By 
May 23, 2025
How do you preserve a place that is no longer standing or has undergone dramatic changes in appearance or even location? Or, put another way, how do you maintain history in the present?
The answer is an array of data, from photographs to historical documents that tell the story of Huntsville’s past, which is exactly what Nick Haney discovered when he joined the City’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) department in 2018.
The role of data in historic preservation
From aerial images stored in filing cabinets to racks of paper maps in cardboard tubes, Haney says that this was a gold mine of historic information, and very little of it had been digitized and made available for everyone to see.
A quick explainer: a geographic information system is essentially a combination of maps and databases that analyzes and displays geographically referenced information.
Housed on the City’s website are dozens of web applications, locators, interactive maps and data galleries created by the GIS department.
“I’m not a historian, but I knew this information needed to be catalogued, digitized and made available to the public,” said Haney. “With help from others in the GIS Department, including Lore Campbell and Erin Fernow, we have been working to add a large portion of historic data to the collection. I knew this would be a challenge due to the sheer amount of data, but I didn’t think we’d still be working on this project seven years later.”
Historic preservation and GIS collaboration
Working on the first component of this project with City Preservation Planner Katie Stamps, the GIS team created a web application to showcase Huntsville’s historic homes and historic districts.
Each of the 2,000 historic homes and buildings mapped within the city was categorized by type and style with descriptions from the National Register nomination documents and photographs dating back to pre-1900.
Historic Huntsville Image Collection Viewer
In 2024, local historian Deane Dayton, who manages the Huntsville Historic Collection website, contacted the City to ask if it was interested in taking possession of his vast collection of photographs, postcards and other historic information. The City eagerly agreed, and an idea began to form.
West Side Square, 1950
“Our aerial photographs allow us to see what Huntsville looked like from above. Our maps, historic building and historic property ownership data let us know what the buildings were used for,” Haney said. “What if we were also able to see what the individual buildings looked like?”
And so, the Historic Huntsville Image Collection Viewer was created.
Haney and Stamps began a new project to map each photo in the GIS collection, date the photo, tag all of its elements and assign it a geographic area such as Downtown, Maysville or Five Points. That allows the public to search for historic images by content, date, area and location.
The result?
The Image Collection Viewer contains:
- 7,100 images of historic buildings
- 2,500 photographs of cemeteries across Madison County
- 1,000 historic images
- 34 images from various planning projects
And the database continues to grow with donations from the Huntsville Madison County Public Library, Huntsville Madison County Convention & Visitors Bureau and other local historians every week.
This gave Stamps an idea.
Digital Downtown Huntsville walking tour
How do we make the fascinating history of Downtown Huntsville’s commercial district accessible to all? The answer, once again, was data.
Using The Clio, a free educational website and mobile application built to guide the public to thousands of historical and cultural sites throughout the U.S., Stamps created a digital walking tour complete with photographs, historical information and videos for each of the 22 stops. Now, residents and visitors can take their own guided tour on their schedule and at their leisure.
“I taught seventh graders civic and geography for a short time—a full year—and learned quickly that everyone is not as into history as I am,” Stamps said. “Public history allows us to share a little bit of our heritage and past with a wider audience, and digitizing tours and historical resources is essential to making history more accessible.”
Preserving the past
Elks Opera Theater, c. 1906
While the mission of the City’s Planning Department, under which both the Historic Preservation and GIS divisions fall, is to provide for “orderly growth, development and redevelopment of the City of Huntsville,” much work is being done to preserve its past.
Again, the question is begged: “How do you preserve buildings, artifacts and moments in history that no longer exist?”
“You must preserve their memory,” Haney said. “We can’t change the past, but we can teach our children about these places, why they were important, how they shaped our city, and how to learn from the mistakes our ancestors made, which resulted in the places being lost.”
