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Michigan's Cultural Resource Preservation
Activities
CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION ACTIVITIES: Automobile Heritage Project is identifying a National Automobile Heritage Area (southeast Michigan as far as Lansing) with six "corridors." The project will do marketing and promotion of sites and activities broadly related to the automobile. Already $300,000 has been appropriated; a search for an executive director is underway. Detroit 300 activities are being planned for the Detroit tri-centennial in 2001. This effort will look to organize broad publicity and celebration of the entire region. In the summer of 1999, work was completed for the revision of Mackinac Island's National Historic Landmark designation; this is in the nomination review process for October 2000. The revision includes 386 newly nominated resources on Mackinac Island. Totals include 395 buildings, 28 sites, 14 structures, and 8 objects. Mackinac State Historic Parks will maintain a copy of the database for both contributing and non-contributing resources. Recognized contributing resources garner increased protection from alterations or destruction and state tax advantages to encourage resource preservation. In the summer of 2000, Mackinac State Historic Parks (MSHP) started a historic structures report (HSR) for the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse. The HSR is being conducted by historic preservation architects, SmithGroup of Ann Arbor. This summer MSHP also opened the Fog Signal House, which is associated with the lighthouse, as an orientation center for the Old Mackinac Point Lighthouse preservation effort. The lighthouse is projected to reopen to the public in the summer of 2002. MichiganÍs lighthouses were on the 1998 National Trusts list of eleven most endangered places. It was noted that there are now efforts underway to preserve lighthouses including a workshop in November 2000 at the Michigan Historical Center aimed at exploring strategies for lighthouse preservation. (link to National Trust?) The Michigan Lighthouse Project has hired a project manager, has space at the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, and is meeting regularly. To date, of the total 126 lighthouses in Michigan six have already transferred from the Coast Guard to state or private ownership and seven more are slated for transfer. The project is huge and complex, with issues of multiple ownership (the property, the building, and the breakwater may all be under different control) and scattered documentation. Many of the lighthouses will become local museums under their new ownership." Haven Hill, the historic home built between 1924 and 1926 by Edsel Ford as a retreat for his family, located in White Lake and Highland Townships near Pontiac, is currently owned by the state Department of Natural Resources, and is now the Highland Recreation Area. The main house was a 20,000 square foot structure built with cedar logs from the Upper Peninsula. The Adirondack-style lodge commanded sweeping views
from its granite terraces atop one of the highest elevations in Oakland
County. The lodge burned down due to vandalism in January, 1999. The
"Save Haven Hill" group is interested in rehabilitating the property
for adaptive reuse, and is trying to obtain an approved use which will
connect Edsel and Eleanor Ford to the property. They can be contacted
at 248/676-8018 or at havenhill24@
hotmail.com or P.O. Box 339, Highland, MI 48357.
CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION PROJECTS The Kresge Art Museum, East Lansing, conserved a Japanese Kano school screen at the University of Michigan Asian Conservation Lab, with funding from the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation. Alden B. Dow Home and Studio, Midland, Michigan was one of four institutions to receive a 2000 Award for Outstanding Commitment to the Preservation and Care of Collections given by the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and Heritage Preservation. This award was created to recognize organizations that have been exemplary in the priority given to conservation and the commitment shown to the preservation of cultural property. The award was presented at the 3 November 2000 Board meeting.
Mackinac State Historic Parks (MSHP) is in the midst of a $4.1 million dollar (State of Michigan special appropriations) full restoration of Fort Mackinac's original 220 year-old fort walls. The project began in 1997 with funding from a 1996 Institute of Museum Services Conservation Project Support grant to conduct a detailed architectural conservation survey of MSHP buildings and structures by James Wermuth of Conservation Technology Group. Key participants of the current restoration project are: Michigan Department of Management and Budget/ Fund Administration; Christman Company/ Construction; Great Lakes Research/ Archaeology; Schiffer Mason Contractors/ Masonry; and SmithGroup/ Historic Preservation Architecture and Engineering. Most of the original stones will be reused, but the original mortar will be replaced with a stronger limestone-based mortar. Nearly 95% of the wall's original fabric will be preserved. Restoration should be complete by fall, 2001. Mackinac State Historic Parks (MSHP) will move their archaeological collections, conservation laboratory, and library collections from Lansing to a newly expanded facility in Mackinaw City by the end of 2000. The newly expanded Collections/ Research and Administrative office in Mackinaw City will make MSHP resources more accessible and efficiently used by the MSHP staff, researchers, historians, and the public. MSHP's institutional consolidation will strengthen this cultural resource in Northern Michigan. Michigan State University Libraries have received National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funding to participate in a national project to preserve books, family farm memoirs, land transactions and other published materials that depict the history of American agricultural and rural life between 1820 and 1945. To date, twenty states have become involved in the National Preservation Program for Agricultural Literature, which began in 1996 and seeks to preserve each stateÍs most critical historical titles. It is hoped that all 50 states will eventually preserve the literature documenting their unique agricultural and rural life Heritage. The preservation project is directed by the staff of Cornell UniversityÍs Mann Library (working on behalf of the United States Agricultural Information Network and is managed at MSU by Jeanne Drewes, MSU LibrariesÍ Assistant Director for Access and Preservation and Anita Ezzo, Food Science & Technology Librarian. A panel of MSU scholars with extensive experience in the study of Michigan agriculture and rural life will assist in the evaluation process to identify the most critical historical publications for preservation. These include Kenneth E. Lewis, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Terry Shaffer, Assistant Curator/Extension Specialist, MSU Museum; Thomas Summerhill, Assistant Professor of History; and David E. Wright, Professor of Resource Development, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. For more information contact drewes@msu.edu; (517-432-7486). The Detroit
Public Library received a SOS!/Target Advance
award of $7,500 in 1998 to cover the cost of repairing the damage done
during the course of Abraham Lincoln's midnight adventure. The bronze
sculpture was originally cast in 1915 by Alfonso Pelzer. This particular
statue is one of six bronze replicas made of the original, which is
in Lincoln, NJ. The Detroit replica was presented to Henry Leland, president
of Lincoln Motor Co., in 1915, and the statue resided in front of company
headquarters until 1958, when it was given to the City of Detroit Parks
Commission by Leland's son, and placed in Library Park. Venus Bronze
Works, Inc. repaired some dents, vandalism, and other age-related damage
in 1986. However, the statue became a local celebrity when it was kidnapped
from its base in September 1997 by three men in a white Ford Escort,
taken for a joy ride, and then dumped, facedown, in front of Cooper
Elementary School. The statue suffered a gash to the head and a ripped-up
foot from being wrenched from its base. Venus Bronze Works also performed
this round of treatment. CONSERVATION AND PRESERVATION GRANT AWARDS Institute
for Library and Museum Services (IMLS) 2000 The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, $50,000.00 To purchase
new storage cabinets to rehouse the Institute's important collection
of over 700 puppets and marionettes, including European and Asian as
well as American puppetry traditions. Represented are noted 20th century
puppeteers Burr Tilstrom and Jim Henson. Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI, $3,862.00 To treat
three important paintings from the Museum's permanent collection: "The
Landscape With Roadway" by Frederic Ramsdell, "Shepherdess and Her Dog"
by William Steelink, and "The Trackless Sea" by Warren Sheppard. 1999 The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, $50,000.00 To improve storage
for the Museum's collection of European sculpture and decorative arts
objects ranging in date from the early Christian period to circa 1910,
by purchasing powder-coated, climate controlled storage cabinets. Grand Rapids Public Museum, Grand Rapids, MI, $49,913.00 To improve
the storage of the Museum's ethnographic and Native American collections,
including approximately 8,000 local and international objects of historical,
archeological and cultural importance, by purchasing and installing
new storage cabinets. Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, MI, $60,000.00 $50,000
to treat about 2,000 individual parts of R. Buckminster Fuller's prototype
for the Dymaxion House. $10,000 for an education component that will
include a temporary exhibition and continuing Web site that interprets
the conservation work done on the building is updated weekly.
Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, MI, $8,888.00 To assist with the storage and
protection of the Museum's 1,974 mostly 19th century ornithology specimens,
by purchasing archival materials, supplies, and cabinets. 1998 The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI, $22,742.00 To upgrade
and improve storage for the Museum's 20th-century small sculptures composed
of bronze, terra-cotta, wood, ivory, stone and mixed media. Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, Dearborn, MI, $50,000.00 To assess
and rehouse the Museum's 36,000 fire-damaged nitrate and acetate film-based
photo negatives in the Ford Motor Company archival collection. Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, $5,500.00 To conduct
a detailed condition survey of 302 ceramics and sculptures in the Museum's
permanent collection. Michigan State University Museum, East Lansing, MI, $49,060.00 To purchase storage cabinets and conservation supplies to rehouse the Museum's 800-piece ethnographic basketry collection. Conservation Assessment Program (CAP) grants- These grants support the hiring of a conservator to evaluate the condition of the museum's collections and set conservation goals for more effective collections management: 2000 (as of September) Oscoda, MI Wurtsmith
Division, Yankee Air Force 1999 Ironwood Historical Museum, Ironwood, MI, $6,350.00 Michigan
Historic Museum - Michigan History Division,
Lansing, MI, $3,300.00 1998 The Scarab Club, Detroit, MI, $5,290.00 Livingston
County Historical Society, Howell, MI, $5,570.00
U.S. Department of the Interior-National Park Service Save America's
Treasures FY 2000 Historic Preservation Fund Grants Cranbrook House, Bloomfield Hills, MI $300,000 Built between 1908 and 1920, the Albert Kahn-designed Cranbrook House is an outstanding example of early 20th-century design and craftsmanship. Cranbrook House was the residence of George and Ellen Booth, founders of the Cranbrook Educational Community, an idealist institution dedicated to combating shoddy machine-age goods by making beautiful objects and creating architectural settings with the finest quality details. This National Historic Landmark house contains fine art, antiques and unique examples of the Arts and Crafts movement. Funding will support restoration of portions of the roof, terrace and plaza deck. SOS! Save Outdoor Sculpture Awards. Awards are available in four categories: Assessment, Conservation Treatment, Maintenance Training, and Achievement. SOS! Awards recognize and support projects that preserve and enhance learning about outdoor sculpture. Treatment awards are funded through Heritage Preservation SOS!, Target Stores, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 2000 - Root Park Fountain and Kearney Park Fountain, Muskegon, MI Consultant: Tom
Podnar 1998 - Oakland County Office of Arts, Culture and Film, Pontiac, MI Lady Justice (1905) unknown Consultant: John
Dugger, Venus Bronze Works 1997 - Grand Army of the Republic Monument (1904) artist unknown Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War & Water Town Charter Township, DeWitt, MI Consultant: Andrzej Dajnowski Consultant:
John Dugger, Venus Bronze Works Muskegon, MI 1999 - Fireman's
Monument (1898), St. Joseph, MI 1997 - Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI Abraham Lincoln (1915) |
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