Grant funding is supporting the early phases of an initiative between George Mason University, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and other partners to chronicle graffiti left behind in the local area by soldiers fighting in the Civil War.
The collaboration, which also includes the city of Fairfax’s Office of Historic Resources and the Brandy Station Foundation, has received a $60,000 stipend from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Off the Wall: Digital Preservation of Civil War Graffiti Houses” will develop a proposal for an eventual implementation grant aimed at digitizing and contextualizing the graffiti and associated ancillary materials held by Historic Blenheim in Fairfax and the Brandy Station Foundation in Culpeper.
Working with R.B. Toth Associates LLC of Oakton, the grant will use a range of digital-imaging technology and work processes to capture the graffiti, university officials said.
“The graffiti gives you an insight into the lived experience of an individual soldier who was struggling to deal with an incredibly brutal war,” said Mills Kelly, director of the Rosenzweig Center and manager of the project, in comments reported by the university.
Mike Toth, president and chief technology officer of R.B. Toth Associates, said the insights gained will be important.
“[The graffiti] may be the only first-person record [that says] the men who were out there fighting and dying were, at one point in time, here in Fairfax,” he said in comments reported by the university. “They may have gone on to die, or gone home and moved on, and we’re capturing that small bit of their life.”
The graffiti varies and includes poems, drawings and games.
