Mt. Mansfield Union High School
presents
The Barns of Richmond, Vermont

INTRODUCTION

We are the VYCC (Vermont Youth Conservation Corps) which is a non-profit organization that is supported by grants and private donations.  The school program allows youth to build skills that help them to create a better community.  Throughout the school program, the student interns develop these skills as well as others which will help them in their future job opportunities.

Our school program has been working on one project for the past three weeks.  The project that we did was surveying barns using a GPS (Global Positioning System) to make waypoints at every barn that we could find in the Town of Richmond, Vermont.  We did this by splitting up the crew into three groups.  Two groups went out and drove around the Richmond town limits to find and locate all the barns possible.  The third group used the waypoints that the other two groups created and made GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps that eventually helped us to create the content for this website.

By completing this project, future school programs that are based at the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps headquarters will be able to continue using the GIS software we used.  Having this kind of technology will give our school group as well as future school groups the opportunity to broaden the unique curriculum opportunities that the VYCC program can offer.

For the majority of our group, using GPS was a new concept and skill.  Using the GPS allowed us to find way points and plot them on our maps that we created with Bradley Materick.  Bradley was our guest instructor whose title at the VYCC is Land Stewardship Specialist.   Bradley has a great deal of knowledge in the technology field so he has been our main contact for learning the GPS technology and the GIS software.  To learn how to use the GPS equipment, we did an activity to help us understand the features the unit has to offer by engaging in a search-and-find game.  This proved to be a huge highlight from the three week unit.
Click here to view our MAPS!


QUOTES

QUOTES FROM INTERNS:

How did you like working hands on with
the GPS units and also doing GIS with Bradley?

"It was fun and I enjoyed working hands on with the equipment."

"It was fun working with Bradley and I liked the search-and-find with the GPS."

"I liked it.  I thought it was the funnest thing we've done so far."

QUOTE FROM GUEST INSTRUCTOR:

How was your experience as a guest instructor for the school program?

"It was great!  I got to go out with you all and do what I love,
using the technology and bringing you all out into the woods."

CONCLUSIONS

Learning how to use the Global Positioning System devices to track lost objects in the woods helped us gain skills on using waypoints.  Ultimately we used these skills to make the waypoints for the barns.

The days we went to look at barns helped us to see what the structures actually looked like.  Additionally, this process will help people be able to find barns in Richmond that are historic and important to our future.  

Using the Global Information System software taught us how to make maps which explain and show our journey of finding and researching barns in Richmond.  These maps and software will help Richmond and the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps.

Another day we spent researching historic information of barns at the Library in Barre, Vermont.  This venture provided us with photos of barns and personal documents of Richmond history.  These files helped us to create the text on specific maps such as  the “Chittenden County Showing The Town Of Richmond” map and the “Locations Where We Performed Research” map.  Other people could use this information that we found at the library to do their own personal research on Vermont barns.

The two final products are a website that will be posted on the internet as part of a Community Atlas Program, and the presentation that will show what we did as a crew for this project.  We will also be sending detailed data about the barns' structures, features, and conditions to the Vermont Division of Historic Preservation.

As a result of these skills and knowledge we developed new ways to keep barns and buildings conserved and preserved for Vermont’s hope.  In the end, we discovered that barns in Vermont are historical, yet unique in architecture.