Preservation Pitch Spotlight: Jobie Hill’s Slave House Database Project
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| (Left to right) Leighton Powell, Scenic Virginia; Jobie Hill and Preservation Virginia CEO Elizabeth Kostelny |
Slave dwellings exist throughout
Virginia that tell stories of a difficult time in history that should never be
forgotten. Our 2015 Preservation Pitch winner, Jobie Hill, has been doing great
work with her Slave House Database Project to document and interpret these
spaces.
Hill, a historic preservation
architect, started her independent project in 2012 to, “ensure that slave
houses, irreplaceable pieces of history, are not lost forever.”
The database serves as a
repository for information and data pertinent to all the known slave houses in
the United States. At the time of her Preservation Pitch win, she had gathered
more than 26,000 images and ex-slave narratives related to slave houses. In
describing the Slave House Database, Hill says:
The documentation [of slave houses] is the
visual representation of the spaces; and the interpretations are descriptions
of the spaces from the actual inhabitants who lived and worked there during
slavery. The narratives recorded from former slaves breathe life into the
two-dimensional drawings and photographs of slave houses.
After having surveyed slave
dwellings in various other states, Hill set her focus on documenting slave
dwellings in Virginia for her Preservation Pitch project. She aimed to locate
and resurvey at least 30 slave houses documented by the Historic American
Buildings Survey program. Her goal was to identify which houses still exist,
document the current conditions of the structures and record architectural
information missing from the original survey.
Hill ended up surveying 37 slave
houses in Virginia with the help of the $2,000 grant she received from her
Preservation Pitch win. In total, she has surveyed 117 dwellings in Virginia
over the past four years, with some located in Campbell
and Pittsylvania Counties.
Overall, she believes that the
relationship between the historical record of slave houses and stories of the
inhabitants are crucial to the understanding and interpretation of the lives
and settings of enslaved people. She states that through this relationship,
“the plantation landscape is revealed not through the eyes of the master but
through the perspective of those who were in his charge.”
The deadline for entering this year’s Preservation Pitch competition
has been extended to Friday, September 8. If you have a historic preservation
project that you would like to pitch, visit Eventbrite for submission details and to register.
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