Vanessa McKuin has always had an interest in history, but it was when her parents bought the homestead of her great-great-grandparents in Newton County that she discovered her love for preservation.
As McKuin says herself, there’s not a lot of written history about Newton County. That required a lot of interviews and research to accomplish her parents’ goal of getting the location on the National Register of Historic Places. McKuin, then about 19 years old, was immersed in the research and exposed to the importance of historical places.
“I started realizing how important typical places are to community, to our identity, both as individuals and also as a culture and society,” she says.
Following that experience, McKuin volunteered at the Historic Preservation Alliance of Arkansas (HPAA), while she worked at the Old State House Museum. Eventually, she developed an interest in architecture-based preservation programs, and ended up in New York City at the Pratt Institute. Her path then led her back to Little Rock and HPAA as director.
It all worked out perfectly, she recalls.
Now, for the past six years, she’s made a career out of her love of preservation.
On any given day, McKuin could be answering inquiries about the National Register of Historic Places, digging up information on various locations across the state or explaining the state’s rehabilitation tax credit. Then, sometimes, there’s actually going out and exploring old buildings, which is still her favorite part of the job. Regardless, there are not many typical days.
Despite her role, McKuin doesn’t consider herself a traveling encyclopedia of knowledge on old buildings in Arkansas.
“Every day I learn about some place I did not know existed, and some place that has this really fascinating history. And I think, ‘Okay, well, I thought I knew all the places,” she says.
The daily occurrence reinstills in McKuin that there is more history to be shared, documented and preserved throughout the state.
In her time at HPAA, there has been much done to restore locations across the state. McKuin credits a lot of the success to the passing of the Arkansas Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit in 2009. Since then, it’s resulted in $8.69 million, which McKuin says has leveraged $72.8 million in private investment.
There have been a lot of restoration projects that stick out in her mind as well, like the St. Joseph Orphanage in North Little Rock, the Johnny Cash Boyhood Home in Dyess and the White-Baucum House in Little Rock.
McKuin still has projects she’s interested in. There’s the Little Rock Central District, the William Woodruff House and the Lee Theater. Whatever the project, she is still driven to preserve historic sites for future generations.
“It’s about community,” she says. “It’s about the places that we identify with, and it’s about passing on that history from one generation to another.”
No Place Like Home
Soirée: Please tell us about your own historic home in the Central High district.
Vanessa McKuin: Our home was built circa 1901 in the Colonial Revival Style, but it has some Craftsman-style elements, too. We think it was partially remodeled in the 1920s when the back porch was enclosed and some other changes were made. The house was built by Thomas M. Clifton, who was at one time listed as a police captain in the city directory.
We found several old medicine bottles under the back of the house in an area that we had to dig out to create a larger crawl space. I have those displayed in the kitchen window, just above where they were disposed of many years ago.
One of my favorite things about the house is that you can see dents from high heels in several spots in the original hardwood. I love the patina that an old house has and the layers of history, hidden and exposed, from all the different lives that have happened in that house.
SO: What was the most interesting thing you discovered while researching your family’s Newton County homestead?
VM: The homestead was originally a single pen log cabin. A frame addition was built on around 1900. When we took the wall board off of the inside of the cabin walls during rehabilitation, we found a little cubby above the door into the frame addition with a pair of tiny old leather shoes. We found out that they belonged to Murle, my grandmother’s first cousin who died in 1915 at 5 years old. We discovered that when a child died, a custom was to put her shoes above a door in the house to prevent another child from dying in the same way. Murle is buried in the nearby Ben’s Branch Cemetery. We left her shoes in the cubby above the door.