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RESEARCH <br />Over a period of months, PaleoWest read as much information as possible about Louisville's <br />history. Sources included past issues of the Museum's quarterly publication, The Louisville <br />Historian, previously completed architectural surveys and reports, the City's website, other <br />online information, public input gathered while the City was developing its Preservation Master <br />Plan, historical photographs, public education presentations, assessor cards, Sanborn Fire <br />Insurance maps, historical newspapers, and personal stories. PaleoWest obtained geographic <br />information system (GIS) shapefiles of Louisville's Old Town Overlay District and subdivision <br />boundaries from the City. In addition, PaleoWest requested a file search of the Office of <br />Archaeology and Historic Preservation's (OAHP's) COMPASS database to obtain information <br />about previously recorded historical resources in Louisville. <br />FIELDWORK <br />After gaining a preliminary understanding of Louisville's history and previously recorded, <br />primarily single-family, residences, Dr. Schwendler made multiple tours of Louisville, viewing <br />from public rights -of -way the exterior of every previously recorded residence, and unrecorded <br />residences that appeared to retain at least some of their historical characteristics. She was <br />accompanied on two occasions by architectural historian, Dr. Kathleen Corbett. One tour focused <br />on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century residences, while the other was devoted to late <br />twentieth- and twenty -first -century houses. During tours of Louisville, Dr. Schwendler created a <br />tally of as many historical house forms and styles as possible. She and Dr. Corbett used <br />information previously gathered by other recorders as a starting point. They compared <br />recommendations of architectural style to their own observations and made more specific notes <br />about apparent architectural forms and styles in cases where no specific information was already <br />offered. These were not full architectural inventories; Dr. Schwendler and Dr. Corbett used <br />observations from public rights -of -way to identify the original form of the house and/or the <br />degree to which the house had been remodeled. Subsequently, Dr. Schwendler consulted <br />assessor cards and historic photographs to clarify the architectural history of houses that <br />appeared to have seen major modifications. She classified a house's form or style based on <br />historical plan view drawings and photographs when those differed markedly from current <br />conditions. Several houses have been transformed from one form or style into another and the <br />tally records their historical, not modern, appearance. In addition to walking past hundreds of <br />houses in person and taking photographs of a small subset of them, Dr. Schwendler used Google <br />Maps to create a record of all houses in the tally. In some cases, she used this method to obtain <br />photographs of houses that have recently been destroyed. To obtain construction dates, Dr. <br />Schwendler consulted online Boulder County Assessor Office records (Boulder County <br />Assessor's Office 2017a) and previous architectural inventories and a dataset maintained by the <br />City. Assessor Office construction dates are sometimes inaccurate by a few or many years, but <br />the scope of this historic context was such that PaleoWest generally did not investigate <br />construction dates further. <br />8 <br />