Additional partners; the city GIS director, State of North Carolina Archivists, the director of Raleigh City Planning, and faculty from the NCSU School of Forestry Wood and Paper Products Lab were consulted and visited. Professors and graduate students spent hours in field research gathering information for the middle school teachers and students to use in their projects.

Field trips for middle school students were funded through grants and coordinated by the teachers and professors. These trips were informative, educational, and motivational. The actual field experiences made the virtual information come alive. Before the field trips, the project was abstract to the students, another academic exercise. Afterwards they could visualize what life was like in the 1953 – 1971 time period and how this history would be recorded. Students were motivated to continue their research and be persistent.
 
 

The GIS students explored the history of Raleigh through GIS at the Raleigh GIS office, maps at the State of  NC Archives, and a tour of the historic sections of the city. We first visited the Raleigh GIS office. Colleen Sharpe, director, showed us the city annexation map. It illustrated the growth of the city. Students immediately saw how we could use GIS to show change over time from the late 1700’s to the present. An annexation map of Raleigh helped both students and teachers visualize how GIS can be used to show change over time. Employees shared several of the current GIS projects for the City of Raleigh. Students were impressed to learn that legislators frequently requested GIS models before making decisions. Students looked at the GIS databases of land parcels. Finding their homes in the database complete with pictures particularly amazed them. They also noted issues of privacy associated with such information. The Raleigh GIS office supplied us with databases for annexation, county streets, public schools, land parcels, and census tracts. LHS was the only high school for Blacks in the Raleigh City School System. In 1971, under orders to desegregate, the city and county school systems consolidated. Black students were then bused out of their neighborhoods to high schools all over the county. Using GIS we can effectively illustrate the Diaspora from a geographic perspective. Wake County is shown in blue, the city of Raleigh in 1950 in yellow, and the current city limits in pink.

Our next stop was the State of North Carolina Archives. Ed Morris displayed maps of Raleigh and Wake County sequentially from the original William Christmas plan for the city to a current map of Raleigh. Students were most impressed with a "Bird’s Eye View" map drawn of Raleigh from a hot air balloon in the 1800’s and the historic Sanborn maps. They were appalled that changes were made to the maps by pasting over original information. Mr. Morris provided us with copies of maps from many time periods. Some of these maps were later digitized to form the basis for the a student's Railroad Development GIS project and another student’s Raleigh Trolley Tour GIS project and web site. The maps were used extensively by the Wake County Heritage class in their study of architectural history of the area. The historic Sanborn maps illustrated areas of Raleigh designated "colored" or "Negro." The maps were shocking and revelatory for many of the project participants, but familiar territory for the Alumni whose daily lives had been lived in its separate spaces. Seeing these maps led us to understand the GIS project in different terms. We began to understand that the history of the segregated period from an African American perspective was frequently not recorded as "official" history, and that representing the information about the Alumni's lives in GIS formats would challenge the boundaries of official layers of GIS information.

The GIS class completed their day, exploring historic areas of the city on the Great Raleigh Trolley tour. Dr. Candy Beal, author of Raleigh: the First 200 Years (1992), narrated the tour that included buildings of historical significance in the downtown area. Several sites had significance for the Ligon History project including the home and business owned by J. W. Ligon, Chavis Park, Saint Augustine’s College, St. Agnes Hospital, the downtown shopping districts, Moore’s Square (known in the 50’s as Baptist Grove), Washington School, and Shaw University. Students took pictures during this tour that were added as hotlinks to the GIS model of Mr. Hunter's Mental Map of the 1950’s. Josh Carter, a student in both the GIS class and the Electronic Publishing class, has made a web site of the tour and will make a GIS model of the tour with hotlinks to all the web pages.

Students in the GIS class had an excellent experience on this field trip. The sequence of the visits helped them visualize complex mapping concepts and made the history come alive. They saw GIS models of the city and its growth, then the hand drawn maps that showed the same development. On the trolley trip they saw the buildings and experienced their locations. This day motivated students to gather data and find ways to communicate the history.
 
 
 

Inspired by "tree cookies" saved from mature willow oaks cut from the property during renovation, Virginia Owens introduced her sixth grade science students to the study of dendrochronology. Owens consulted scientists at the NCSU College of Forestry Wood and Paper Products lab to prepare for this study. Unfortunately the lab was not a safe place for students to visit, so Owens and Hagevik visited the lab and photographed the scientists as they processed the tree cookies. They also consulted specialists at US Division of Forest Resources, the US Forest Service, and the Forest History Society. Guest speakers spoke to the students and helped them do field research on trees on the campus. Because of this support student dendrochronologists learned complex scientific information and were able to determine the age of the tree. For an overview of this aspect of the project visit "Ligon's History in the Rings."