The Pleasant View Historic Site is comprised of the Quince Orchard Colored School, the Pleasant View Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Pleasant View Cemetery – each different resource with different needs for preservation. The trustees and community are launching a $1 million dollar fundraising campaign to address those needs.
Preservation Maryland’s Six-to-Fix program began with a simple question: Could we do more to help save threatened history across our state?
The Pleasant View Historic Site is comprised of the Quince Orchard Colored School, the Pleasant View Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Pleasant View Cemetery. The buildings on this site are monuments to the story of how during segregation African Americans utilized the institutions available to them to forge a new future. The buildings are beginning to suffer from years of deferred maintenance, and Pleasant View needs to embrace new uses to remain relevant to the larger community. This will require a more comprehensive approach to rehabilitation and future use.
Chilren play at Pleasant View. Photo from the Quince Orchard Project.
In 2016, Preservation Maryland announced the Pleasant View Historic Site in Montgomery County as one of the organization’s first Six-to-Fix projects and working with the site’s Trustees to complete essential repair work. In tandem, the Trustees and the broader Quince Orchard community continued to research the site’s special history, and hat awesome history is now being shared through a documentary called Finding Fellowship.
Finding Fellowship is a film by Jason Green and Kisha Davis, the children of Rev. Gerald Green, one of the Trustees of Pleasant View. The documentary traces the history of the land on which Pleasant View sits on through the ups-and-downs of keeping a church active in Montgomery County during the Civil Rights-era and into current times, including their plans for continued restoration work.
The title Finding Fellowship is a double entendre. Fellowship is the name of the lane that two of the film’s subjects, Kisha and Jason, grew up on. This documentary has been about actively unearthing and finding the history of the community in which they grew up and the street that they grew up on is a wonderful symbol of that community. But the film is also about the power of people coming together in a shared interest and how that can only be achieved when actively pursued. In a world where we are often told that we are irreconcilably divided, we still believe in finding fellowship, and it’s this story that gives us hope.
The Pleasant View Historic Site is comprised of the Quince Orchard Colored School, the Pleasant View Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Pleasant View Cemetery – each different resource with different needs for preservation. Encroaching development, deferred maintenance, and lack of funding was beginning to show on the historic properties. As a result of the Six-to-FIx partnership, Keast & Hood Structural Engineers generously donated staff time and expertise in Spring 2016 to conduct a structural condition assessment for the church and school. The document outlines what issues the buildings have and in which order the projects should be tackled. With this assessment in hand, the Trustees can now make a case to potential funders with a strong and accurate plan for stabilization and rehabilitation of the structures.
Keast & Hood donated an expert engineering evaluation of the Pleasant View Historic Site, 2016.