About Preservation

What Is Historic?

Today, most preservationists start with a 50-year cut-off to determine the ‘historic eligibility’ of a particular resource. Thus, something built 50 years ago qualifies as historic, if it met a certain set of criteria.

The National Register of Historic Places, created in 1966, established those criteria for determining this eligibility of a potentially historic resource. These criteria still guide the work of most preservation efforts and projects.

The National Register broadly defines eligibility in four categories:

• Associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history; or
• Associated with the lives of significant persons in or past; or
• Embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values, or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack individual distinction; or
• Have yielded or may be likely to yield, information important in history or prehistory.

Using these categories, preservationists across the country are able to focus their work on compelling and important places – places worth preserving. These categories are also used for property owners attempting to list their property on the National Register of Historic Places.

Preservation in the United States and Maryland

Historic Preservation, as a discipline and movement in the United States, is a relatively young endeavor. It was not until the mid-19^th century that efforts commenced to ‘save’ or ‘preserve’ important homes, public buildings and later landscapes. George Washington’s Mount Vernon and America’s Civil War battlefields are now fondly remembered as some of the nation’s first forays into legitimate preservation – setting the tone for generations to come.

Today, nearly 150 years after the first American preservation project began, much has changed and oddly much remains exactly the same.

From day one – preservation in the United States has been a decidedly grassroots effort. While government agencies have taken on an important role in most aspects of preservation – nearly every major preservation campaign has first started with a group of concerned citizens sounding the alarm, organizing and then identifying ways to save places that matter. Even in 21^st century Maryland, this common thread of grassroots oriented preservation is still played out in the pages of the state’s newspapers on a weekly basis.

In 1931, a similar group of concerned citizens gathered to establish the Society for the Preservation of Maryland Antiquities – known today as Preservation Maryland. Their initial goal was to save sites in Maryland associated with George Washington, but soon thereafter expanded their mission to the preservation of all of Maryland’s unique history.

Almost a century later, that effort continues.