When he started his consulting firm in 1900, it’s unlikely that our founder, Daniel Mead, could’ve envisioned that one of his legacies 125 years later would include our firm’s Cultural Resources Business Unit. Within the AEC industry, it is unique for firms to specialize in cultural resources with such a large group. Our 60-person Cultural Resources team interprets and evaluates our shared cultural heritage represented in buildings, sites, structures, and landscapes nationwide.
During our work to bring these stories to life, we’ve had the opportunity to recognize the projects designed by our founder, Daniel Mead, evaluating the engineering and historical significance of the early dams he designed in the Upper Midwest. We also created a Founder’s Room in our headquarters that features a company timeline, including photographs and materials from Mead and many other engineers who contributed to Mead & Hunt’s legacy. Telling stories of the past through our built environment, we not only learn about our history, but we also help shape the future.
Cultural Resources Takes Off
When I started working at Mead & Hunt in 1995, I’d graduated with my master’s in historic preservation, and my goal was to find a job doing what I love. Ultimately, I discovered so much more. Thirty years ago, our CEO-elect, Amy Squitieri, hired me as the company’s second full-time historian. Including a team of historians within an engineering and architecture firm was not typical, yet developed from the need to support our in-house transportation group with Section 106 compliance instead of hiring external subconsultants. The team soon went from providing support for Mead & Hunt’s in-house projects to seeking out work directly for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (WisDOT). We supported WisDOT’s cultural resources program and worked with communities to conduct architectural surveys and National Register of Historic Places nominations to help them understand their cultural heritage.
We have grown organically and steadily over the years to the team we have today, working throughout the country to assist federal, state, local, and private clients with historic resource compliance and recognizing our historic properties. As I celebrate my 30th year at Mead & Hunt, I look back with amazement and gratitude that I’ve had a great career helping to build a national cultural resources practice that now includes historians, archaeologists, architectural historians, GIS specialists, and technical editors.
Technology Shifts How We View History
Although we are still working with the same regulations as when I began my career, including Section 106, many aspects of our work have become more streamlined and sophisticated thanks to technology. This has changed almost every aspect of how we do our job today and provides some remarkable benefits.
First, taking black-and-white photos (yes, black-and-white because this processing was more archivally stable than color processing) with manual film cameras has been surpassed by digital, fully automated cameras. Now we can take endless photos without the cost of buying and developing film. We see the results in real time and easily zoom in to view architectural details in the images once we’ve left the field.
Research has also evolved. Once, we had to sit in basements of county courthouses year after year, reviewing musty tax assessor books and researching the year that the dollar value of a property increased, indicating improvements such as the construction of a house. Now we review these same documents from our desk, with many records accessible online. With the availability of more source materials online—such as newspapers, census records, tax assessor data, and state and local histories—we can learn so much more about the places we are evaluating. Uncovering stories about the people and uses of the historic properties once required weeks or even months of research…if we could discover them at all. We can now sometimes accomplish this in an afternoon. It is deeply rewarding to uncover unique stories and tell more comprehensive histories of the people, buildings, and places in our communities.
Geographic information systems (GIS) have also expanded our capabilities, not only in mapping and assisting with navigating our survey routes, but also as a tool to analyze large sets of data. This can range from overlaying historic maps from various time periods onto a current aerial to determining how the development pattern has changed over time. We can also identify where an earlier house or outbuilding may have been located on a property. These advanced tools quickly and graphically illustrate development timeframes in our reports, presenting information to the reader in a visual and interactive manner.
What’s Next?
Our group has grown steadily over the years, adding architectural historians and historians, and expanding our geographic footprint from our roots in the Midwest to Texas, California, and Colorado. While working on our historic bridge and road projects, I have traveled the country from New York to Alaska and many states in between, including Louisiana, Nebraska, and West Virginia. It has been quite the professional and personal journey for me.
Last year, with the acquisition of Dovetail Cultural Resources Group, we doubled the number of cultural resource professionals on our team. This also expanded our expertise into archaeology (the below-ground aspect of cultural resources) and our geographic footprint into Virginia, Delaware, Washington DC, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. The goal of becoming a full-service cultural resources team that provides expertise in both above-ground structures and below-ground artifacts has been realized.
It’s been my pleasure to play a pivotal role in building this talented Cultural Resources team. I’ve also enjoyed working with new colleagues in the Mid-Atlantic and witnessing firsthand their passion for this profession, stewards of our cultural heritage, conducting archaeological and architectural history investigations for our public and private clients.
Reminiscent of Daniel Mead’s devotion to engineering ethics, our team works hard to place our cultural heritage at the forefront of the work we do. We strive to balance preservation with project development needs.
I don’t have a Magic 8 Ball to tell me what the next 125 years might have in store, but I do know that our Cultural Resources team will continue bringing to light the stories of people and our shared history through the research and investigations we do every day. This ongoing journey will continue to impact and shape our team’s legacy at Mead & Hunt.
