First month report

After one month, LandmarkHunter.com is doing quite nicely. I had originally imported photos of approximately 1,200 landmarks from the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record. Since then, thanks to your uploaded photos, the number of photographed landmarks has more than doubled: 2,573 at last count. Who knew there were so many barns with painted advertisements?

New features added in July:

• Advanced Uploader tool for uploading multiple photos at a time. The system will try to use the best method supported by your browser. On recent browsers, it will automatically resize your photos before uploading them.
• States, counties, and tag pages all have an Exhibit option. This is the same tool used on Bridgehunter.com letting you interactively hide and show markers on the map.
• Trip Planner feature lets you enter a starting and ending location for your trip and then see all of the landmarks that are within a short distance along the route. It seems to work best for shorter trips (50-200 miles), but you can divide a long roadtrip into multiple sections. This feature is also available on Bridgehunter.com.

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Israel Stowell Temperance House In Peril

The oldest extant structure in Delavan, Wisconsin is in peril. Delavan is a city rich in historic heritage and prominant citizens are attempting to save the structure from demolition.

Israel Stowell was a transplanted temperance supporter and he joined the Phoenix Brothers in Delavan, who founded the city as a colony for temperance and abolitionists. Stowell built a hotel in 1839, meant to be a stagecoach overnght stop between Madison and Chicago. The hotel catered to Baptists, Yankees and those who did not indulge in the use of alcohol. If you weren't in one of those categories, you were turned away.

The temperance movement came to a close in Delavan in the mid 1840s. In 1847, Edmund and Jerimiah Mabie selected Delavan as the winter quarters for their U.S. Olympic Circus, the largest traveling show in the country at the time. After the collapse of the temperance movement, the Temperance House changed hands numerous times and at one point, in a strange twist of irony, it was a tavern. Its last commercial use was as a used book store. One can see shelves of books remaining inside the building.

The owner of the books, the closed bookstore and the building itself is 87 years old. He is in the process of donating the house to the Delavan Historical Society. (Most of the bookstore inventory has actually been removed to reduce the load on the structure.)

The house is in bad shape and is in peril of demolition. A banner attached to the front pleads for help to save the historic structure. It is thought to be the oldest building in Delavan and according to the Wisconsin Historical Society, is the last temperance house in the state.

The Israel Stowell Temperance House was condemned and scheduled for demolition on July 1, 2010. As of this writing, the house still stands. The demolition order was extended and recently has been lifted. On July 27, 2010, a consultant inspected the property to examine the possibility of saving the structure. Members of the city government have speculated on the restoration of the house in order to use it as a resource center for historical research and possibly to house the offices of the historical society.

The results of the study are due approximately October 1.

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Some new features

• For most landmarks, I've included links to the appropriate USGS topographic quadrangle map. At one time the original TIFF files for these maps were hard to find, but they can now be found on archive.org.

• Scanned PDF files of the National Register of Historic Places nomination forms are available online for some states, including Missouri, Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Nevada, North Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and the District of Columbia. I've added links to these documents where possible.

• Missouri maintains an extensive database of springs, including coordinates and average water flow. I've incorporated over 300 of the largest Missouri springs into this site. If you know of other similar databases that might be appropriate to include in this website, please let me know.

• If you don't already have a Bridgehunter.com editor's account, you can now sign up for a Landmarkhunter.com account. Due to a constant barrage by spammers and troublemakers, I currently have to manually approve each sign up. (I haven't even publicized the sign-up form yet, and I've already had to filter out three spammers who tried to register!)

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