There are many ways to learn history and social studies besides the traditional way of memorizing names and dates that turned so many generations off. Interestingly, a historic building can actually serve as a textbook just as well as a printed thing you carry around in a backpack.
Beckley Furnace office building, seen from Lower Road
We are indebted to Christine Baron and Christina Dobbs for their article “Expanding the Notion of Historical Text Through Historic Building Analysis” that appeared in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy in March 2015. It really gave us the ideas that let us organize our analysis of the administration building at Beckley — something we have been discussing for a long, long time. Consultant Elisabeth Nevins pointed us to that article, and needless to say, we are very grateful for her help.
Why the Administration Building?
And why not the furnace itself?
Several reasons, really. Historical building as text analysis is especially useful as a learning tool in cases when structures have served many purposes over their lifespans. Really, the furnace served only one (served it rather well, but still the furnace never had a function other than making pig iron). The Office Building (also known as the Administration Building and the Barnum Richardson Research Center) has played several historical roles, including a few at the same time.
Another reason: the Office Building doesn’t get the attention it deserves. Visitors to Beckley Furnace almost always start with the furnace itself, and, time permitting, view the dam, the turbine display, and many wander over to the slag pile. Very, very few make their way up the hill to this building that really doesn’t seem like it is part of what they understand about Beckley Furnace. We think it deserves more attention than it gets.
Adapting a framework
Baron and Dobbs, in the article cited earlier, developed a framework. They called it “Historical Thinking Framework for Buildings” (or HTFB) and included it as table 1 of their article. Each represents a different perspective from which the building can be viewed, and each paints a bit more of the picture of the building as what the authors consider the building as historical text.
For this analysis, we took the five elements the authors had defined: Origination, Intertectionality, Stratification, Supposition, and Empathetic Insight, and restated them as six elements — tasks, really — as follows:
Defining connection to the eras when it was constructed
Stratification of building elements – what happened when?
Reviewing the historical contexts in which the building was present
Examining correlations with other similar buildings of those periods
Consider occupants/users, their roles in society, and how they might have responded to the building
Elaborating on the macrostructure: competing uses of structural elements
That said, we didn’t necessarily tackle the tasks in order, and in fact worked on more that one simultaneously.
Some tasks were fairly easy — at least on the surface — while others became quite complex upon further investigation.
