Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve Reading the Cultural Landscape

PRESERVATION PRINCIPLES

Introduction

The total cultural landscape of the reserve has been growing and changing as community needs and values shift over generations. Preservation principles are not intended to inhibit or stop growth, but serve as guides for understanding how much change and what kinds of change can occur before the cultural context and historic integrity of the landscape is lost.

This report has outlined historic settlement patterns, land uses, and resulting structures. It has identified natural and cultural resources in the landscape today and illustrated ways to describe critical landscape relationships among these individual resources. The preservation principles that follow are based on that information and patterned in the following manner.

First, while the reserve as a whole is considered a single landscape, within it are ten distinct land units or character areas that can be used as a framework for evaluation and development of preservation principles. These ten areas are identified in the 1983 Building and Landscape Inventory and include all eighteen sites listed in the Comprehensive Plan (1980). The ten areas include: the San de Fuca Uplands, West Woodlands, Coupeville, East Woodlands, Smith Prairie, Penn Cove, Ebey's Prairie, Fort Casey Uplands, Crockett Prairie, and the Coastal Strip.

For each of the ten land areas an evaluation of landscape resources includes:

1. a description, including location and boundaries, general character and primary access;

2. a statement summarizing the historic patterns and significant elements that remain and contribute to an overall landscape integrity;

3. a set of principles to guide preservation of significant historic landscape patterns, features and structures as identified in this report and the 1983 Building and Landscape Inventory.

It is important to note that the landscape evaluation and the principles outlined in this report address preservation of the general landscape patterns that are historically significant. Guidelines for preservation of more discrete or site specific land units would require a more detailed evaluation.

Finally, in several of the preservation principles, reference is made to the visual quality or visual resource of a character area. A short discussion of these resources is included in the appendix and techniques for visual assessment can be found in the bibliography.