Over the summer, students in the historic preservation program completed internships in both urban and rural settings as local as Salem and as remote as Croatia.

The students presented their accomplished work recently in Lawrence Hall to faculty members and first-year students looking for future internships in preservation.

The positions included government, international, nonprofit, and nongovernmental internships. All master’s candidates in historic preservation are required to complete Internship I in winter term prior to their internships and Internship II the fall after their internships.

Above: Graduate student Brandon Grlic presents key lessons from his historic preservation internship with the Greater Portland Landmarks in Portland, Maine, in Lawrence Hall in November. His work included surveying and photographing historic properties. Photograph courtesy of Ben Stinnett.

The follow-up internship class is “a great time for students not only to share what they’ve accomplished, but gain experience in presenting to a group, which is an important skill in so many types of work,” said instructor Kristin Grieger, who teaches the courses. “We also use this as a way to help first-years coming through the program understand what they need to do in upcoming terms.”

David Espinosa interned with the New York City Arts and Antiquities Department, a branch of the city’s parks department. His duties encompassed maintenance of all public monuments within the five boroughs of New York City.

“Throughout the summer, we worked on various elements of monuments,” he said. “Statuary was a big one. [It was] a lot of large, bronze statuary.”

One responsibility included cleaning a bronze statue of George Washington. He and his colleagues used a propane torch to heat the surface and apply a hot wax, which would help preserve the sculpture and protect it from UV rays, rain, dirt, and graffiti.

Although he gained experience with urban preservation, Espinosa’s career goal is in architecture conservation with a focus on historic buildings and masonry.

“I went into the summer wanting to develop my hand skills and get better oriented with a variety of materials and I accomplished that over and over again,” he said. “I developed a lot of hand skills with all the masonry, metal, and bricks. … The skills I developed were all applicable [to my career].”

David Casteel worked as project specialist with the Oregon State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) in Salem. His main project involved nominating two sites to the National Register of Historic Places.

Casteel’s two nominations were the West 99 Twin Cinemas and Drive-In Theatre in Newberg, Oregon, and the Linkville Pioneer Cemetery outside Klamath Falls, Oregon.

“It was a rural-type cemetery developed in the early 1900s,” he said of the Klamath Falls site. “It has a grove of maple trees. The significance of this is the landscape [and] the design represent the development of Klamath Falls from the early 1900s.”

Casteel recommends an internship with SHPO to all students in the historic preservation program.

“What I did will be 100 percent helpful for the future,” he said. “This program at the SHPO—they ask you what you want to do, so I said I want to do a couple National Register [nominations]. Everything I have here—with the survey work—I can use for a portfolio and future consulting work in the field.”

Ben Stinnett spent his summer working at Yosemite National Park in California. He was an intern with the park’s cultural resources division in an internship coordinated through the National Council for Preservation Education. Like Espinosa, Stinnett applied online through preservenet.cornell.edu.

His internship transpired at the same time the Rim Fire, the biggest wildfire on record in the Sierra Nevada and California’s third largest wildfire in history, threatened Yosemite Valley.

“There was one day, in particular, where you could not see the sun and there was ash all over the sky,” he said. “It was quite an experience.”

Stinnett helped with a scenic vista indicator project, which evaluated and ranked scenic vistas in terms of their form, light, color, and texture and their impact on the environment in the national park. This will influence the construction of future developments so they blend in naturally with the surrounding scenery.

“The goal was to look at the ones with the low scores, based on the rating system, and possibly mitigate and reduce the impact,” he said.

Other responsibilities included restoration of the Yosemite Valley cemetery, which contains graves of both American Indians and early settlers. Stinnett helped recondition the grave of James C. Lamon, one of the first Euro-American settlers in Yosemite Valley.

Susie Trexler’s internship with a nonprofit organization was at the Philip Foster Farm in Eagle Creek, Oregon Once an important establishment on the Oregon Trail, the farm is now a popular tourist destination near Portland.

Trexler’s internship involved researching and archiving documents, photographs, and historical items. “My job was to go through the items, and they varied from paper items to clothing,” she said. “I even found a lock of hair. In the end, I archived 265 items.”

She also organized a number of summer events for which she helped create displays and craft projects for children.

“My takeaway from this internship was if you’re working for a small nonprofit, the work never ends, much like harvesting wheat, which we did,” she said. “The work is not just historic preservation. It can range as far as creating a wreath out of the excess wheat.”

Ann Phillips traveled to Croatia with the Historic Preservation Program’s study abroad program to spend her international internship at the Croatia Field School. She spent time in Brdaci, a remote village in the hinterlands, and Kaštel Stari, one of Croatia’s seven fortified villages on the Dalmatian coast.

Phillips and her colleagues found a renaissance aqueduct that ran through Kaštel Stari, which became a core component to one of her projects.

“People knew it was there but they didn’t know what it was,” she said. “Historically, it brought water from the springs up in the hills down to the coast.”

Her proposal involved developing a city park and public pavilion, something the city lacked.

“We did some research. We did some field measurements and drawings. We came up with a heritage park proposal,” Phillips said. “It’s a way to introduce a piece of their culture, but not just preserve it in a glass box—have it be something that’s active and alive.”

Phillips said she wants to work at an architecture firm as an historic preservation specialist. This experience gave her a key understanding of site-specific structures, how to develop an edifice where one already exists, and how a community perceives its history. This was Phillips’s first intensive experience with historic preservation.