Investigating the landscape at Monroe Hill - both the current and historic change over time - proved more challenging or perhaps ambiguous, than our classmates’ efforts to investigate the built fabric of the site and its change overtime. As this course advocated, we did our best to privilege field work and site observation over archival materials, but this was increasingly difficult for our team in so much as many of the scars and changes to the site’s landscape are not readily visible on the site as it appears today.  That said, we adopted methodology to overcome such limitations, including the use of GPR technology. Subsequently, our report combines recorded data from the field in combination with historic documents, maps, drawings, and other archival resources associated with the Monroe Hill site to provide a better picture of the site, its significance, and its change over time.

One characteristic about Monroe Hill, that is shared across all of the teams investigating the site (landscape, main house, range, and law office), is that Monroe Hill defined a collection of buildings: including the main house, law office, ranges, and a series of evolving outbuildings.

For more on this subject, please see the attached final report below: