Holiday House Tour – Page 16 – Preservation of Historic Winchester

Friday Roundup: Holiday House Tour, Preorder Wreaths, and Preservation News

Happy Friday! We apologize for the radio silence most of this week as we finished up the printing and mailing for Holiday House Tour. Tickets are available now at all the ticket sale locations, and online ticket sales are being mailed as they are received. You can use the forms below, or on our website if the forms do not load in your email.

Don’t forget, if you want to place a preorder with Nate Windle for some special custom arrangements and wreaths at the Bough and Dough Shop, you need to get your order in by next Wednesday, November 22 to guarantee fulfillment. Pickup will be at the Bough and Dough Shop Sunday afternoon on December 3.

While we are still monitoring developments in the historic tax credit, we have a few other pieces of news to share:

Winchester City Council will vote on “R-2017-46, A Resolution to Urge the President of the United States and the United States Congress to Continue the Federal Historic Tax Credit Program and to Otherwise Provide with Respect Thereto” at the Nov. 28 regular City Council Meeting. We are proud to report the City’s recommendation is to maintain the Historic Tax Credit as it exists because it has been an important tool in the redevelopment of local historic sites. You can see the resolution here.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is launching the African-American Cultural Heritage Action Fund. The fund will be used to provide grants to African-American historic sites and train high school students through the Hands-On Preservation Experience (HOPE Crew). Visit their website to learn more or make a pledge to the action fund.

Open Culture posted the news that The Internet Archive has found a way to make some material published between 1923 to 1941 available for free online. While the first batch of materials utilizing this provision of copyright law may not be useful to local historians, it is a sign of things to watch for in the coming years.

Lastly, the PHW office will be closed on Thursday and Friday, November 23 and 24, for Thanksgiving. We anticipate the office being open as usual Monday-Wednesday, November 27-29. The office will likely be closed at least part of Thursday and Friday as we prepare for the Bough & Dough Shop setup.

Holiday House Tour Tickets Update

Time flies in November! We are expecting the program booklets to arrive late Monday, but if you have a strong internet connection, you can view or download the booklet as a PDF (about 22 MB).

Online ticket sales for the Holiday House Tour are available now at www.phwi.org. We will plan to mail online orders received by Friday, Nov. 24. For orders placed after that, keep a copy of your receipt to use as your temporary ticket.

We are planning for the tickets and program booklets to be available at our physical sale locations around Winchester by the afternoon of Tuesday, Nov. 14 at the following locations:

The Final Yard, 33 East Gerrard Street
Kimberly’s, 135 North Braddock Street
Wilkins’ Shoe Center, 7 South Loudoun Street
Winchester Book Gallery, 185 North Loudoun Street
Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center, 1400 South Pleasant Valley Road

If you are waiting to see how the weather pans out that weekend, tickets will also be available at the advance sale price at the Bough & Dough Shop at the Winchester Little Theatre, 315 West Boscawen Street, on Dec. 2 and 3.

And as in past years, if you only want to visit a site or two or take the Sunday walking tour, each site is a $5 single admission paid at the door (excluding the Preview Party home, which is full price to cover the food and drink).

Holiday House Tour 2017 Preliminary Information

While we are waiting for our printed Holiday House Tour materials to arrive and tickets to go on sale, we have some thanks and our first round of information to share about the tour.

1. First, thank you to everyone who has contributed shopping bags this year for the Bough & Dough Shop. We are close to our goal, but don’t let that discourage you from donating if you haven’t made it to the Hexagon House yet. We will happily take them through the rest of November. As always, any unused bags from this drive are held for the next year, or recycled if the bags cannot be reused.

2. If you ever wished you could place a custom order for finished greenery at the Bough & Dough Shop, we have you covered! Nate Windle will be taking custom orders for live and artificial greenery arrangements and wreaths this year. Be sure to place an order before Wednesday, November 22 with Nate to guarantee fulfillment. Pickup will be at 315 W. Boscawen St. on Sunday, Dec. 3 between 1-4 p.m.

3. While we gear up for the Shop, we also want to share a special, limited edition print of the Community Food Store. This landmark of South Kent Street was demolished in 2011 after it was deemed too structurally unsound to rehabilitate, but the memory of the building lives on. The image is reproduced from a watercolor of the store from 1989 with the familiar Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and RC Cola signs and vending machines in full color. The print itself is approximately 16″x20″, printed on an acid free substrate, with foam core backing and wrapped in cellophane for easy gift-giving or temporary display. The print run was limited to less than 50, and in total we have only 36 prints available for sale. You may pick one up at the PHW office or at the Bough & Dough Shop for $75 – either way, the proceeds from the print sales will be split 50/50 between PHW and the Winchester Little Theatre.

4. We expect tickets will go on sale by November 15 at the following locations:
The Final Yard, 33 East Gerrard Street
Kimberly’s, 135 North Braddock Street
Wilkins’ Shoe Center, 7 South Loudoun Street
Winchester Book Gallery, 185 North Loudoun Street
Winchester-Frederick County Visitors Center, 1400 South Pleasant Valley Road
And online at www.phwi.org

Tickets will also be available at the PHW Office, 530 Amherst Street, but please be mindful as the Hexagon House is undergoing some interior tune ups and we may have minor interruptions, dust, and the general hubbub of a building getting some TLC.

5. The online map to the ticket sale locations, tour stops, Bough & Dough Shop, and parking lots has been updated for 2017 and is available for viewing. We will note the houses are a bit more spread out this year than in some previous years, and the sidewalks may be challenging in some areas on Loudoun Street in particular. On-street parking will be very tight or non-existent on Loudoun and East Clifford Streets. Carpooling is recommended!

The guided walking tours on Sunday will only cover the Stewart and Washington Street neighborhood and are planned to take about 20 minutes. The tours will go past 21 South Washington Street if you want to hop off for a house tour, but they will also return to the Bough & Dough Shop if that is where you parked your car.

Friday Round Up: Clowser House, Guideline Updates, and More

Happy Friday! It’s been a busy week at PHW, so here’s what we’ve been up to:

We have added five images from the Walk and Learn tour we hosted in conjunction with the Clowser Foundation at the Clowser House last Saturday to our Flickr account. Thank you to everyone who came out and saw the house and heard about the efforts so far to save it. The Clowser Foundation needs your support – they are still fundraising for their efforts to repair the back wall before June 2018. You can learn more about their organization at their website and Facebook page.

We had some good questions on the historic farming uses at the Clowser House. As we learned on Saturday, the Clowser family ran a mixed farm with wheat, corn, cattle, pigs, and other crops and livestock. Although not specific to the Clowser family, you can learn more about agriculture in the Shenandoah Valley before and during the Civil War at Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation.

In Winchester news, we know many people have been awaiting word on the overhaul of the Board of Architectural Review Guidelines. The revised document, which has been in the works for about a year and a half, was presented at the September 26 City Council work session. It appears very likely the new guidelines, which allow for some additional flexibility with non-traditional materials, will be adopted on Tuesday, October 10. You may review the agenda and packet through the city’s website.

In Holiday House Tour news, we still have spaces available for interior full page, half page, and business card ads. You can learn more on the sizes and benefits of the ads here. If you are interested in reserving a spot, please let us know at phwinc.org@gmail.com or by calling 540-667-3577 before October 31.

We also took a few moments this week to update our GuideStar profile and reach their Silver rating. This has also opened up a new donation option for us on the GuideStar webpage. You may use the donation link under our logo as an alternate way to make online donations to PHW. Thank you in advance!

Holiday House Tour Call for Advertisers

It’s that time again! PHW is at work on lining up sponsors for our 2017 Holiday House Tour. For many of us this event officially begins the holiday season with its guided tours of the festively decorated historic properties in Winchester. In addition to being a fun community tradition, the Holiday House Tour generates the monetary foundation that enables us to continue our mission to preserve the best of the area’s past.

As part of our promotional materials for the event, PHW will be producing a full color program booklet again this year. I invite you to place an ad in the booklet to show your support for PHW and to promote your business to a demographic interested in Old Town Winchester, its history, and its architecture. Ads are available in full page (5″x8″), half page (5″x4″), and business card (2″x3.5″) sizes. Enlarging the image shows the sizes, costs, and benefits of the sponsors’ ads in the program.

Please reserve your spot soon – ads are due by 5 PM on October 31 to ensure inclusion in the program booklet, which will be distributed in mid-November to ticket sale locations and local visitor centers around Winchester. Include your business name, contact information, and ad size in your reservation. Your print-ready digital ad files may be emailed to phwinc.org@gmail.com or submitted on CD or flash drive at the PHW Office, 530 Amherst Street, Winchester, VA 22601. If you have questions, do not hesitate to email us or call us at 540-667-3577.

Thank you for your support, and we hope to see you at our 41st Holiday House Tour this December 2 and 3!

Friday Photos: Bough & Dough Shop 1996

Happy Friday! As unbelievable as it may seem, we are already starting work on Holiday House Tour and Bough & Dough Shop 2017. Mark your calendars now for the weekend of December 2 and 3!

We also heard your feedback about increasing the variety of vendors at the Shop in 2017. We are asking that new artisans interested in participating in the Shop for 2017 fill out a short form so that the Shop committee can jury new participants. Take your time with your submissions – we will accept applications through June 30, 2017.

To get your creative juices flowing, for Friday Photos this week we are revisiting the 1996 Bough & Dough Shop, which was held at the Winchester Rehabilitation Center at 333 W. Cork Street. This is one of the few years the Shop submitted a detailed report on what worked and what didn’t. This year was the first time we used a computerized cash register and vendor numbers during checkout. Despite a number of last minute no shows, the 1996 Shop had 25 vendors, plus the separate greenery and donated baked goods. The event was pulled together by Robin Sutton, Jenny Powers, Kim Dodd, Courtney Bragg, Julian Bragg, Rick Bragg, Aimee Kennedy, and Peggy Sweeney. Enjoy this stroll down a Christmas memory lane in 34 photos at Flickr!

Friday Photos: Holiday House Tour Circa 1980

This week, PHW has added 43 photos of Holiday House Tour decorations taken in the early to mid 1980s. There may be a few duplicates in the mix from past uploads, but you can check out all the new additions at the end of the Holiday House Tours album, or see just the latest images at the top of the Flickr photostream. Happy viewing!

Holiday House Tour Leftovers

As is usual after Holiday House Tour, a few lost items have been turned in to the PHW Office and have not yet been claimed. If you are missing a hat or a car alarm key fob, we may have them! Let us know at 540-667-3577 or phwinc.org@gmail.com and we can reunite you.

We were remiss in not thanking some of the volunteers who stepped up over the fall and collected shopping bags and newspapers for PHW to use at the Bough and Dough Shop. As best we can determine, we used the equivalent of a 39 gallon trash bag’s worth of donated plastic grocery bags, and probably close to that amount of paper bags and newspaper bits to pack items. The unused newspapers were recycled, and the leftover bags have been saved for next year. Thank you so much for your donations – we will do it again next fall!

Also, if you have not done so already, we are still seeking your anonymous feedback from the 2016 Holiday House Tour to be discussed at our January 9 meeting. Take the survey now! All feedback, good and bad, is helpful for us to see where we can improve the Tour and Shop.

2016 Holiday House Tour Feedback Wanted!

Did you attend the Holiday House Tour and/or Bough & Dough Shop this year? We’d like your feedback for future planning! Please take a few moments to answer a ten question survey at Survey Monkey. It should take you about fifteen minutes maximum and the anonymous responses will be discussed as part of our event wrap up meeting in early January.

Take the survey now! Thank you all for your time and interest in improving the Holiday House Tour!