Digitally preserving history in the City of Green
by Collin Cunningham and photos by Logan Lutton
Time Machine
A Green resident is preserving fading historical sites with technology.
For as much as people celebrate certain historic sites, we often don’t treat them well. “Every single day they start to deteriorate just by time and man,” says Jerrad Lancaster, a University of Akron anthropology senior lecturer. For the past two years, Lancaster has been creating digital models of some of Green’s most prominent historic locations. “I’m trying to just help preserve our history,” he says.
The project started after a group of teenagers burned down the Lichtenwalter Schoolhouse in Boettler Park in 2016. Lancaster, who was raised in Green and moved back in 2017, would go so far as to call the 1885 building the most personally meaningful historical site in the city.
“When I was in high school, I played on the tennis team, and the courts are right next to it, so I stared at it,” he says. “My engagement photos were taken right next to it. When I read the article saying that it had burned down and when I first saw it, I had a reaction. It hit me a little bit.”
Once the schoolhouse was gone, Lancaster felt that he’d lost part of his history — and part of himself in the process.
He decided to re-create it. “I photographed it, made the model to kind of serve as a reminder of what we can lose,” he says. He took photos of the schoolhouse with the DJI Phantom 3 drone he uses for academic research on digital mediums for historic preservation. Then he rendered the schoolhouse photos digitally, using photogrammetry software to take information from the photos and make them into 3D models. The entire procedure took about three months to complete, with a model taking up to a day to complete.
After Sarah Haring, the city of Green community development administrator, saw what he’d done with the schoolhouse, she realized how valuable Lancaster’s services could be to the city and asked him to do more. Lancaster continued to hone his craft by working with the city to model two other historic Green locations, depicting all their various stages throughout history.
“I’m helping my city,” he says. “It took quite a while. This was in part because I was still learning all the software, but mostly I wanted to get it as perfect as I could.”
Lancaster is currently waiting on approval from the Federal Aviation Administration before he models the Hartong Farmhouse in Green. He has his sights also set on the John Brown House and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church — which was damaged in a fire earlier this year — in Akron.
Lancaster hopes his models can be used for educational purposes, even if those structures are no longer standing. People can interact with the models on the online sharing platform Sketchfab, which also allows users to embed it and Lancaster’s other works on their websites. One of the construction workers that is refurbishing the schoolhouse has told him that some of his co-workers have used the online rendering to look at the old building when they were revising the architecture.
“The idea is to record that moment in history for perpetuity so at least we always have that model to remember it,” he says. “Anything that can be done to teach local history, to talk about arson or talk about some things that may be lost for capitalism reasons — whatever uses somebody could get would be great.”