on the landscape that were present during the three-day Civil War battle in July 1863 are classified as “witness trees.”48 Inspired, Broholm developed a course using lumber from a felled pecan tree at Hampton NHS, a former plantation outside Baltimore, Maryland. Class readings and discussions looked at the history of slaveholding, the lives of slaves, the slave-based economy of the Upper South, and the lifestyles of the planter class. Students researched Hampton’s significance in American history and visited the tree’s site in Maryland, building a fully informed design vocabulary from which they created objects. The RISD student artwork was then displayed at Hampton NHS in spring 2010. “Working with the tree from Hampton,” said Broholm, “shows how history informs objects and provides a deeper understanding of culture. This has been an enriching experience and our hope is this project will enrich the learning of others as well.”49 “This project brings to life the social, cultural, and economic history of the Hampton property,” said Gregory Weidman, Hampton’s curator. “Watching the process of RISD students creating objects in response to the pecan Witness Tree was fascinating and a wonderful learning experience.”50 In both collaborations, students are exposed in fresh and creative ways to NPS work, while the agency benefits from the infusion of youthful energy, and also the resources higher education can offer, from access to and application of new media tools to furniture workshops and exposure to developments in the visual arts.
Bridging the Gap between Nature and Culture: Martin Van Buren National Historic Site Since its founding, NPS has drawn distinctions between sites protected for their natural and scenic qualities and others preserved for their cultural and historical significance. As Mark Fiege points out in a recent issue of the George Wright Forum, environmental history in some form has always been valued by the agency; its contemporary iteration an “outgrowth of a much older effort to identify and understand nature and the causes of environmental change.”51 Yet while the agency is increasingly alert to the many ways such boundaries are blurred, a too-broad gap continues to separate natural and cultural resources. In many instances, that separation undermines sound stewardship, particularly with regard to agricultural lands within national parks. Parks that interpret farming or collaborate with farms are often hampered by the nature/culture distinction, as well as by the difficulty of knowing how—or whether—to engage with decision making about how to keep farms viable within the contemporary agricultural economy. One site that is bridging the gap between nature and culture is the Martin Van Buren NHS in Kinderhook, New York. For more than a decade, the park has been working to incorporate interpretation of Van Buren’s post-presidential farming activities, which Van Buren saw as an important expression of his political and personal values. This interpretive shift was greatly enhanced in 2009 with a boundary expansion that brought most of Van Buren’s farm within the park. Several scholarly studies, including an ethnographic landscape study of farming in Columbia County, where the farm is located, support the development of innovative new 48 “Rhode Island School of Design and National Park Service Partner on Cultural Study and Object Creation from Fallen Witness Tree,” press release, http://www.risd.edu/templates /content.aspx?id= 4294974149; “Witness Tree Exhibit Opens,“ NPS Digest, http://home.nps.gov /applications/digest/headline.cfm?type=Announcements&id=8911; WTP General Introduction, 2010 (thanks to Dale Broholm for sharing this document); and Charles A. Birnbaum, “Tree Hugging Is Back in Style,” Huffington Post April 1, 2011. 49 “Rhode Island School of Design and National Park Service Partner.” “Rhode Island School of Design and National Park Service Partner.” 50 51 Mark Fiege, “Toward a History of Environmental History in the National Parks,” George Wright Forum 28, no. 2 (2011): 128-47. 129
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