If these walls could talk

The University’s Historic Preservation Committee recently launched a new website that provides the first comprehensive online history of WSU Pullman’s buildings and landscapes.

Developed as a teaching tool and an eventual community history repository, the WSU Building and Landscapes website features photographs, maps and plans from the WSU Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC).  Currently, the website includes entries for 161 buildings on the Pullman campus, including 39 buildings that have been destroyed, demolished, or moved elsewhere. Eighteen entries feature narratives written by WSU faculty and several more are in the works.

Funding for the website is provided by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) and the Lawrence R. Stark Archives Graduate Fellowship from the Washington State University Libraries’  MASC.

The hope is that it will cultivate more faculty, student and alumni engagement with the history of the Pullman campus and the services of both CDSC and MASC. The committee expects to have a system in place that will allow the public to contribute information, including oral histories and photographs.

The website was created by Andrew Gillreath‑Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who earned summer fellowships from CDSC and MASC, and continued worked on the project on his own volition. Gillreath‑Brown spent fall semester researching, gathering information, taking photographs of buildings and landscapes, and coding the site.

“I really wanted to create a website that would allow me to dive into the university’s past — one that would also help other people connect to the campus and landscape,” Gillreath‑Brown said. “My goal was to create an attractive and interactive website that would allow users to look at historic and modern images, videos, read narratives about buildings and parts of the landscape, as well as oral histories.”

Top photo: An early photo of the WSU Pullman campus from the new website about the history of WSU Pullman buildings and landscapes.

Originally posted at WSU Insider.