Preserving the stories of the past on campus
By Peggy Nolan
Daniel Einstein says history is about significant people and events, so historic preservation isn’t just about buildings. Nearly two years after retiring from UW-Madison as the historic and cultural resources manager, he is back at his old job part time to “tie up some loose ends.” Below, Daniel reflects on his nearly 30-year career at UW and why history – and historic preservation – is important.
Why is historic preservation important?
Let me answer the question by saying why is history important? I think it’s important to understand that history is just a story we tell about a significant person or event. Those stories can be mostly true or mostly not true. And when we get to the authentic and most complete telling of a particular story about a significant person or event, we can better understand how we got to where we are today. And that informs decisions about how to move forward in the future.
We talk a lot now about rewriting history and about revisionist history. I think rewriting history is absolutely appropriate. It’s absolutely needed, especially when, often, the stories of the underrepresented, the poor and the disenfranchised aren’t told. And so if we broaden our understanding of what happened by listening to different communities that haven’t had the power to dictate the narrative, that’s not rewriting history in the way a lot of people talk about it. Rewriting history is a bad thing when people are inauthentic and when they are manipulating stories to advance a particular political bias or introducing “alternative facts” that really are lies.
Historic preservation makes it possible to reference in a physical way how we have lived in the past. When we lose architecture, dwellings, we lose chapters in this broad story of how we got to where we are today. If we lose the chapters, sentences, paragraphs and words, our understanding is garbled and incomplete.
Your educational background focused on the environment and land resources. How do those connect to historic preservation?
I came to Madison 33 years ago to go to a graduate program in what is now the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, where I got a masters degree in land resources. During this time I was a teaching assistant for a course on the university’s environmental footprint, and I developed a working relationship with the associate vice chancellor for facilities planning and management. So when I finished my degree program, I was asked to be the university’s first recycling coordinator and transportation demand management coordinator. I had a natural history/environmental studies/advocacy background, and I understood energy conservation, I understood recycling and the like. But all those facilities-related activities were informed by a broader understanding of the interconnectedness of stuff. That a campus, a community, a physical infrastructure is a web, and one thing affects the other.
After a number of years, I transitioned into being a program manager for the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, where I became involved in archaeology because many of the indigenous habitation and burial sites on campus are located in the Preserve. Later I got involved with commemorative objects and historic structures. And that’s how I’ve spent the last 15-20 years of my roughly 30-year career on campus — working with the Wisconsin Historical Society on projects that had the potential to affect a historic structure or an archaeological site.
I like to say that I know a lot of things about many different disciplines, but I’m not an expert in any. My training in the natural sciences, where you look at communities and you look at the relationships of the animals and the plants and the climate to develop a big picture of how things operate, is really at the foundation of being a good historian. What I tell the students is that it’s because I have a liberal arts/generalist background that I can make the connections between siloed disciplines and help the experts understand each other better. I can help them understand why a particular decision is going to have unintended consequences to other members of the community, and maybe we ought to think about doing things differently.
What are you most proud of in your career?
I’m most proud of the work that we’ve been able to do at the Willow Drive Mound Group, which is just to the north of the new Bakke Recreation Center. Twenty-five years ago the four effigy mounds at the site were barely visible. The site had an old recreational sports equipment storage shed, piles of construction debris and a thick cover of invasive species. And over the last 25 years, with a lot of support from the Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, grants and funding from mitigation projects on nearby sites, we were able to conduct an ecological restoration to remove invasive species and foster a return to a landscape that is more in keeping with the historic oak savanna landscape of pre-European settlement. We also removed intrusive paths, a Trachte building and a guard rail along the old Willow Drive. You can now go to that site and get a better sense of the cultural events that were happening there over a thousand years ago. The restoration on this site led to its being listing on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s both a cultural landscape restoration and an ecological restoration.
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We have this deep history in Madison associated with Native nations that has been ignored and abused in many respects. But things are getting better. Just a couple of months ago, outside the boundaries of the archaeological site at Willow Drive, we collaborated with the Ho Chunk Nation to create a sculpture that celebrates the 12 clans of the Ho Chunk Nation. So we’ve got this new monumental alignment between the Ho Chunk Nation clans and the effigy mound culture.
What challenges have you faced in your career, and how did you overcome them?
It’s often difficult to get funding to do maintenance on historic structures and cultural landscapes. We’re always competing with all sorts of different interests on campus, and people like to build new. That’s always been the case. Investing in the maintenance of our historic structures is a hard sell. When it comes to archaeological site restoration, or painting, or window maintenance, these are really hard things to sell to people because they’re not shiny and exciting. Often we’ve been able to do things by leveraging activities in some major capital project or as the result of a mitigation project, which is when we find ways to offset the loss of historic fabric in one place by doing something good somewhere else. We’ve used mitigation projects to do some really important research or restoration work. You have to always cobble together funding. I think it would be appropriate if we could have an annual allocation just for doing high-priority maintenance projects.
What are your future goals?
Archaeology and cultural landscape preservation is one of the areas that has really been changing in the last 10-15 years on campus, in part because the university is working much, much harder at collaborating with Native nations. We’re recognizing that there’s so much we can learn from indigenous people. We’re getting closer to completing a plan for one of the other major mound groups on campus, just north of Ag Hall, where there’s been a sidewalk that has bisected two effigy mounds for the past 100 years. We are working to remove that sidewalk and reunite these two mounds. In collaboration with the Wisconsin Historical Society and representatives of the Native nations, we’re looking at ways to restore this sacred burial landscape and offer the mounds the respect they’ve always deserved.
Periodically in this space, we’ll feature local historic preservation heroes. We all have a role to play in keeping Madison’s history alive. What’s yours? Submit suggestions for others we should feature here.