The university’s Historic Preservation Committee launched a website this month providing the first comprehensive online history of WSU Pullman’s buildings and landscapes.
The WSU Building and Landscapes website, sponsored by the Historic Preservation Committee, features photographs, maps and plans from MASC. The site currently includes entries for 161 buildings on the Pullman campus, including 39 buildings that have been destroyed, demolished or moved elsewhere. Eighteen of these entries feature narratives, written by WSU faculty, and several more are in the works.
Funding for this project is provided by the Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation (CDSC) and the Lawrence R. Stark Archives Graduate Fellowship from the Washington State University Libraries’ Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC).
The site is intended as a teaching tool. The hope is that it will cultivate more faculty, student and alumni engagement with the history of the Pullman campus and the services of both CDSC and MASC. The committee expects to have a system in place that will allow the public to contribute information, including oral histories and photographs.
The website was created by Andrew Gillreath‑Brown, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who earned summer fellowships from CDSC and MASC, and continued worked on the project on his own volition. Gillreath‑Brown spent fall semester researching, gathering information, taking photographs of buildings and landscapes, and coding the site.
“I really wanted to create a website that would allow me to dive into the university’s past — one that would also help other people connect to the campus and landscape,” Gillreath‑Brown said. “My goal was to create an attractive and interactive website that would allow users to look at historic and modern images, videos, read narratives about buildings and parts of the landscape, as well as oral histories.”
