American Magazine Fall 05

American Magazine | Fall 2006

Mark Jeffrey Epstein, SPA ’86

It was the only Civil War fight in Ohio, and the end of one of the Confederacy’s most daring raids. But who has heard of the Battle of Buffington Island? Certainly not a company that wanted to mine the site for sand and gravel.

That’s where Mark Jeffrey Epstein of the Ohio Historic Preservation Office came in. Sometimes Epstein is known as “the building doctor” for the technical advice he provides to owners of old property. This time his work would involve not the timeworn buildings scattered across Ohio’s landscape, but the bullets and bones that could be buried in its soil.

First, return to July 1863, when legendary Rebel cavalryman John Hunt Morgan had just led his men across the Ohio River. After some bridge burning and skirmishing, they wanted to escape to West Virginia through the low waters around Buffington Island. But they found themselves trapped on the wrong side of Union gunboats and encircled by Ohio soldiers whose ranks included future presidents Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and William McKinley.

Bullets were flying, and men were falling in the fog. But over 130 years later, the precise spot was hard to pinpoint. And without knowing where the fight took place, the mining company couldn’t go about its business without a danger of destroying history.

Epstein and his department helped to negotiate an agreement in which the mining company would pay for an archeological investigation. “There had to be a give and take—where the mining would occur, what they could and couldn’t touch,” Epstein says.

Epstein’s work seldom involves bullets, but it often involves battles.

He’s head of the Department of Resource Protection and Review of the Ohio Historic Preservation Office, which is part of the Ohio Historical Society in Columbus. His office is consulted when projects may have an effect on historic properties.

“We have the third largest number of places in the National Register,” he says of Ohio. “New York and Massachusetts are Numbers One and Two, but being Number Three is one of our points of pride.”

Some sites were already ancient when Columbus landed. The historic register includes the Serpent Mound and Hopewell Culture National Park, where geometric burial mounds tell of cultures that flourished during the Roman Empire.

Not long after Ohio became a state in 1807, it began producing presidents—eight in all—and that has meant a lot of sites to preserve, such as the boyhood home and one-room schoolhouse of Ulysses Grant in Georgetown, near Cincinnati.

But not every site is a home, or even very old. “If something is unique, it can be recognized even if it’s not particularly old,” Epstein says. Ohio is home to a number of NASA sites linked to space research; the Goodyear Air Dock near Akron, which serviced the famous blimps; and the Huffman Prairie Flying Field, where the Wright brothers turned the contraption they tested at Kitty Hawk into a practical aircraft.

“Ohio always has a rivalry with North Carolina,” Epstein says. “We’re the ‘birthplace of aviation,’ and North Carolina is ‘first in flight.’” The Wright Flyer III, the world’s first practical airplane, is also listed in the historic register—which includes properties and sites as well as buildings.

But in such a populous and long-settled state, there are lots of old buildings, properties, and sites. And everything old is not necessarily historic. Who is to say if a proposed golf course or housing development will impact a historic area? Ferreting out the answers keep Epstein and his office busy. They review some 6,000 projects a year. And that’s a lot of Ohio history.

—Sally Acharya

http://www.american.edu/american/fall06_classnotable1