May 28, 2025 By Garrett Neese 5 min read

The desks where early 20th-century students sat were lined up once more Tuesday, ready to be filled with young scholars. And, a tavern along the National Road was lit up and ready to welcome weary travelers.

Those journeys, and others, came courtesy of high school students from four local counties who participated in the second annual Portals Showcase. Launched last year by the nonprofit Perennial Project, the program gives students access to cutting-edge technology to render three-dimensional and immersive virtual-reality experiences to allow people to step into buildings as they existed decades or centuries before.

The group’s founder, Joe Barantovich, said the project had been a way to thread the needle between two factions in Brownsville: Those who wanted to tear down every old building, and those who wanted to preserve everything.

“We figured if we can’t save these buildings physically, we can save them virtually,” he said.

Some of the buildings scanned in Brownsville have since had to come down through emergency demolition. But with the scans accurate to within one-sixteenth of an inch, the scans could allow a prospective builder to recreate the historic landmarks down the line.

“If somebody wanted to come back and rebuild those buildings, we can give them those models, and they can rebuild them exactly the way they were,” Barantovich said.

It can also help bring in funding. Even before the Portals Showcase, students Barantovich worked with in Brownsville helped bring in a $1.8 million Environmental Protection Agency grant to clean up hazardous materials in Brownsville’s abandoned Union Station.

Students from the Albert Gallatin, Brownsville, California, Jefferson-Morgan, Mount Pleasant and West Greene school districts gave presentations and held demonstrations beforehand for the crowd.

West Greene’s students chose the Crouse Schoolhouse, a one-room schoolhouse built in 1909 that has been closed since the early 1960s. The building is now owned by the district.

“In our area, we really don’t have much for old buildings, and this is one of the schoolhouses in the area, so we chose it,” said Jacob Orndorff, a junior at West Greene.

Students visited the sites to make digital scans of the buildings as they are, then used the Unreal game engine, developed by Epic, to turn them into 3-D renderings.

Along the way they learned the joys of troubleshooting. For West Greene, that meant fixing interactions between their game character and the door to allow him to pass through — and also adding collisions to prevent the character from walking through the walls like a ghost.

The team spent a couple of months building the rendering, as well as adding the surrounding landscape.

For students from the Albert Gallatin School District in Fayette County, the task was recreating the Mount Washington Tavern, a stagecoach stop on the National Road. Students were able to get access to the tavern site itself, part of the Fort Necessity historical unit, and talk with park rangers.

The attention to detail included walking on the tavern floors in cowboy boots to recreate the sounds one might have heard, said Isabella Simpkins, a senior at Albert Gallatin High School.

The team had done another project at Fort Necessity at last year’s showcase. They also considered doing the fort’s Gallatin House, but decided against it because of the difficulty of unwinding the years of add-ons.

Simpkins said for her, the biggest area of growth was honing her teamwork and leadership skills

“It really helped me with how I’m going to develop in the future,” she said.

In one case from this year, Mount Pleasant students used the technology to reimagine their future, showing off a sleek redesigned library with new student spaces.

California and West Greene were new additions to the program. Barantovich said he hopes to add two districts every year. Students from the prospective two new districts from West Virginia were on hand Tuesday to learn from this year’s students.

Other projects included Jefferson-Morgan’s recreation of the W.A. Young & Sons Foundry and Machine Shop, and California’s recreation of another stagecoach stop on the National Road: the tavern near the current site of Paci’s Lounge & Dining Room in Brownsville. The tavern itself is now a private residence, while Paci’s stands at the former site of a stable.

The team worked to tie it in with the National Road projects, noting the work done by Brownsville’s group to recreate the Searights Tollhouse north of Uniontown, said instructor Jon Difilippo.

“Just to get this base done, it took a year, and then we’re going to try to jazz it up year after year after year,” he said.

The presentations impressed Jenn Burden, director of cultural resources for the National Road Heritage Corridor.

It’s “light years ahead” of the shoebox dioramas with pipe cleaners she remembers from her childhood. And the number of National Road-themed displays in this year’s showcase could someday become new displays that will let people see parts of historic sites along the road that are currently closed to the public.

“It’ll give an idea of what those spaces look like, how they function, and being able to manipulate it yourself, go in and out of rooms and not just read a brochure,” she said. “I think it will be much more engaging to all generations, especially the younger generations.”