All that remains of the 1837 Catherine Furnace Complex in Snell, Virginia (now a part of the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park) is the interior of the furnace stack. At its prime, however, the iron blast furnace complex consisted of about 14 structures. This 3D model of the site, created using SketchUp, was developed to help interpret the site while in use during the mid-nineteenth century. The reconstruction began with a scaled plan of the site, which was used to plot out the footprints of the structures.
The vertical dimensions of the buildings were then chosen using common measurements for structures during the time period along with an artist’s rendering of the site. The forms, materials, and architectural details of the buildings were created using descriptions from the National Park Services 2011 Historic Resource Study on the site, common features on vernacular Greek Revival structures (the popular style of the period), and contemporaneous sites such as Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site.
Once the 3D model was completed, this narrated flythrough of the site was created to interpret how the site’s structures would have supported the iron smelting process. After developing a script, the flythrough was generated to follow the narrative of the script using SketchUp’s animation tool. The animation was exported as a video to iMovie, where the voiceover, overlay images, titles, and credits were added. The finished video was uploaded to YouTube to allow public access to the content. The Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields National Military Park was able to share the video to their Facebook page to help educate the public on the site, which is located on the Chancellorsville Battlefield within the park
This project was completed in the spring of 2021 as the final for Associate Professor Michael Spencer’s HISP 345: Computer Applications in Historic Preservation class at the University of Mary Washington.
