The Virginia Department of Historic Resources
is the State Historic
Preservation Office.
Our mission is to foster, encourage, and support the stewardship of
Virginia's significant historic architectural, archaeological, and cultural resources.
Post-Natural Disaster Advisory:
See this
webpage.
For Owners and Managers
of Historic Buildings in Virginia: If you have an historic home, commercial
building, or other historic property that was damaged by the
August earthquake or Hurricane Irene,
please know that the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the historic
preservation agency for the Commonwealth, is available to assist you.
(See more. . .)
Recent News
FEMA Individual Assistance Program:
Application Deadline: March 5, 2012:
Historic homes damaged by
the August 23, 2011 earthquake and used as primary residences may be eligible for financial
assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through its Individual Assistance
Program. Historic buildings used as businesses may also be eligible for loans issued through the
Small Business Administration (SBA). (See more
PDF)
13 New Historical Highway Markers Approved:
A new historical highway marker commemorating a man who mailed himself to Philadelphia to escape slavery and six other signs focusing on topics in African American history are among the 13 new markers approved
recently by DHR. (See this
press release for more information.)
DHR architectural historian
Michael Pulice has authored a book titled
Discovering the
True Legacies of the Deyerle Builders: Nineteenth-Century Brick Architecture in the
Roanoke Valley and Beyond.
The book is available from the
History Museum of Western Virginia, which brought it to publication. Read this
review.
Go
here to order the book online.
Look! DHR's newest book publication:
Jordan's Point, Virginia: Archaeology in Perspective,
Prehistoric to Modern Times
by Martha W. McCartney.
If there is “a world in a grain of sand,” as the poet
William Blake writes, then imagine what archaeology can reveal
at a richly layered triangle of land known as Jordan’s Point,
situated along the James River, just down river from the City of
Hopewell. What archaeologists discovered there through careful
investigations sponsored by [DHR] ... is a path into the worlds of Virginia prehistory, colonial, and post-colonial history
... Anyone interested in Virginia history will want Martha McCartney’s book in his or her library.
— From the Foreword by Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, Director, DHR.
Generously illustrated and priced at $14.95, it is now available
through local bookstores or the
University
of Virginia Press.
Notes on Virginia:
The Battle of Trent’s Reach, James River, 1865:
Civil War photographers typically used enormous glass negatives to capture an image.
When these same negatives are scanned at a high resolution and posted online, as
the Library of Congress has done, it is possible using photographic software to
explore details (some previously unseen) inherent within each negative.
That’s exactly what archaeologist Taft Kiser has done to create fresh views
of historic photographs and illustrations. In so
doing, he also tells the story of a little-recalled battle between the Confederate and Union
navies on the James River in January 1865. “It was a bold and eleventh-hour attempt by the
Confederate navy to cut off the Union army's supply base at City Point in
January of 1865,” says Kiser, an archaeologist with Cultural Resources Inc.
See this
slideshow of Kiser’s narrative, an online feature of
Notes on Virginia,
a publication of the Department of Historic Resources. (This slideshow expands an annotated
gallery that Kiser contributed to Notes on Virginia, No. 53.)
