Wilmington Heritage Cemeteries Preservation Planning Records

Collection

Identifier: SC-MS-397

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

The Wilmington Heritage Cemeteries Preservation Planning Records document the efforts of UNC Wilmington public history professor, Dr. Virginia Stewart, in seeking grant funding from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Preservation Services Fund to carry out a preservation assessment of Wilmington’s historic Oakdale and Pine Forest Cemeteries. Upon receiving the award, Stewart coordinated on-site consultations of these cemeteries by preservation professionals Lynette Strangstad and William Clendaniel. Records in this collection date from 1993-2002, though the bulk of the materials pertain to work carried out between 2000-2002. Materials include correspondence, grant application documents, financial documents, reports, publicity materials, research materials, and ephemera. The collection arrangement follows the order of grant activities from submission of the initial application to implementation of cemetery consultations to submission of the final grant report. Also included are student work products from a graduate course taught by Dr. Stewart and pertaining to the promotion of Oakdale Cemetery.

Dates

Creation: 1993-2002
Creation: Majority of material found within 2000-2002

Creator

Stewart, Virginia (Person)

Conditions Governing Access

This collection is open for research use.

Copyright Statement

Copyright 2021 University of North Carolina at Wilmington, all rights reserved (subject to exceptions). Certain items in this collections were conveyed to UNCW without the accompanying copyright. Where the donor did not convey copyright to UNCW, copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Biographical / Historical

Dr. Virginia Elsie Radatz Stewart was born in 1944. She attended York High School in Elmhurst, Illinois and later Willowbrook High School in Villa Park, graduating as co-valedictorian in 1961. Stewart received political science degrees from Knox Collection (Bachelors) and Purdue University (Masters), after which she worked as a high school English teacher in Hammond, Indiana.

Later in her career, Stewart worked as an archivist for the University of Illinois Chicago’s Special Collections and as the first Director of the Elmhurst Historical Museum. She went on to receive her PhD in History from Northwestern University and became the Director of Public History at the University of North Carolina Wilmington from 1999-2005.

Virginia Stewart died on April 7, 2022.