If your community needs help with a local history project, the folks at MTSU’s Center for Historic Preservation would like to hear from you.

June 1, 2018, is the deadline to apply for the CHP’s next round of Professional Services Partnerships. These relationships link communities with the center’s professional staff and graduate research assistants at no cost.

Possible eligible projects include driving tours, historic structure reports, exhibitions, preservation plans and publications.

The projects currently in progress stretch across all three grand divisions of Tennessee. In East Tennessee, the center is working with Knox Heritage and the West View Community Action Group to create interpretive materials for three African-American cemeteries.

Another East Tennessee project teamed the CHP with the Crossroads Downtown Partnership in Morristown to design a walking and driving tour of local historic resources.

Middle Tennessee partnerships include the CHP’s work with Wolf Gap Education Outreach to assess Giles County’s historic resources for their educational and interpretive potential. The Upper Cumberland Development District and Clay County residents are working with the CHP on an exhibition that will be displayed in the historic county courthouse.

Graduate research assistant Harris Abernathy, right, and local resident Chase Stapler explore an abandoned railroad tunnel in Giles County as part of an MTSU Center for Historic Preservation Professional Services Partnership. (Photo courtesy of the Center for Historic Preservation)

The Walter Brewer Bemis Community Center worked with the CHP on a heritage room to interpret the history of the former West Bemis Rosenwald School, which now houses the community center just outside Jackson.

Dr. Carroll Van West, CHP director and the Tennessee State Historian, worked with staff and students alongside partners in Memphis on interpretive projects for the 50th anniversary of the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

West, students and CHP staffers have created driving tours, exhibitions and publications for several Memphis partners, including the Memphis Heritage Trail, Soulsville USA and the Universal Life Insurance Co.

To learn more about applying for help with your community heritage project, visit www.mtsuhistpres.org/community-based-historic-preservation.

For more information, call Dr. Antoinette van Zelm, CHP assistant director, or Lydia Simpson, CHP programs manager, at 615-898-2947, or email antoinette.vanzelm@mtsu.edu or lydia.simpson@mtsu.edu.

Applicants will learn their status by the beginning of August 2018, and the selected projects will begin later that month.

— Gina K. Logue (gina.logue@mtsu.edu)

Knoxville musician and local activist James “Sparky” Rucker, left, joins MTSU junior Tara Salvati, center left, and MTSU graduate research assistants Typhanie Schafer and Ethan Holden at Crestview Cemetery in Knoxville as they help with part of an MTSU Center for Historic Preservation Professional Services Partnership. (Photo courtesy of the MTSU Center for Historic Preservation)