Research Sites

The initial offering of the Maymester course has grown into a multi-faceted long-term relationship that has generated an incredible amount of research, service and learning opportunities, including:

• A complete redesign of the Tsa-La-Gi Interpretive Village at the Cherokee Heritage Center by UGA students and Professor Vick.
• Groundbreaking research on Cherokee ethnobotany published in American Indian Quarterly, the premier journal of American Indian studies.
• An archaeological study of the Cherokee Heritage Center grounds by UGA archaeologists.
• A very successful national conference held at UGA in the spring of 2010, hosted by the Institute of Native American Studies.
• A gallery exhibit of student work and faculty research in the Circle Gallery in Athens, Georgia.
• An appearance on the radio talk show Newsmakers by professors Jace Weaver and Alfie Vick.
• A museum exhibit of research and archaeology related to the Cherokee Female Seminary site at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma featuring the work of UGA faculty and students.
• Several invited trips to the Cherokee Nation to meet with stakeholders, and to present aspects of the project.
• Several newspaper articles, newsletter articles and presentations related to the project.
• Annual Maymester courses.
• Several invited conference presentations and published papers.
• Opportunity for students to earn a Certificate in Native American Studies offered through UGA’s INAS.

“An experience of this magnitude deserves more description than this short essay can deliver. An entire people, their history and struggles opened in front of me as never before. Before this trip, I had believed that a voyage abroad was the only way to get a taste of a foreign culture. Little did I suspect that such a meaningful cultural experience lay right in my own backyard. By directly experiencing these environments so rich with history and ecology, I came to better understand one of the most complex, tragic and finally triumphant aspects of American history.”

— Andrew White, 2009 Maymester participant

UGA Research Partners

Institute of Native American Studies

Private Research Partners

Cherokee Heritage Center

Cherokee Nation

Cherokee Nation Enterprises

Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

National Trail of Tears Association

North Park University

The Founders Memorial Garden on the campus of the University of Georgia commemorates the twelve founders of the first American Garden Club, the Ladies Garden Club of Athens, which was founded in 1891. With funds raised by the Garden Club of Georgia, Dean Hubert B. Owens, his staff, and students of the Landscape Architecture Department designed the garden during the 1940s around a Greek Revival-style house built in 1857.

History

The layout of the two and one-half acre series of gardens, the grounds of the former Headquarters House for the Garden Club of Georgia, consists of a small boxwood knot garden, two courtyards, a terrace, a perennial garden, and two informal areas. Today, the garden is maintained by the College of Environment and Design (CED), and serves as a teaching resource for the college as well as for other units across the campus. The gardens and the house are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Our Work

Since 2009 CED Professor Marianne Cramer has used the Founders Memorial Garden as a service-learning project for her graduate-level landscape management class. The garden is the focus of an on-going program of study that includes analysis, evaluation, and management over time. It is, perhaps, the UGA Cultural Landscape Laboratory’s primary testing ground for researching adaptive management strategies. Recently, Professor Cramer and her students have concentrated on articulating the mission and core values that underlie management of the garden, which will provide the framework for an adaptive management strategy.

Adding great interest to the Great House complex is Stratford Hall’s extensive landscape, consisting of nearly 1,900 acres and over two miles of Potomac River shoreline. Previously not studied as a whole, this large property has tremendous potential to reveal a fascinating story about how humans have valued and used the land from pre-historic times to the present.

History

Dating to the late 1730s, the Stratford Hall Great House and its surrounding outbuildings are highly remarkable examples of colonial Virginia architecture. Stratford Hall’s history is equally striking: it was the site of a large 18th-century tobacco plantation, the home of two signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the birthplace of Robert E. Lee. Since 1929, a nonprofit corporation, the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association, has cared for Stratford Hall as a public historic site.

Our Work

The Stratford Hall Cultural Landscape Laboratory is a collaborative venture of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Association (RELMA), the University of Georgia, College of Environment and Design (UGA-CED), and landscape professionals from The Jaeger Company of Gainesville, Georgia. Together, these partners are developing an exciting vision for the management and interpretation of Stratford Hall’s highly significant cultural landscape — an area encompassing unique natural features, formal gardens, dramatic vistas, and remnants of past agricultural, commercial, and domestic activities.

With a focus on heritage conservation and sustainability, the Laboratory provides research and learning oppor­tunities for RELMA staff, graduate students, university faculty, and professional practitioners. Currently, our efforts are focused on researching the history of the landscape and documenting existing conditions using Geographic Information System (GIS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies. The research findings and GIS database will be crucial resources for the future stewardship of Stratford Hall, providing a framework for future landscape management and planning.

Mission

The Stratford Hall Cultural Landscape Laboratory exists to ensure the long-term stewardship and sustainability of Stratford Hall–one of America’s most treasured cultural and ecological resources–and to advance the theory and practice of cultural landscape conservation.

Core Commitments

Impeccability – Upholding the highest professional standards and using state-of-the-art methods for public history and cultural resource conservation.

Leadership – Providing leadership in the realms of public history, historic site management and interpretation, and cultural resource conservation.

Sustainability – Ensuring the long-term sustainability of the ecological, cultural, and social systems that constitute Stratford Hall’s cultural landscape.

Communication – Building and maintaining community through effective communication.

UGA Research Partners

Department of Geography

Center for Geospatial Research

Department of Horticulture

Private Research Partners

The Jaeger Company

Robert E. Lee Memorial Association

The landscape is part of the oldest chain of marsh islands on the Atlantic Coast and holds numerous opportunities for research and inspiration, including colonial roads and fort-house foundations, Civil War earthworks, slave quarters, an estate house and formal garden, cemeteries, and outbuildings, as well as magnificent avenues of planted oaks.

History

Wormsloe, on the Isle of Hope, Georgia, is one of the richest cultural landscapes in the state, a place shaped over the centuries by Native American, Anglo-American, and African-American inhabitants. Part of the oldest chain of marsh islands on the Atlantic coast, the land was inhabited first by Native Americans for thousands of years before the arrival of Noble Jones, one of the original founders of the Georgia Colony in 1733. Jones established Wormsloe as a farm and fortress to protect the newly-established port of Savannah from would-be Spanish invaders from the south. Jones and his heirs developed their property as an outpost of horticultural experimentation, and by the time of the American Civil War Wormsloe had become an important sea island cotton plantation. During the twentieth century, Wormsloe became an important tourist attraction, and one of the first landscapes in the region to be protected by a conservation easement. Today, the Wormsloe landscape survives as an intricate tapestry of prehistoric shell middens, remnants of colonial buildings and roadways, magnificent live oak avenues, an imposing estate house and formal gardens, antebellum slave quarters, cemeteries, Civil War earthworks, forests, and marshlands—a site that offers innumerable avenues for research and inspiration.

Our Work

During summer 2010, the UGA Cultural Landscape Laboratory began an in-depth study of the cultural landscape at Wormsloe. The Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History is the lab’s primary partner in this venture, although the lab also is working with other UGA academic units, including the Department of Geography, the Department of History, and the Odum School of Ecology. These partners have come together to ensure the long-term stewardship and sustainability of Wormsloe as a nationally-significant historic, natural and cultural resources, and as a laboratory for research in landscape ecology and environmental history.

Currently, UGA-CED faculty and graduate students are conducting a comprehensive inventory of cultural landscape features at Wormsloe. Working with the UGA Department of Geography’s Center for Remote Sensing and mapping Science, we are building the inventory as a computer-based Geographic Information System (GIS). The inventory and GIS will guide future management plans, and inform landscape research and interpretation. faculty and graduate students affiliated with the Cultural Landscape Laboratory also are collecting oral histories from members of the greater Wormsloe community. The information gathered from these histories will help us understand how people have valued and used the landscape in the past, and it will help us define appropriate landscape management strategies.

UGA Research Partners

Department of History

Department of Geography

Department of Horticulture

Center for Geospatial Research

Private Research Partners

Wormsloe Institute for Environmental History

Mr. and Mrs. Craig Barrow

The Revolutionary War Battle of Cowpens, January 17, 1781, was a decisive victory for American forces as they held their ground, forced a British retreat and surrender, and only lost 12 soldiers. Originally a just an acre of land with a crossroads monument, by the early 1970s the federal government had undertaken enough research to justify acquisition of over 800 acres around the monument to create a National Battlefield site. The CLL, with assistance from the UGA Historic Preservation graduate program’s Introduction to Cultural Landscape Documentation class, is researching and writing both a Cultural Landscape Inventory (CLI) and a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) for the park. The final document will include landscape history, existing conditions, site analysis & evaluation and a management plan.

The concept for the Blue Ridge Parkway began in 1933 as a way to connect the Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains national parks; built in phases, the parkway was completed in 1987. As part of the overall design of the parkway, recreational areas with visitor service nodes were developed along the 469 mile route, such as the Peaks of Otter Developed Area in Virginia. During the summer of 2013, the CLL crafted six Cultural Landscape Inventories (CLIs) under the Peaks of Otter Developed Area parent landscape including the Peaks of Otter Campground, Peaks of Otter Picnic Area, Peaks of Otter Lodge and Abbott Lake, Peaks of Otter Visitor Center, Flat Top and Fallingwater Cascades Trailheads and Sharp Top and the Nature Center.

The human-constructed island upon which Fort Sumter National Monument resides was completed in 1861 and saw the first shots fired during the United States Civil War (1861-1865). During that war it was held by Confederate soldier and was under near constant bombardment until it was surrendered to the Union Army in February of 1865. After that seminal period of history, the fort was rebuilt and modified multiple times as needed by the War Department who managed the property. In 1948 the site was transferred to the National Park Service (NPS) for continued management. At that time the NPS undertook a large scale excavation and demolition project revealing the fort’s historic interior and numerous artifacts. Today the NPS welcomes over 750,000 people to the historic site each year. Since Fall 2012, the CLL has been researching and writing a Cultural Landscape Report (CLR) for the park.