Annual Meeting – Preservation of Historic Winchester

Preservation Award Winners for 2022

PHW 58th Annual Meeting — Mary Beth Shaver poses with Bruce Downing after accepting the Award of Merit for Centenary Reformed United Church or Christ.

PHW is thrilled to recognize the following people and projects for their work in maintaining and enhancing Winchester’s neighborhood character and historic fabric of the city. All of our projects this year fell into our Award of Merit category. In alphabetical order by street, the projects were:

Maroo Property Management LLC, 918 Amherst Street

This late Folk Victorian was constructed circa 1900 on the Northwestern Turnpike, now known as Amherst Street. The single-family dwelling has changed uses through the years, serving for a time as the Green Gables Tourist Home in the 1930s to becoming the Calvary Baptist Church office. For the first time in many years, the building has a new owner and has been given some much needed TLC inside and out, including restoring color to the façade in keeping with its Victorian heritage.

Beverley Byrd, 124 West Boscawen Street

This outstanding Federal-style single-family dwelling was constructed circa 1835 by Thomas Phillips, a successful merchant based in Winchester. The building has seen many uses over its lifetime, including a music school during the late nineteenth century, office space, commercial first floor use, and most recently as the Frances Barton Event Center. The residence has been turned into two condominium units, using Foreman Builders and Jackson-Park Design as the contractor and designer respectively. The floors were retained where possible and replaced to match where impossible to salvage, and the original mantels and other character-defining woodwork were restored.

Centenary Reformed United Church of Christ, 202 South Cameron Street

The stained-glass windows at Centenary Reformed Church have been in place for more than 100 years, but few of us were able to enjoy their beauty from the outside. The previous plastic safety covering over the windows had yellowed and obscured the openings. Epiphany Studios worked with the congregation to restore the stained glass windows. On the exterior, the yellowed plastic was removed and replaced with clear safety glass to protect the windows and retain a view of them from the exterior. This is a long-term three to five year project to tackle all twenty windows, but the improvements are already visible on the main facade facing Cameron Street.

James Green & Wendy Oesterling, 611 South Cameron Street

This house was built circa 1925 by James N. W. Funk, one of the members of the Funk family involved with the Funk & Ray’s funeral business. The house was involved in the April 2020 fire that originated next door at 609 S. Cameron St. The owners have restored the home after the catastrophe. From the exterior, the home appears just as it did before the fire.

OTW, LLC—Coe Eldredge & William McIntosh, 100 and 114 North Loudoun Street

These two properties were restored separately by the same group. The Old F&M Bank was constructed ca. 1902 while the Clowser Building was a ca. 1950 adjoining addition. Both structures have now found a new life after the separate adaptive reuse projects. The Old F&M Bank retains much of its interior character as a bank, such as the vault doors being left in full view through the new downstairs restaurant. The Clowser Building work in part removed changes such as dropped ceilings and fluorescent lights installed in the 1990s and revealed the original brick walls, steel beams, and subfloors which now provide architectural character to the extended stay apartment units. Learn more at www.innovault.space/ and see some interior apartment images at www.apartments.com.

Ronald McGehee, 186 North Loudoun Street

The second bank reuse project recognized this year is the former Commercial and Savings Bank Building, ca. 1922. The project was an adaptive reuse of the space as an event center now functional as The Monument, focusing on live music and performances. The first floor space can host about 420 people in a setting combining the classic architectural features of a bank with modern lighting, technical equipment, and even a disco ball. As part of the project, work continues on the complementary sports bar and basement speakeasy. Find them online at themonumentva.com.

TEJ Builds & Four Square Architects, 301 North Loudoun Street

The ca. 1926 firehall has seen a number of uses since its time as a fire station drew to an end, including a bicycle shop and laundromat. The building is now the hub of an adaptive reuse and redevelopment project that adds residential use to its storied history. The firehall now houses four apartments in the upper levels, with ground floor commercial space. Find them online at www.sarahzaneapts.com.

The Godfrey Miller Center, 28 South Loudoun Street

The Godfrey Miller home is one of about twenty surviving limestone homes from the late 18^th century. This project focused on safety concerns and sensitive repairs to the exterior, including repairs to the porch, repairing and repainting the wood shutters, and repairs to the historic windows themselves. This exterior work helps the building present its best face to the Loudoun Street mall and address potential safety concerns from lead paint and decaying stair treads. Simultaneously, the home is being freshened on the inside as well. Find them online at godfreymillercenter.org.

We took a few photos of the outdoor portion of the event, which can be seen on our Flickr. If you see projects taking place around you that deserve similar recognition, let us know! Our award form is available online and stays relatively consistent year to year. Award nomination forms should be submitted to PHW preferably in late May to the first week of June for a consideration of an award, but we will take nominations at any time through the year.

The Annual Meeting is This Sunday!

Fingers crossed, it looks like our Sunday afternoon event will be dry, cloudy, and on the hot side. We will have cool drinks ready at the beginning of the event to keep you hydrated. Should we have another unexpected downpour this year, we will be able to move inside.

If this is your first time visiting the Hexagon House at 530 Amherst St., we have a small parking lot at the top of the hill. Our outdoor meeting space is in the back yard, using the porch as our stage area. Extra parking can be found along the Hawthorne Drive side of the building or the surface lot across the street.

Remember to bring your own seating for the event and dress for the weather. We anticipate being outside for no more than an hour for the business meeting and award presentations, but the rear yard could be in sun.

After the event, stay around to socialize, pick up a brochure on the Hexagon House and enjoy a self-guided tour of the first floor, and check out our “book nook” with art prints and historically-themed reading material.

Mark Your Calendars: PHW’s 58th Annual Meeting

Another year has flown past – it’s time for our Annual Meeting! Join us in the rear yard of the Hexagon House at 530 Amherst St. on Sunday, June 26 at 3 PM to celebrate our “maple anniversary” of preserving history and architecture in Winchester. The Annual Meeting is a member-only event hosted every June by Preservation of Historic Winchester. We gather and review the past year, elect the board of directors, and renew old acquaintances.

Enjoy some cool beverages, hear preservation success stories, and learn about our next challenges at our gathering. Please dress for the weather and bring your own seating. RSVPs are not required. Tours of the first floor of the Hexagon House and our new brochure on the building’s history will be offered after the meeting.

PHW members will receive a mailed invitation with the list of preservation award winners for 2022 and PHW board of directors nomination slate. Like last year, we have included a membership form detailing the last date we have on record for your dues renewal (membership dues are good for one year). New to PHW or need to renew a lapsed membership? Credit card renewals will be available in-person the day of the meeting, or a check and a membership form can be returned to the PHW office anytime. For questions, please contact the PHW office, (540) 667-3577 or phwinc.org@gmail.com.

See you then!

Congratulations for the Annual Meeting!

Despite an unexpected afternoon rainstorm and our own surprise at having double-booked so many of our members with other activities and services on the same day and time, we still managed to pull together a successful annual meeting.

If you were unable to attend, you can catch up with the official portion of the meeting and the presentation of the awards on our YouTube:

If this is a bit long for you to watch, you can find an album with images at our Flickr. We would especially like to recognize the 2020 and 2021 award winners, as follows:

Awards of Merit:

These awards recognize renovations of houses or buildings that contribute to improving the character of their neighborhoods and maintaining the overall historic fabric of the city. In order of nomination:

Nancy Murphy, 126 West Leicester Street
Stephen Von Fange, 501-507 North Cameron Street
Karen Darby, 417 Fairmont Avenue
Betty Laws, 416 South Cameron Street
Stephen P. Williams, 212 North Kent Street
GinTon, LLC, Henkel House, 316 West Boscawen Street
Beverley Byrd, 312 West Boscawen Street
David E. Mitchell, 123 East Cork Street
The Clowser Foundation, Clowser Family Cemetery, 152 Tomahawk Trail
Scott Bessette, Philip Williams House, 25 West Piccadilly Street

Belchic Award:

This award is named in honor of Ben Belchic, a founding member of PHW. Ben Belchic was also an active member of the Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society, so the Belchic award recognizes a significant contribution to understanding Winchester’s history. These awards are generally presented for written texts, such as books, maps, National Register nominations, and guided tours.

This year we were proud to recognize the work of Mike Robinson, who has been bringing Winchester’s history to a wider audience through his Facebook page Winchester Tales, that have subsequently expanded into five-volume set of books, with more on the way.

Patron’s Award:

This award recognizes a person or business which has been an outstanding supporter of the goals and programs of PHW. This award usually recognizes a financial component.

This year, we were honored to recognize Margaretta Barton Colt, who has long been a supporter of the history and architecture of Winchester. Her involvement with PHW started in our Kurtz Cultural Center days during the publication of Defend the Valley, for which she commissioned the painting “Winchester & Frederick County, Virginia” by Page Huff Dillon. That may sound familiar, as the painting has reentered our day to day lives again through the Shenandoah Valley Tapestry Project, which recreated the painting in needlework. Most recently, you can find out more about the tapestry and the houses included in it at www.svtapestry.com.

One of our award winners, David Mitchell, was unable to attend in person on Sunday. He did, however, provide a note on his work to his porch at 123 East Cork Street. You may remember the painstaking work and the scaffolding and tarps installed to protect the porch while it was under repairs. We are happy to report via David that “all original salvageable 1800s heart pine used in the original construction was stripped of paint and restored. Most of the original porch flooring is still present. Both ends required replacing with 1 1/8 inch tongue and groove, copied and milled to match. I found three of the original balusters and copied them . . . for the porch. . . . The woodwork was all preceded by rebuilding the stone foundation of the porch damaged by water on the east end, where there was an inch wide crack from the east corner to the left of the first floor window sill, and stones falling out from loss of mortar.” This specialized work was undertaken by Hicksville Planning Mill and Marshall Adams Stonework, along with the use of a product called Rot Doctor for wood preservation. David truly went above and beyond in the care he took to preserve and restore his porch.

Due to the rain, we also omitted the official announcement of our newest Honorary Council member, Ed Acker. As you may remember, he served as the VP of Education at PHW and spearheaded the Lunch and Learn lecture series. We have reproduced Ed’s note on this recognition in its entirety below:

Dear Members of PHW:

I want to thank the Board of Directors of PHW very much for this appointment to the Honorary Council. I was totally surprised and appreciate its significance very seriously.

I hope to see the very necessary educational function of PHW continue with renewed vitality, perhaps not in its most recent form, but being able to take advantage of new electronic communications technologies that have come on stream since the Covid pandemic. Also, I had always wanted to get more PHW involvement with K-12 children, which can instill in them the seed of a lifetime interest in history and preservation.

Professionally, I have been involved in historic preservation since 1963 when I had a summer architectural job and worked on an award-winning adaptive reuse project at the State University of NY Merchant Marine Academy, converting an old mess hall winding through the gigantic 7-foot-thick granite walls and arches of Fort Schuyler into the school’s library, pictures of which are still proudly displayed on the school’s website. Later that year I partook in an architect’s march to protest the planned demolition of the wonderful McKim, Mead and White Pennsylvania Station building, the event which many mark as the beginning of the modern preservation movement.

My last historic preservation project was to design the structural rehabilitation of the walls and granite recladding of the 110-foot-tall facades of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel Ventilation Building. This octagonal building is located at the northern tip of Governor’s Island, sitting quietly and mostly unnoticed in the middle of New York harbor.

When Sherry Nay Acker and I moved to Winchester in June 2011 it was the twilight of both of our careers, she as a history professor and I as an actively practicing architect. But neither of us played golf, so what would we do? Sherry met Warren Hofstra, in fact at the exact time of the great Virginia earthquake at his Abram’s Delight office, who then put us in contact with Mark Lore, who introduced me to PHW, and the commitment to become Chairman of the Education Committee.

Sherry’s interest in her family’s genealogy went into overdrive. She knew that her great grandfather had been injured and taken prisoner at Halltown, WV in the Civil War. His West Virginia regiment had been retreating north and fought at Kernstown Two, Rutherford Crossing, and Halltown. Some of her Ohio ancestors were at the 2^nd Battle of Winchester. And she was related to the Scotch Bruce’s who had owned one of the original Winchester city lots at the SW corner of E. Piccadilly and N. Cameron Streets. So having not been here for a long time, we now have some real historical ties to Winchester.

I arrive at this time of this year with a jumble of emotions which is reflected in this piece. June 24^th will mark the one-year anniversary of Sherry’s death and our family and friends still miss her so much. June 30^th and July 7^th are the birthdays of our wonderful daughters, Alexandra, and Amanda respectively and we will gather in Denver to both remember and celebrate. And our grandchildren aged 5, almost 12, and 15 have some of their own milestones – Abe will start kindergarten in August; Hudson graduated elementary school, will start middle school, and is in scouting; and Sawyer is in high school and heading to Eagle scout, and is now learning how to drive.

I guess an underlying theme tying all these jumbled thoughts together is Resilience – Rebirth – Renewal, which can apply to our individual lives, our homes and workplaces, our neighborhoods, friends, and associations, and our entire communities.

Resilience – to have the toughness, flexibility, and canny skill to endure the hard knocks; Rebirth – to realize survival and to start anew; and Renewal – to establish a sustainable path to endure and thrive into the future.

Thank you for the opportunity to continue to serve the PHW community.

This Weekend Is Annual Meeting!

It seems like a toasty weekend is on hand, so you might want to envision the cooling water droplets from the Old Town Fountains while at our meeting on Sunday.

We’ve been keeping an eye on the weekend forecast and it appears we will be all set for a rain-free weekend. We hope you will join us on Sunday, June 27 beginning at 3 PM in the Hexagon House yard for our 57th Annual Meeting. We are happy to report the cicadas have moved on to the less amorous phase of their lifecycle and we will not be competing with their dulcet tones. Here are some other things to keep in mind:

We ask that guests who are able to walk up the hill to leave our limited parking lot at the top of the hill available for our older guests. If you are a designated driver and find the lot is full, you may drive your guests up the circular driveway in front of the house to let guests out on even ground.

We will have our small tent in the yard as a check in area for those renewing or joining PHW and picking up copies of the Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture book. We will also have a few other architecture and history-adjacent books out for sale, and a few plants for those who want to grab an offspring of the PHW African violets. We hope to be able to process credit cards, but as the WiFi has been spotty recently we are not sure we will quite be able to manage processing credit card transactions that far in the yard. You may wish to bring a check as fallback.

If you want to nominate someone to the PHW Board from the floor, remember your nominee must be in attendance and be a PHW member in good standing.

A limited amount of chairs are available for guests, but if possible, please provide your own seating.

The yard will be mostly in sun at the time of the event. Wear your sunscreen, bring parasols or hats, and stay safe. Plan to be at the business and award portion of the meeting in the yard for about an hour. Cold bottled drinks will be on hand for attendees to help you stay hydrated and cool.

Following the meeting, limited tours (suggested group size of five to six) will be available of the downstairs of the Hexagon House. We strongly encourage mask wearing inside for your safety.

Thank you all for your continued interest in PHW. We hope to see many familiar faces on Sunday to help us celebrate the accomplishments of our local preservationists!

PHW’s 57th Annual Meeting

The meeting approaches! Mark your calendars for Sunday, June 27 at 3 PM to visit the Hexagon House. Mailed invitations are at the Post Office for the award recipients and PHW members, but for our other followers, here is a heads up on the event:

The meeting will be held outside at the back porch of the Hexagon House. We will not be rescheduling for inclement weather.

Please bring your own seating if possible. You may also wish to bring parasols or hats if the day is sunny, as the back yard is fairly exposed at this time of day.

You do not need to RSVP in advance, as we do not have a capacity limit this year. However, we strongly encourage anyone not fully vaccinated to continue social distancing and mask-wearing.

We will be able to process member renewals or new signups at the event. You may wish to bring a check just in case we have difficulty with the credit card payments with the machine at a distance from the WiFi.

Copies of Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture will be available for pick up at the membership renewal table.

While we will not have snacks after the meeting as in years past, we will have an assortment of cold beverages to keep you hydrated during the meeting.

The cicada boom seems to be dying down at the Hexagon House, but be prepared for some insect party crashers.

If you have not had a chance to tour the Hexagon House, we will be available to take guided tours through the downstairs following the meeting. We strongly encourage mask wearing inside the building during tours.

Repair work at the Apple — Oh no! The giant apple in front of Kimberly’s has been peeled! We hope to see the familiar shiny red skin back on this landmark with its stem reattached soon.

Friday Roundup: Behind the Scenes Prep Work and Friday Photos

First, we did a bit of cleaning up of our MailChimp mailing list during the lead-up to the Annual Meeting. A few new member emails have been added (hello and welcome!) and a section of bounced and unsubscribed emails have been archived. If you know someone who is not receiving the weekly emails and wants to stay informed, remind them to sign up in the opt-in form. If you unsubscribe from our mailing list, we cannot add you back in manually at the office, as it needs your confirmation you want to receive emails again. This is done in compliance with anti-spam laws through MailChimp. Thank you for understanding!

Second, next week will be a busy one for the office as we prepare the snail-mail Annual Meeting invitations in advance of the June 27 meeting, as well as some out of the office meetings. Please remember to call or email ahead of a site visit to the Hexagon House, as we may not be in the office.

We hope to help you find out what you member renewal status is with this Annual Meeting mailing, as we know last year we lost all sense of time. Look for your member renewal date (to the month of your renewal) in the membership form block in the Annual Meeting invitation and check its accuracy. Don’t receive a mailed invitation? That means you have fallen off our recent membership list. We hope you will chose to renew and catch up with old friends and familiar faces at the Annual Meeting, which will be our first real event since Holiday House Tour 2019(!).

Third, if you would like to join PHW or renew your membership, remember we are offering copies of our reprinted Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture book (a $25 value) as a thank you for your continued support. Copies can be picked up at the Annual Meeting or by arrangement through the PHW office. The reprinted edition was lovingly remade from the original to be as faithful as possible to Walter Kidney’s text and James R. Morrison’s photographs. The revisions and updates were limited to correcting errors and expanding on some omissions from the first publication (like a much-needed index). The book is a perfect introduction to Winchester’s architecture and broad history of development patterns. It may especially appeal if you are new to town, or want to share your appreciation of Winchester with someone less versed in architectural history.

Fourth, we were thrilled to be able to visit the Clowser House in Shawneeland last weekend to see all the progress made at the site. If you were not able to attend, you can catch photos of the event at our Flickr album. The Foundation is doing an amazing job documenting the history of their site and the family connected to the homestead, and PHW is proud to have helped them begin the journey five years ago to preserve their ancestral home for generations to come.

Clowser Foundation Memorial Service — Blaine Dunn and Ruth Perrine, two of the people who stepped up to help save the home from demolition, at the Clowser Memorial Service.

Friday Roundup: Photos and Assorted News Bites

It’s been a while, but Friday Photos brings new content! Visit the Fort Loudoun Day 2021 album on Flickr for images taken last weekend at the event. There are 70 photos in total.

You still have about a week to get award nominations for the 57th Annual Meeting in to PHW. Anyone may nominate a project in Winchester or Frederick County. Find the form here and nominate people and projects worthy of recognition!

Looking ahead at our next week, the PHW office may be closed Friday, May 28, depending on how the second round of vaccination goes. We will also be celebrating Memorial Day on May 31. Stay safe and healthy, and we will catch up with any questions we may miss while we are recuperating over the long holiday weekend.

Also, PHW is drawing to the end of its fiscal year. If your membership dues are up for renewal, please try to get your checks in before the end of the month to help our bottom line. Also, if you’ve been enjoying our online content or looking forward to the upcoming Annual Meeting on June 27, remember only PHW members in good standing may vote at the meeting. Membership forms are available online and will be available on-site during the meeting; new or renewing members may pick up a free copy of “Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture” with their membership dues.

An interesting thread has been posted on Forum Connect by Donovan Rypkema about preservationists’ perception by others and actual goals and aims. Perhaps the best example is the poll on historic preservation and affordable housing, which highlights many of the challenges and perhaps unstated goals of wanting to preserving older homes – Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing – as well as the longtime residents which help give neighborhoods their character. Read the full report here.

Do you own a log house in Winchester? Do you think your building may contain logs repurposed from Fort Loudoun? Would you be open to volunteers taking some images and possibly wood samples to better explore this possibility? Please get in touch with your contact details to the PHW office at phwinc.org@gmail.com or 540-667-3577 and we can fill you in on this idea for an accounting of logs from the Fort.

Save the date for June 12 for “Experience American Military History in Action” from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. hosted by the American Military Heritage Museum. The event is free, rain-or-shine and will feature re-enactors and living history displays. Meet World War II veterans from 10:30 a.m. until noon, check out a large collection of World War II equipment and military vehicles as well as historic museum displays. The museum is located at 811 Fairfax Pike in Stephens City.

Friday Roundup: Save the Date for the Annual Meeting and Other Tidbits

Join us on June 27, 3 PM at the Hexagon House for this free membership event!

Preservation of Historic Winchester’s 57^th Annual Meeting: Meet your friends or make new acquaintances in the local preservation community on Sunday, June 27, 3 PM at the backyard of the Hexagon House, 530 Amherst Street. The gathering will elect PHW’s board of directors for 2021-2022, touch on the past year’s challenges and accomplishments, and conclude with the presentation of preservation awards. Please bring your own chairs; liquid refreshments will be offered. The organization will be following any restrictions in place at the time of the meeting to comply with state mandates to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Only PHW members in good standing may vote at the meeting. Membership forms will be available on-site; new or renewing members may pick up a free copy of “Winchester: Limestone, Sycamores & Architecture” with their membership dues.

Don’t forget to turn in your award nominations by May 28 to help recognize people and projects at this event!

Requests Requested! Is there a photo in our Flickr collection you would like to see captioned for more information? Drop us a note and we’ll add the photo to the queue to highlight in a future social media post.

We have received one of our first donations of historic materials and images following our call last newsletter. While we did not put all the material online, we are delighted with the digital materials shared by Howard Lewis on Hawthorne at 610 Amherst Street. The items that are not publicly available on our Flickr have been added to our hard copy and digital collections on the historic district for future researchers. If you also have material to contribute, drop us a note at phwinc.org@gmail.com to see if it fits our collection scope.

In-Kind Donation Wish List: PHW is looking for basic materials to help keep the office in shape and running, such as paper, mailing labels, and file folders, and likely in the future things like ink cartridges and toner. If this kind of item donation calls to you and you have an Amazon account, please refer to our Amazon Charity List for ideas. If you have opened or slightly used items on this list (like a half-used pack of mailing labels or legal size paper you no longer need), we are also happy to take them in-person at our office. Arrange a drop off time by emailing phwinc.org@gmail.com or calling 540-667-3577.

Research Request: Are you interested in helping Winchester clarify and confirm its African-American community’s history? We are continuing to work on questions posed to us by Mark Gunderman in his deep dive into the history of John Mann UMC. This week, we are hoping to gather additional information on George Smith, mentioned in William Greenway Russell’s recollections as “a colored man of the town” who left money to the congregation to build the brick church about twenty years before the recollection was written (thus around 1856). His contribution to the church was undoubtedly great, but his name has disappeared from public memory. If someone wants to take up the research mantle and run with what we (think we) know about George Smith, please get in touch with the PHW office.

If you are missing Kidzfest this year, don’t fret! Two history-themed activities the whole family can enjoy are taking place this weekend. Fort Loudoun will host a living history event from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday May 15 at 419 N. Loudoun St. Visitors will learn about the history of the French & Indian War era at the site of Col. George Washington’s headquarters for the Virginia Regiment. Meet living history interpreters and tour the site. Admission is free. Information available at 419-971-3493 or www.FIWF.org.

The Cedar Creek Battlefield Foundation Museum and Visitor Center will host a living history day from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, May 15 and 16, at 8437 Valley Pike, Middletown. Costumed historians will host photography workshops, cooking demonstration, muster in new recruits and practice drill, have Civil War medicine displays, play period games and tell stories and the cavalry will have their horses to talk about the roles of horses during the war.

Friday Roundup: Celebrate National Preservation Month

Happy Preservation Month! We hope you’ll take a moment to show your love for our local history and architecture with a few of these ideas and activities:

Visit the National Trust for Historic Preservation for a new set of daily informative activities you can do to celebrate this year’s theme “Tell the Full American Story.” There is reading material, videos, images, interactive maps, and petitions and letters of support you can join and share.

*Click to view the full letter. The donation form is at the bottom.*

The French and Indian War Foundation is looking for your help! The organization has launched a fundraising campaign to help them retire the debt on the Baker-Hardy House, and every donation will be matched by the Wilkins Family Trust. The Baker-Hardy House serves as the organization’s resource center, and the hope is once the mortgage is paid off, other long-term goals for interpretation can take place. See the letter and donation form image for more information and how to contribute to the campaign.

The four City-owned museums (Abram’s Delight, Hollingsworth Mill, George Washington’s Office, and Stonewall Jackson’s Headquarters) reopen for the 2021 season on May 10th. Each museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10 am-4 pm and on Sundays from 12-4 pm. Stop in and see some familiar faces, learn about our local history, and the view the current exhibit at the Hollingsworth Mill: “Quaker Families of Winchester & Frederick County.”

We have been captioning images on our Flickr page, and we recently had an unidentified building in the midst of demolition come up on our randomizing program for captioning. Our suspicion is the building may be in York, PA, based on the demolition sign on the building. The slide’s imprinted date on the cardboard is November 1979, and it appears we had a series of three images of this building from different angles to use during informative slide presentations. We suspect the image may have been shared with us by our preservation consultants from Pittsburgh who assisted PHW in the 1970s. If you are familiar with the York area and can provide any further information or possible context on this series of images, please drop us a note!

Help us recognize local preservation projects and preservation leaders by nominating a person or project for a 2021 PHW Preservation Award. We are tentatively hoping to host awards in June, and as such, the award nomination form has been updated. Projects completed between June 2019 to May 2021 are eligible for this combined round of recognition. Awards are open to BOTH Winchester City and Frederick County. People or projects may be nominated by anyone (including the potential award recipient or family member) AND you may nominate an unlimited number of projects. Applications DO NOT need to be complete, but should at least have enough identifying information that the project can be further discussed by the award committee. Return applications or suggestions to PHW, 530 Amherst St., Winchester, VA 22601 or by email at phwinc.org@gmail.com. Applications should be sent by May 28, 2021 for consideration for a 2020 or 2021 award.