Potomac Corridor Historic Resources IMS:
Connecting Past and Present

Jacquelyn M. Strager, Research Coordinator
Natural Resource Analysis Center
West Virginia University

Dan Bonenberger, Associate Director
Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology
West Virginia University

ABSTRACT

A recent collaboration between the Natural Resource Analysis Center and the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology at West Virginia University has produced an IMS application that presents information on historic cultural resources located in central Appalachia. Developed using Esri’s Map Objects technology, this interactive, web-based mapping project allows users to search and display descriptive and locational information for hundreds of historic structures along three famous transportation routes that crossed the Appalachians via the Potomac River valley. The Potomac Corridor Historic Resources IMS website makes a valuable contribution to heritage tourism and cultural resource management.

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Project Participants

The Natural Resource Analysis Center (NRAC) and the Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology (IHTIA) of West Virginia University have combined to produce the online Potomac Corridor GIS.  The NRAC is a multi-disciplinary GIS facility in the College of Agriculture, Forestry and Consumer Sciences at West Virginia University, with research activities concentrated in environmental planning, natural resource economics, wildlife management, forest ecology, and reclamation.  The IHTIA, a unit of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, has a mission to “document, analyze and preserve our nation’s industrial heritage while providing unique educational opportunities.”

This pilot project has been financed in by West Virginia University in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS) Historic American Engineering Record program with technical support from the NPS branch of Mapping and Information Technology and the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Transportation Routes and the Potomac Corridor

In the early 19th century, the Appalachian Mountains formed a seemingly insurmountable barrier to east-west trade within the rapidly expanding United States.  Historic transportation routes forged across the Appalachians of central Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia offer prime examples of important early American structures and buildings, including bridges, tunnels, power plants, mills, and more.  This work focuses on three of these routes: the National Road, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Cataloging Historic Resources

Significant architectural, engineering, and industrial works along these three routes and throughout the United States have been catalogued and documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historical American Engineering Record (HAER), both administered by the National Park Service.  Together, information collected by the HABS/HAER programs is archived by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.  The Library of Congress makes primary source material including digital images (site drawings, photographs, written records) for individual HABS/HAER sites available through the American Memory historical collections website.  Some of the most important historical resources of the United States are recognized on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP).

With the use of Internet mapping technology, the Potomac Corridor GIS serves to link digital maps of site locations to the wealth of information available in the HABS/HAER and NRHP programs.  The Potomac Corridor GIS is one example of a small number of GIS-enabled websites interfacing geographic locations with historic resources.  On a much larger scale, the Alexandria Digital Library project hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara has developed an interactive gazetteer combining data from the US Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information Service and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency’s GeoName Server.

By linking the records of the past with the technology of the present, we provide a valuable and timely resource to educators, researchers, and those interested in cultural heritage tourism.

WEB-BASED MAPPING FOR THE POTOMAC CORRIDOR GIS

Website Development

The Potomac Corridor GIS web mapping interface was developed using Esri’s Map Objects and Map Objects IMS technology.  At the time of website development, ArcIMS had not yet been released.  Future upgrades may include eventual system migration to ArcIMS.  Advantages of the use of Map Objects included ease of site customization, and the ability to limit the functionality of the site to basic GIS functions combined with easy-to-use search capabilities.  We specifically wanted to avoid the look and feel of an ‘out of the box’ mapping website template.  Site programming and customization was performed using Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6.0, and the resulting web site is served using Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) software.

Website Functionality

The Potomac Corridor GIS web site has been designed for the non-technical GIS user, with simple map functions and directed search capabilities (Figure 1).  Map functions include zoom in, zoom out, pan, and identify.  Users may toggle the visibility of vector and image-based map layers.  The visibility of several of the more detailed image layers is scale-dependent, ensuring that image backdrops are displayed appropriately as site users zoom to different map extents.
 

Figure 1.  Potomac Corridor GIS web site's initial map display.  Map layers are listed on the left, map controls, search interface, and instructions appear below the map image.

Additional features of the Potomac Corridor GIS include a brief metadata record for each map layer, including a description of the data source and helpful links to related information.  The webpage also provides a link to a printer-ready version of the user’s current map window.

Data Included

The main spatial data layers referenced on the Potomac Corridor GIS are shapefiles of historic points (found within about 1 mile of each of the three historic transportation routes) from the HABS/HAER, NRHP, and IHTIA databases.  Other ancillary datasets are shown for reference, including state and county outlines, major roads, and rivers.  The user has a choice of background images, including a shaded relief map and topographic maps of various scales and levels of detail.  For certain areas with high concentrations of historic features, 1:24,000 topographic maps are available.  A scanned historical map of western Maryland is currently provided on the site as a background image (Figure 2), and additional historical map backgrounds will be added during the second phase of the project in order to provide a richer context for the point data.

Figure 2.  Historical map background image (dated 1873) for western Maryland, from the Potomac Corridor GIS map window.  Transportation corridors and historic point features are drawn on top of the image background.

Table 1.  Data layers and sources incorporated in the Potomac Corridor GIS.

The simple search interface incorporated into the site’s design performs queries against the various historic point shapefiles by database, state, and county.  Query results are shown directly on the resulting webpage.  Query results are also hyperlinked (in the case of HABS/HAER records) to related information on the external American Memory webpage at the Library of Congress.

Figure 3.  Example of query results (user has queried historical points database for HABS sites in Marion County, WV.)

 

Figure 4.  Example of measured drawing of High Gate Carriage House, Fairmont WV from American Memory web page hosted by the Library of Congress.  The Potomac Corridor GIS provides hyperlinks to individual American Memory webpages for various historical sites.

 

Website Users

Electronic cultural heritage resources such as the Potomac Corridor GIS website attract a varied audience, including those with an interest in research, education, and cultural tourism.  Project coordinator Dan Bonenberger exhibited the pilot website at the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative's January 2001 conference in Hong Kong.  The project website has since been presented at the annual conference of the Society for Industrial Archeology in May 2001.

Future Work

We expect that the Potomac Corridor GIS will continue to evolve and expand with the constantly changing field of web-based mapping technology.  We also plan to expand the depth and breadth of information available through this interface in a number of ways.  Additional scanned images of historical maps will be added to the website, beginning with the National Road.  An updated version of the HABS/HAER database will be reviewed and plans will be made for integrating all HABS/HAER records for the central Appalachian states.  We are prepared to expand the scope of the site beyond the current historic corridors to include resources found along scenic byways, rail-trails and other historic features throughout the region.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was funded by West Virginia University in cooperation with the National Park Service's HABS/HAER and Mapping and Information Technology branches.  We thank Dean M. Duane Nellis of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University and E. Blaine Cliver, Chief of HABS/HAER for their support of this project.  Deirdre McCarthy with the NPS Mapping and Information Technology branch provided additional technical assistance. Brian Renzella contributed valuable efforts in compiling geographic coordinates and other information for inclusion in the GIS datasets used for this project.  Bryan Tolka and Dr. Jerry Fletcher of the Natural Resource Analysis Center also provided support and assistance.

AUTHOR INFORMATION
 

Jacquelyn M. Strager Natural Resource Analysis Center West Virginia University PO Box 6108 Morgantown, WV  26506-6108 USA Phone: (304) 293-4832 ext.4455 Fax: (304) 293-3752
Dan Bonenberger Institute for the History of Technology and Industrial Archaeology West Virginia University PO Box 6305 Morgantown, WV  26506-6305 USA Phone: (304) 293-3589 Fax: (304) 293-2449

http://www.nrac.wvu.edu/scripts/Esrimap.dll?name=ihtia&cmd=Map