ECU students, staff assist western North Carolina community with historical homes survey
On Jan. 25-26, East Carolina University students and staff conducted a historic house survey in western North Carolina in the wake of significant property damage during Hurricane Helene. The team worked with the Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County (PSABC) to conduct a pedestrian survey of roughly 400 historic structures in Montreat — some dating as far back as 1898.
ECU graduate student volunteers were given grids of historical home locations to help conduct their walking survey of damages or clean up since Hurricane Helene. (Photo by Jennifer McKinnon)
The ECU team was led by two members of the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Department of History and its Program in Maritime Studies. Chelsea Freeland is a research fellow who recruited the students and Dr. Jennifer McKinnon is a professor who provided survey method guidance to the volunteers.
McKinnon has conducted community archaeology and citizen science projects for more than 20 years in various communities from Australia to the Pacific and within the United States. Freeland is a resident of Montreat and has volunteered with the PSABC since the storm as part of her fellowship in community archaeology.
“This isn’t the community I thought I would be working in, but this is the community that needs it right now,” Freeland said. “I felt after the hurricane that I wasn’t doing enough. Most of us who live in the area felt everything was in shambles, and so many people had lost so much. So for me, volunteering has been a useful stress coping mechanism.”
This is also how she learned about the opportunity for others to get involved in the historical homes survey. She participated in a training session to be able to lead the ECU team with the survey.
Twelve ECU graduate students traveled with McKinnon and Freeland to participate in the community service project. Once they arrived in Montreat, an alumnus from the program, who is currently employed by FEMA and was already helping with clean-up efforts in Asheville, joined the group.
“It was nice to have the students come out, to see that they really cared and were interested,” Freeland said.
Freeland said they wanted students to “get a sense of what it is like to be in a disaster zone, especially if they haven’t had experience working with that level of destruction,” get familiar with a rapid survey, quickly record notes and experience working with a local nonprofit.
“The students surveyed 400 houses in two days, which is one-third of the survey that needs to be accomplished by the preservation board. So it was a huge help,” McKinnon said. “This allowed students to use their classroom skills to contribute to the efforts of recovery in the region and assist in the preservation of houses from the late 1800s to the 1970s.”
Volunteers took notes and photographs of houses throughout the town that sustained damage from the hurricane in September. These photos and notes will be compared to a pre-storm survey completed by the PSABC in June to better understand the storm’s impact and assess potential mediation and rebuilding needs. The survey is part of a larger volunteer effort to document historic property damage across Asheville and Buncombe County.
“It was interesting to go back and see everything up close. The experience was nice, and it was rewarding to help with this survey of historic houses,” said Rebecca Kelley, one of the graduate student volunteers originally from western North Carolina who has lived in Asheville the past eight years.
Graduate students, alumni, faculty and staff volunteers from ECU worked with the Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County to survey historic homes in western North Carolina post-Hurricane Helene. (Contributed Photo)
Kelley, who wants to stay in North Carolina and work with the National Park Service or Office of State Archaeology after she completes her degree, said that in addition to flooding, she noticed massive tree damage on the hillsides in the higher elevations. She said downed trees and limb damage were a majority of what the group observed in the Montreat area.
“Entire swaths of trees had been knocked over by the wind,” she said.
The group of volunteers were divided up into small teams. Kelley said she and her teammate worked on surveying 24 properties on their first day, which included homes that were present before the founding of Montreat through the year 1930. The second day, they surveyed houses from the ’60s.
They looked for and noted any exterior damage to roofs, siding and foundations, porch collapses and yard debris. Then, they noted if that damage was severe, moderate or minor, and if any construction or repairs were started. The current survey also helps to determine if any houses need reassessing from the survey conducted before the hurricane.
“Luckily, there were not too many that had significant damage,” she said. She also noted that some places had been roped off, tarps placed over debris, and repairs had started in many areas.
Kelley said that this experience allowed her and the other maritime archaeology students to apply the skills they learned in archaeology to disaster recovery efforts. She said they have learned how to conduct a quick survey, be efficient and cover a large area of ground. However, helping the community was also a gratifying experience.
“The foot survey gave us more time to think about what we were doing and feel like you were part of the community,” she said. “It was really rewarding because people would stop us and ask what we were doing. They would say ‘thank you.’ Overall, the response was pretty positive, and it was nice knowing we were contributing.”
Jessie Landl, PSABC executive director, said, “By the end of this survey project, we hope to have a much better understanding about the impact of Hurricane Helene on our historic resources, documentation of places that have been lost and damaged and a document that can live on to tell the story of this storm and the people and places it impacted.”