BY TIMOTHY A. SCHULER
The National Map is a feat of modern-day cartography. It also reveals our country?s shifting priorities.
FROM THE APRIL 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
Lisa Orr, ASLA, was 11 years old when she attended her first West Virginia funeral. Her great-grandmother, Susan Bolyard Summers, had died at the age of 102 and was being buried in the family cemetery, behind a little country church called Mount Zion. Orr?s family drove the hour and a half from Morgantown, in the northern part of the state, to rural Preston County, winding through a tangled warren of hills and hollows and passing a dozen other hilltop cemeteries before reaching their destination.
The trip made a lasting impression on Orr. Preston County was so unlike her life in Morgantown: The landscape was as breathtaking as it was formidable. ?It?s hard to explain how rugged the territory is,? she says, speaking from her office at West Virginia University (WVU), where she teaches landscape architecture. ?It?s like a mini-Grand Canyon everywhere you go.? It illuminated the hardscrabble life that her great-grandmother had lived, living on foraged chestnuts and whatever else would grow in Preston County?s rocky soil. And it gave Orr her first glimpse into the role these cemeteries played in local people?s lives. Caring for these places, she learned, was part of many families? cultural heritage, including her own. ?Part of my grandmother?s life was just visiting cemeteries,? she says, reca...