Director of operations at Historic Fort Steuben and the Steubenville Visitors Center.
Any regular reader of my column will already know of my love for Williamsburg in Virginia. As a historian, Williamsburg was like Disneyland to me. The experience of visiting a place with so much history and a living sense of the past was captivating. Lucky for me, that feeling has generally stayed with me all these years. I am fortunate that in an old space, be it a house, battlefield or on a city street, I can almost feel the past. I don’t believe in ghosts as specters that haunt the living, but I do believe that memory can leave an imprint on a space. Whether that imprint is something measurable, or perhaps it is something that is internal, is up for debate. That also could just be the personality of a hopeless nostalgic at heart, but I also find that you don’t always need to be in the presence of a historic place to feel its history.