Saving History Saturday: Graffiti Houses Preservation and Culpeper Battlefield State Park News

On May 13th, The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced that Mike Kelly, Senior Scholar and former director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, has received funding for “Off the Wall: Digital Preservation of Civil War Graffiti Houses.”

The project will create and publish a digital archive of soldiers’ graffiti found in Civil War era structures in the greater Northern Virginia region. The archive will provide students, scholars, and the general public access to the graffiti, as well as additional material associated with the graffiti.

The structures that will be a part of this project are operated by six local project partners. Professor Kelly received $350,000 for this project over the next two years.

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The newest state park in Virginia is set to open on July 1st. The Culpeper Battlefields State Park will officially open on the 1st of July.

Sites included in the new park include, the Brandy Station Battlefield, Cedar Mountain Battlefield, as well as parts of battlefields at Kelly’s Ford, and Rappahannock Station. Also included is land associated with the Army of the Potomac’s winter quarters on Handsborough Ridge, near Stevensburg.

The park is being created by land previously preserved and interpreted by the American Battlefield Trust, and its partners including the Brandy Station Foundation, Friends of Cedar Mountain Battlefield.

To learn more about the soon to open Culpeper Battlefields State Park, visit the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s website.