CHARG is partnering with The Wake Forest Historical Museum this spring to provide support in digitizing and georeferencing historical maps of the Town of Wake Forest and the original Wake Forest College Campus. This post is written by Dr. Sarah Soleim, WFHM’s Manager of Community and Academic Learning. The exhibit is funded by North Carolina Humanities through an American Rescue Plan Humanities Project Support Grant.
The Wake Forest Historical Museum is creating a new hybrid exhibition that will explore how Wake Forest has changed over time through maps, land surveys, and aerial imagery. The exhibit will locate Wake Forest in regional and national contexts and show how an eighteenth-century plantation landscape evolved into one of North Carolina’s fastest growing communities. The museum is partnering with CHARG to create an interactive component featuring georeferenced historical maps.
CHARG students will create historic overlay maps that visitors can use on a touch screen in the exhibit gallery or on any smartphone or tablet. One of the maps included in the digital component will be a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map published in 1915. Originally created for insurance companies to access liabilities, Sanborn maps provide detailed drawings of commercial and residential districts across the United States. CHARG students will also use georeferenced aerial imagery to show major changes to Wake Forest’s landscape in the late twentieth century, including the construction of the US 1 bypass in 1953 and Falls Lake Dam in 1981.
The new exhibit builds off community excitement about “Sites of Memory” a digital exhibit created by the Town of Wake Forest that explores the history of Wake Forest’s historically African American neighborhood through historic overlay maps, documentary research, and oral history. In anticipation of exhibit, the museum will host monthly walking tours in different areas of Wake Forest. All of these exhibits and events create opportunities for Wake Forest residents to reflect on how the past shapes the places we live and work today.
“You Are Here” is funded by an American Rescue Plan Humanities Project Support Grant from North Carolina Humanities and is scheduled to open in August 2022. Funding for North Carolina Humanities American Rescue Plan Humanities Grants was provided to North Carolina Humanities by the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan Act, passed by Congress, and signed by President Biden in March 2021. North Carolina Humanities www.nchumanities.org is a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
