History Through Preservation: Saving Buildings and Sharing Stories

In this lecture, we will dive into the early history of preservation in Winchester. We will explore the first fifty years of saving and restoring buildings in Winchester by focusing on a handful of sites, some well-known and some more obscure, to learn about their preservation and some lesser-known aspects of their pasts. The lecture will be accompanied by slides of the buildings, some with artwork by local artist Loretta Johnson.

Speaker Sandra Bosley, freelance historian, has been fascinated with history and historic buildings since early childhood. Her love of history and historic buildings began early; her first experience as a docent was in fourth grade, standing under the flying buttress in the Red Lion Tavern during a school-led open house event. After a year-long internship at the Shenandoah University History and Tourism Center, she was hired by Preservation of Historic Winchester in 2005. After receiving a Master of Arts in Historic Preservation from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010, she was promoted to Executive Director in 2015, and held that position until earlier this year.

Sandra prefers doing the behind the scenes work of history – finding forgotten stories and compiling them into easily understandable tidbits with an engaging local twist. Her time at PHW inspired a fascination in “Vanished Winchester,” a topic she has covered in a number of lectures and blog posts over the years and hopes to explore more in the future.