Our local communities and National Parks are dotted with historic architectural and engineering sites. Through proper care, documentation, treatment, and management, they will serve as lasting evidence for us to more fully understand our national heritage.

All Wet & How to Prevent It
Water, water everywhere! Without argument, it's essential to us. But in terms of the places where we live or work, unwanted moisture means erosion, corrosion and rot! This mini-web class can help anyone who cares for, or about, a historic house to better understand and deal with the three most common sources of the "wet stuff". We'll show you how it invades historic materials; what goes wrong when moisture is not adequately managed; and how to turn the corner on present and future problems by providing some simple, common sense tips. Then, after you've read everything, take a short quiz to see if you're still "All Wet!"

Caring for Your Historic Building -- The Good Guides!
These guides cover all aspects of caring for historic buildings--from choosing appropriate treatments to actually doing the work in ways that meet historic preservation standards. Both the popular classics and brand new web offerings are easily accessible.

Electronic Rehab
This popular web class is useful for anyone interested in learning more about the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation; but, is designed especially for historic building owners, members of design review and historic preservation commissions, architects, contractors, developers, maintenance personnel, and historic preservation students. Features two quizzes.

HABS/HAER Collections
This national treasure consists of hand-measured and computer-generated drawings, large-format black and white and color photographs, written historical and descriptive data, and original field notes, capturing the essence of the American experience through more than 36,000 recorded historic structures and sites, from Native American cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde to space-age technology at Cape Canaveral.

The Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS)
The Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS) is a permanent federal program charged with recording historic landscapes in the United States and its territories. Historic landscapes vary in size from small gardens to several thousand-acre national parks. In character they range from designed to vernacular, rural to urban, and agricultural to industrial spaces. Vegetable patches, estate gardens, cemeteries, farms, quarries, nuclear test sites, suburbs, and abandoned settlements all may be considered historic landscapes. Like its sister programs, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), HALS produces written and graphic records of interest to educators, land managers, and preservation planners.

Library of Congress-HABS/HAER Catalog
This web interface with the database of the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER) allows users to browse more than 36,000 entries of historic sites and structures. Subject, location and general keyword searches locate data and digital images for available measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written historical and descriptive data from the HABS/HAER Collections.

Lighthouse Heritage
Survey information from the 1994 National Park Service inventory of 595 U.S. light stations is only one of a variety of lighthouse-related pages that make up this site. Also available are the Historic Lighthouse Preservation Handbook, a listing of lighthouses by construction type, and other source links.

Preservation Briefs
These briefs assist owners and developers of historic buildings to recognize and resolve common preservation and repair problems prior to work. They are especially useful to preservation tax incentive program applicants by recommending methods and approaches for rehabilitating which are consistent with a building's historic character.

PARKitecture in Western National Parks: Early Twentieth Century Rustic Design & Naturalism
Celebrate with us the concept of designing with nature through an exhibition of black and white photos and measured drawings of representative structures and sites in ten well-known parks. The idea of designing with nature flourished in the National Park Service in the early twentieth century. Architects, landscape architects, and engineers combined native wood and stone with convincingly 'native' styles to create visually appealing structures that seemed to fit naturally within the majestic landscapes.

Telling Historic Preservation Time
This web guide demonstrates that historic preservation clocks don't operate the same way that other clocks do. What's different about these interpretive and seemingly arbitrary "clocks" is that they can be temporarily stopped through PRESERVATION; moved forward through REHABILITATION; moved backward through RESTORATION; or restarted through RECONSTRUCTION. Four historic buildings are used to illustrate these ideas about time which make up the philosophical framework for historic preservation treatments.

Historic Buildings and Structures

National Historic Landmarks

National Register of Historic Places