National Park Service
Susan Haines
Exhibits Specialist
National Park Service/Harpers Ferry Center
Harpers Ferry
West Virginia
Graphic Design
Colonial National Historical Park Unigrid
National Park Service/Harpers Ferry Center
Mary Yakush
Angela Faulkner, designer
James Eynard, cartographer
Richard Schlecht, illustrator
Help the park reassert its leading role in preserving and interpreting two of the nation's primary colonial history
resources––Jamestown and Yorktown. Emphasize the sites' authenticity. Show how people in Virginia adapted
certain European ideas of government, capitalism, labor, and culture to build an economy for a fledgling nation,
and how some of those ideas––good or evil––endured.
General public, families, many from countries other than the US, school groups, historians.
The park's three areas––Jamestown, Yorktown, and Colonial Parkway––are united in one brochure that helps
people navigate the historic peninsula between the York and James rivers. Today the area bristles with motels,
chain restaurants, and theme parks amid a tangle of heavily traveled roads. The Unigrid guides visitors past
these distractions. It shows, with an economy of means, how the plantation economy that developed from
Jamestown and Yorktown helped fund the Revolution and create a government in the wilderness––but
displaced native Americans, created staggering levels of income inequality, and ushered in centuries of slavery.
A foundation that owns and preserves the site of Jamestown Fort (inside the national park boundary) opposed
the elimination of separate brochures for Jamestown and Yorktown. After protracted negotiation we
determined that one brochure, with briefer, well-organized text and images, would better serve the public, be
cost-effective, and reduce paper waste. A new superintendent arrived midway and added requirements to an
already long list. After the artist completed the illustration, which depicts Jamestown Church as the site of the first representative assembly in the Western hemisphere, archeologists announced new information about the
construction of Jamestown Church.
The text suffered from insertions that interrupt its flow, and stinging criticism from one park partner led to
removal of some text about the slave trade that, in retrospect, should have been kept.