Documenting Slave Cabins and Tenant Farm Houses

The Team at Magnolia Mound Plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

NPS Photo

Meet the Team

The National Center for Preservation, Technology, and Training has hired a team of three to travel the back roads of American documenting existing Slave Cabins and Tenant Farmer Houses and to record the stories of those who once lived there. The team will travel starting from their home base of Natchitoches, Louisiana and radiate out to any location that requests the documentation. If you know of a slave dwelling or tenant/ sharecropper housing still standing please contact the project supervisor, Jason Church. Also, if you or someone you know would like to be interviewed about their experiences as a sharecropper or tenant farmer please contact us. We can conduct interviews remotely. As sites are documented NCPTT will post them on YouTube and on SketchFab. You can also follow the project on Instagram and Facebook.

Meet the Documentation Team

Ina Sthapit with a FARO scanner.

Ina Sthapit

Hello! I am Ina Sthapit from Nepal. I am working as a Historic Preservation Research Associate in NCPTT’s Technical Services team. I will be assisting in the documentation of existing slave cabins and tenant farming houses, throughtout the United States. We will are using photography and 3d laser scanning for the documentation.

I completed my undergraduate degree in Architecture from Institute of Engineering, Tribhuwan University in Nepal. The devastating earthquake 2015 destroyed numerous heritage structures within & outside Kathmandu valley. I was involved in Rebuild Kasthamandap, a non-profit organization working to preserve one of the prominent icons of the valley, which sparked my interest in Preservation.

I moved to the States to complete my Master’s in Historic Preservation from University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. During the summer 2019, I got opportunity to work as a US ICOMOS 2019 IEP intern at National Center for Preservation Technology & Training (NCPTT) in Louisiana. I helped in the documentation of tenant farmer cabins within the Natchitoches Parish. As a part of the documentation, I was involved in laser scanning and collecting the oral histories. Prior to joining NCPTT for work, I participated in Preservation Institute Nantucket program (PIN 2020) where I helped in surveying and assessing the South Washington Street area of Historic Nantucket Town with the goal of preparing resilience measures for built and natural environments. I love travelling, reading, playing volleyball, and spacing out!

Research associate Sreya Chakraborty

Sreya Chakraborty

Sreya Chakraborty is joining NCPTT’s Technical Services team as a research associate. She is a cultural heritage preservation professional and an architect from India and has recently graduated from the Historic Preservation program at Columbia University. Sreya will be working on the Slave Cabin and Tenant Farming House documentation project, which intends to use digital documentation and presentation technologies to explore the unexplored history of tenant farming and sharecropping practices in the United States and spatialize them. With a strong belief in preservation as a means for social empowerment and an aptitude for technical research, this project provides the perfect opportunity for her to engage in the history of marginalized communities while using scientific technologies to tell the story.

Before graduate school, she worked as an architect and preservation consultant at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, a non-profit preservation organization in New Delhi, where she was exposed to preservation design, conservation science, and preservation advocacy. On this job, she worked on several interesting projects including drafting a conservation management plan for the 20th-century President House (Rashtrapati Bhawan) in India. During graduate school, she interned at Jan Hird Pokorny Associates in New York, where she was exposed to the preservation enterprise in NYC and the US.

Isabella Jones is the team videographer

Isabella Jones
My name is Isabella Jones and I am a 2019 graduate of Northwestern State University of Louisiana. At NSU I earned a bachelor’s degree in biology with a concentration in natural sciences as well as a bachelor’s degree in art with a concentration in graphic communications. I have always been interested in wildlife as well as art, so I chose to pursue education in both fields. My biology degree has allowed me to learn a vast amount about animal physiology, animal species identification, coordinating and maintaining species management plans, and many other areas of interest. At the same time, the art program allowed me to be creative and develop my skills in both the fine arts as well as the graphic design medium.

My time at the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training is focused on our Documenting Tenant Cabins Project. This time is being spent traveling across the United States to scan as many remaining slave and tenant cabins as we can. My role is to conduct oral histories with local historians at each site we attend, as to get a recollection of the individual site in correspondence with the 3D laser scanning of the structures. These on site oral histories are available alongside NCPTT’s other topic related videos under the “video” tab here on our website or can be located on our corresponding YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/ncptt).

I find it a privilege to have the opportunity to be part of such a project. Our team is documenting historic structures that may otherwise not be standing a year from now as well as serving as a platform for telling first hand experiences from the time of tenant farming. This way history can be taught first hand for generations come.