Catoctin Mountain Park
Misty Mount and Greentop Cabin Camps
Thurmont, Maryland
Embedded Files
The Preservation Maintenance Guide
In the 1970s, official National Park Service (NPS) publications began to define the concept of “preservation maintenance”, with the first explicit definition appearing in 1976.
That first document , Cyclical Maintenance for Historic Buildings , defined preservation maintenance as “all those day-to-day activities necessary to prolong the life of an historic property.” It stated that general maintenance included regular inspections, repairs, replacements, and housekeeping chores; however, when applied to historic structures, the depth of critical considerations increased, as techniques and materials had to be carefully considered to ensure the survival and functionality of the historic fabric. This translated to a difference in prioritization; the emphasis on materials and historic character differentiated preservation maintenance from its standard maintenance counterpart.
Preservation maintenance is objectively positive as it seeks to maximize integrity and longevity in original materials, mitigating future deterioration and decay. In contrast, corrective maintenance is reactive because it aims to fix damage instead of preventing it. Corrective maintenance will always be necessary due to the unpredictability of nature and human interaction, but by taking steps to reduce necessary levels of intervention regarding foreseeable issues, well managed preservation maintenance offers a much more efficient stewardship as a whole. The challenge is finding a clear set of guidelines on how to develop a preservation maintenance guide. Is it the same methodology for all parks or is it always site specific, and what established documents are necessary to start the process of determining the answers?
Though the graph is not based on quantitative data, it provides a logical recurring pattern of the costs of different approaches to maintenance, showing how preventive maintenance can reduce both long-term costs and frequency of major repairs (i.e., corrective maintenance). In other words, cost-effective preventive measures reduce the overall future necessity of corrective ones.
The Catoctin Camp Architectural Survey and Preservation Maintenance Guide project was a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, the Catoctin Mountain Park (CATO), and the National Park Service (NPS) National Capitol Area.
Reevaluating principles first put forth in Cyclical Maintenance For Historic Buildings, the project’s objectives reflected on both recent, as well as long existent NPS resource management protocols, active park service standards and guidelines, as well as understood CATO park needs. Through discussions, the partners were better able to identify a type of deliverable that could serve the constantly expanding range of immediate and future park preservation needs from physical intervention to documentation and data management; all while providing a template for “best practices” for the region’s similar resources.
One of the first guidelines reviewed was the NPS Cultural Resource Management Guideline (NPS-28). more formally known as Director's Order 28, this document, first created in 1980, is the cultural resource management guidelines that all national parks must comply with.
It states that “appreciation of a resource lies outside of contemporary concerns. Law and policy require that we understand and evaluate each resource in the context of its own time and its own culture.” Throughout NPS, evaluating each resource is well established for condition survey and assessment procedures; a process that the Catoctin staff already addressed effectively through its annually mandated Parks Facility Management Software System (FMSS) survey. NPS-28 also points out that “the approach applies equally well to identification of physical attributes deserving preservation” clearly suggesting condition survey is not the only consideration and that ‘historic character’ is of equal value. As a result, it was understood that the annual NPS mandated FMSS survey could be used to identify conditions, but a secondary survey of character defining features and historic integrity was also vital to project success. Therefore, University and Park partners agreed to develop both maintenance and style guides that would work in tandem.
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