By Barbara S. Miller

Staff writer

bmiller@observer-reporter.com

For the next year, teams will be photographing farms in Washington and Greene counties on behalf of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission Bureau of Historic Preservation.

Documenting the farms will be done from public rights-of-way unless property owners invite team members onto their property.

Andrea MacDonald, preservation services division chief for the state Bureau for Historic Preservation in Harrisburg, said the effort is being made solely to document the historic development of agriculture in the area.

"This is not public acquisition or access," MacDonald said. "There is often confusion with national registration designation and a local historic district. The national registry is not a local ordinance that reviews changes to a local property.

"We maintain an inventory of resources for the entire commonwealth. It's primarily honorary."

In addition to photographs, the survey of buildings and landscapes will include maps and a brief description of local farms. The survey team is using historic and current aerial photographs, atlases and road maps to do its work. The team also is interested in recording oral history of farmers telling their own stories either individually or in groups.

The team hopes to take several hundred photographs between the two counties, MacDonald said.

"They'll be documenting a substantial number of farms, even through the winter, as much as they can."

Copies of the information collected will be provided on request. Listed as a contact is Carol Lee, chief of registration and survey for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, who can be reached at 717-783-9918.

The state commission is partnering with Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, the state Department of Transportation and Penn State University, who have received a grant from the Preserve America program.

All information collected during the survey will be kept on record in the Pennsylvania historic resources inventory in Harrisburg.

Washington and Greene counties are among the last counties in the state to be photographed.

Sandy Mansmann, coordinator and former board member of Washington County History and Landmarks Foundation, directed a similar local survey of historic structures in 1996.

Spurred by imminent longwall mining, the local foundation recruited volunteers to photograph buildings and write descriptions as part of an ongoing project.

"We started with rural areas because they were most immediately impacted by longwall mining and time," Mansmann said.

She met with state survey team members Jeremy Ammerman, Hannah Cole and Aaron Collins last month at the Washington County Fair to pass along information the local volunteers already had cataloged.

"Some of the things we collected are already gone. At the time we collected it, they didn't even have a Web site," Mansmann said of the state Historical and Museum Commission.

Raymond Patterson of Nottingham Township, who lives on a 165-acre homestead classified as a Century Farm in 2002 by the state, said Tuesday he hadn't heard of the photography project.

He said he and his wife, Mary Jane, ignore any phone calls that come from numbers unknown to their caller identification, and hadn't received anything by letter "that the historical people are looking at anything.

"Maybe they were already here. We have a horse farm, and we have people and children looking at the horses and ponies and taking pictures all the time," Patterson said.

More information about the program is available at http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bhp/Agricultural/?secid=25.

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