“Stratford Hall is endeared to me by many memories,” said Robert E. Lee. Stratford Hall was Lee’s birthplace and home until the age of three. He never again lived there. Graduate students like Tim Barrett have been working here through UGA's College of Environment and Design to assist Stratford Hall's preservation efforts concerning the site's historic landscapes. "Graduate education is changing—and we think the example of our work at Stratford Hall is one powerful example," says Daniel Nadenicek. "Both students and faculty are part of an 'expeditionary team' invited by Stratford Hall for a new venture," he says.
An engraving of Captain John Smith. Next page: Barrett discovered this fossilized whale bone last year at the Stratford Hall historic site.
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the Stratford Hall historic and cultural landscape. But Barrett’s thesis work is not necessarily on terra firma. His research concerns the waterways and tributaries explored by Smith that extend many thousands of nautical miles. What does Captain John Smith have to do with Stratford Hall? For one thing, “He surely saw the {Lee family} property from the water and mapped its shoreline,” says Barrett. Smith is central to Barrett’s research, which concerns “the landscape corridors he mapped and how they appear today,” he says. This Virginia landscape is for Barrett, as a student of historic preservation, a marvel of opportunity and breadth. Barrett has spent hundreds of hours at Stratford Hall, living, hiking, exploring, photographing, observing, listening and learning. Some of that time has been on water, where he observed Stratford Hall’s dramatic coastline from Smith’s vantage point.
A Living Laboratory for “Intellectual Apprenticeship” Barrett says the time at Stratford Hall was a journey into truly untested waters, “to build upon my work experience and become a member of an ‘expeditionary team’ of graduate students and professors to make contributions that I believed would help make a difference in both an academic field and a new venture.” Dean Nadenicek adds, “The CLL offers an unusual emersion experience for faculty and scholars. In so many ways, it has given us a chance to be realtime innovators and put scholarship to work in the real world. It provides opportunity for graduate students like Tim to develop intellectual muscle and apply that to a project, gaining experience with UGA professors guiding and channeling that experience. It is something like an intellectual