Just Fieldwork: Exploring the Vernacular in the African American Community in Portland Oregon’s Albina District

Abstract:Preservationists in the United States increasingly seek ways to serve minority communities who have been underserved by the profession. Because the existing preservation infrastructure emphasizes building fabric over historical experience, this system may not serve minority communities where less tangible aspects of heritage carry greater importance than historic building fabric. Vernacular architecture fieldwork methods have helped to broaden the interpretation of American history by tracking the physical traces of people who left little written record of their existence, including immigrants and enslaved people, and may offer one approach to exploring the character of more recent minority communities. To explore these possibilities, the University of Oregon historic preservation program has initiated a community-oriented fieldwork research project on the historic and present-day African American community in the Albina neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. This ongoing work is raising several issues about how preservationists can best use vernacular field methods to promote the histories of minority communities and perhaps strengthen community bonds. The Albina project is demonstrating that, to properly carry out fieldwork to preserve and interpret minority histories, vernacular architecture historians will need to expand their typical methods to reincorporate ethnographic methods from some of the fields from which vernacular architecture studies initially sprang, such as folklore and anthropology.