The series of investigations also provided excellent educational opportunities for students seeking degrees with a concentration in historic archeology. A cooperative agreement with the University of Maryland's Department of Anthropology enabled park managers to fully staff the park's archeology team. This type of hands-on leaning promoted the educational value of study on Virginius Island and followed a tradition established by previous projects. Among these were the earlier archeological investigations, the 1988 Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) project, and a 1991 summer study conducted by the Institute for the History of Technology and Archeology (West Virginia University). The WVU project documented the pulp mill, the cotton/flour and cotton mills, and the headgates according to HAER standards.

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		Line drawings of the Pulp Mill produced by the Institute for the History of Technology and Archeology, West Virginia University. [ Tiff format - 720kb ]

Efforts to interpret Virginius Island included the previously mentioned tours, the development and installation of permanent wayside exhibits and the publication of a brochure. Some waysides incorporated text from the treatment plan, with emphasis on the social, cultural, industrial, transportation and military history of the island. In 1994, a tree identification walk was developed that followed the rehabilitated trails and historic circulation routes. The brochure identified 18 different tree species visible from the trails, ranging from stately sycamores to the shrubby paw paw and the non-native, exotic princess tree. These resources supplemented the ranger-led tours and the self-guided tours suggested in the official Virginius Island Map and Guide brochure or described in one of the published walking guides sold in the park's bookstore.

The 1996 floods marked a turning point in the ways interpretation and education take place on the Island. Park stewards captured the challenge of repairing the damage caused by the January 1996 flood in a series of articles published in CRM (Volume 19, No. 5, 1996), an issue devoted entirely to the park's cultural resource. These articles hint at the cautious optimism of the months immediately following the first flood. At that time, managers used the information in the cultural landscape reports (CLR), archeology reports and other studies for Lower Town, Harpers Ferry as well as Virginius Island to determine pre-flood conditions, and to inform and guide the scope of the repair projects. The contributing authors intended for readers to use the Harpers Ferry example as a model for the management of cultural resources in flood prone areas.

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