Revolution Mill, a historic mill in Greensboro, has been rehabilitated as a lively mixed-use campus of offices, residences, restaurants, and event spaces. Revolution Mill also sits across the flood-prone North Buffalo Creek. Most days the creek flows calmly and delightfully through the campus. With enough rain, however, the creek brings floodwaters. When it does, property managers must install temporary flood walls and move tenant cars from low-lying parking areas. Upstream sensors alert the property managers when the rising waters demand action to protect the property and occupants.

Revolution Mill and its response to flood risks is just one example of addressing a common challenge: How do we preserve North Carolina’s amazing historic resources from North Carolina’s inevitable natural hazards? It is a challenge that we see throughout the state: along the coast, across the piedmont, and in the mountains.

The Historic Resilience Project is a cross-university, interdisciplinary effort to equip communities across the state to prepare for and rebuild from major storms and hazards that impact historic and cultural resources. The Project includes resources such as the Historic Resilience Primer, the Handbook for Historic Resilience Community Planning, and the Resilience Design Standards (described below).

Historic Resilience Primer

The Historic Resilience Primer: Resilient Adaptation Strategies for North Carolina’s Historic Properties is an essential introduction for all audiences. The Primer provides contextual information on the impacts of natural hazards in North Carolina, state and federal hazard mitigation resources, and detailed and concrete examples of historically appropriate resilience adaptations.

Case study examples include Revolution Mill in Greensboro, the Ocracoke Historic District, and Biltmore Village in Asheville.

Historic Resilience Community Planning

The Handbook for Historic Resilience Community Planning: Protecting North Carolina’s History, Culture, and Economy from Natural Hazards provides a straightforward process that communities can use to prepare their own historic resilience plans.

The methodology is designed to be used by local planners, emergency managers, consultants, and others to identify the historic resources that are most vulnerable to natural hazards and to implement strategies to better protect them. The process is tailored to be effective and achievable by local staff who have many responsibilities and limited resources.

Resilience Design Standards

The Resilience Design Standards: Model Standards for North Carolina’s Historic Properties is a ready-made tool for local governments to encourage and support historic resilience efforts by property owners.

The Standards provide a model regulatory framework for historic preservation commissions to assess the appropriateness of specific structural interventions for properties with a local historic designation. They may be tailored to a community and adopted as a supplement to existing preservation design standards.

While the target audiences for the Standards are preservation professionals and commission members, the information in this publication is relevant to property owners, hazard mitigation professionals, and many others.

Historic Resilience Workshops

The project includes regional workshops. The Historic Resilience Workshop seeks to find common ground between historic preservation, hazard mitigation, private ownership, and public regulation—worlds that are sometimes at odds despite common goals. Upcoming workshops are:

• October 2, 2024 | Mt. Holly @ Muddy River Distillery
• October 30, 2024 | Wilmington @ Battleship
• November 7, 2024 | Edenton @ 1767 Chowan County Courthouse

The Historic Resilience Project and Workshops were produced with assistance from the Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the National Park Service, Department of Interior. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Interior.  The Project was supported by the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office and Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and coordinated among initiatives at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the partner institutions or individual team members.