historic route the road took in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries—and will be available to archaeologists and other researchers with an interest in the
Generals Highway region.
Future of Historic Resource Surveying: Mobile Data Collection Applications
- Deidre McCarthy & Megan Brown, National Park Service; Michele Oaks & Mary C. Collins, City of Alexandria.
The National Park Service, in partnership with the City of Alexandria, is seeking to preserve America’s historic
and cultural places by developing a mobile historic resource survey application to streamline the time-
consuming process of traditional field collection surveys.
Traditional surveys require significant man-hours in the field collecting data, utilizing methods such as paper
survey forms, hand drawn maps, and 35 mm cameras. These surveys are no longer feasible for our
communities, particularly when faced with limited funding and many resources in need of rapid evaluation
and re-evaluation. Utilizing Geographic Information System (GIS) technology and handheld devices, the
National Park Service, with its partners are working to develop an application to streamline this workflow,
reduce survey man-hours and easily share information with other agencies and the public. After the multi-
phased testing is complete, the application will be made available as a complementary data collection tool to
historic preservation offices around the country.
This presentation will be a preview of future of historic resource survey tools. Attendees will have the chance
to see first-hand how the National Park Service and its partners have leveraged the power of GIS and mobile
technology to create an application that is user-friendly and intuitive.
Visualizing Antebellum Richmond by Constructing a Historical 3D City
- Justin Madron, University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.
Richmond was a very different place a decade before the Civil War than it is today. This presents a number of
challenges in how to visualize a city over 150 years later, while capturing the essence of the place. Historical
data is often sparse—making it difficult to construct a historical 3D city. The majority of the data came from
digitizing building footprints derived from historical maps, which provided the base data. Using programming
rules created in CityEngine, buildings were populated from these footprints and rendered instantly. We used
geovisualization techniques to explore the role Richmond, Virginia played during the slave trade by following
the travels of Eyre Crow--visually identifying where his paintings and engravings took place. Using procedural

4. modeling techniques we were able to capture mid-19th-century urban architectural styles and immerse the
viewers in historic Richmond.
Building a Historic Building Information Model at Mount Vernon
- Tom Reinhart & Eric Benson, MVLA; Patrick Gahagan, ESRI.
In 1860, the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association saved the home of George Washington and since that time has
worked to better our understanding of plantation life at Washington’s Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon’s
original construction and continued preservation have produced a vast archive of records, beginning with
Washington’s personal papers and continuing with research and restoration documentation generated by
ongoing conservation work.
To organize this large amount of data, Mount Vernon’s Department of Historic Preservation has created a
Historic Building Information Model (HBIM) of the mansion. The HBIM is a purpose-built database accessed
through a highly accurate, 3-D model. The model was created through a combination of laser scanning and
hand rendering in the Autodesk program Revit. Data in various media are attached to individual elements -
framing members, electrical system, decorative features, even patches in plaster - and are accessed through
‘entering’ the model and clicking on the desired element. The model can be manipulated to show sections or
plans, and parts, such as wall surfaces, can be hidden to reveal framing or infrastructure within the walls. The
HBIM is not static; it will be constantly updated to reflect the most current understanding of the building. The
first test of this new technology is underway as Mount Vernon begins to upgrade its fire suppression system,
with the model providing the framework for the design of the system components, and the installation
allowing documentation of normally inaccessible spaces for incorporation into the HBIM.
Another advantage of the HBIM is its compatibility with GIS technology. Mount Vernon has been
collaborating with ESRI, an industry leader in GIS, to integrate the HBIM database with the estate's existing GIS
data of the surrounding landscape. By importing both the 3-D model and associated tabular data into ESRI's
ArcGIS Pro and CityEngine softwares, the buildings can be viewed within a 3-D representation of the entire
estate. This integration goes far beyond the visual applications; it provides seamless querying and analysis of
all the datasets involved, and allows users to access information about buildings or landscape elements, all
while viewing them in their proper spatial relationship to each other. This comprehensive system will give our
staff unprecedented management of our historic resources and the attendant modern infrastructure, and will
eventually provide web-based visitors an unparalleled window into the history of Mount Vernon.