The Fare Forward Interview with Jane-Coleman Cottone
Jane-Coleman Cottone is an academic historian, information scientist and cultural resource management specialist with over ten years of experience in research, writing and curation at various institutions throughout the United States and Canada. Her background is in African American history and culture with a special focus on the history of enslavement and the slave trade. She has served as the Collections Manager and Registrar at Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art and as the Certified Local Government Coordinator at the Tennessee Historical Commission, where she assisted local governments with a variety of preservation projects including National Register nominations, establishing historic zoning overlays, and providing stakeholder feedback for Section 106 reviews. From 2021-2023, she worked as a Senior Research Analyst at JLL, a major commercial real estate firm, tracking all real estate activity and creating quarterly reports on the state of the office and industrial markets in Nashville and Memphis. Jane-Coleman is also the immediate past president and current board member of the Friends of Two Rivers Mansion, a non-profit foundation supporting the Metro Nashville Parks historic site.
Interview Conducted by Sarah Clark
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Fare Forward: What first drew you to the field of museum curation and historic preservation, and is that still what keeps you in the field?
Jane-Coleman Cottone: I think what first drew me to it was just a strong interest in history—of all things that happened in the past. I loved books and television shows and movies that were set in the past—historic dramas—as a small child. I was thinking recently about how I think some of my learning differences, and how it took me a while to get up to reading level. I was in high school before I was reading at level. So I was realizing that learning history in a museum or historic site setting came more naturally than sitting down and reading a long book that I’d struggle with more. So that’s what got me really interested in those kinds of places.
Then in high school, my school had a winter interim internship program, and you could check the box on where you were interested in working, if it was “medical” or “advertising,” and there was a “museum” box, and I was like, “Wow, I can work in a museum.” The curator at the Parthenon in Nashville had a daughter at my high school, St. Cecilia, so she had offered to host a winter interim intern. That was my first experience, and it kind of grew from there: This is a career, you can work at a place like this. The Parthenon is really interesting—if you don’t know it, it’s the world’s only full-scale replica of the ancient Greek Parthenon. They talk about the ancient Greek history there, and they also talk about the history of why there is a Parthenon in Nashville. There was the Centennial Exhibition that happened there in 1897, and the Parthenon was the Nashville building because Nashville was known as the “Athens of the South.” At the Exhibition, they used the building to display art, and today it is still an art museum on the ground floor.
So I worked with the curator of the art collection (I guess she was also the curator of the whole building), and she became a mentor of mine. All through college, I did things to try to position myself to get one of these jobs as a curator somewhere. And then later, in graduate school at Brown for Public Humanities, I worked at a historic preservation nonprofit. I was interested in house museums. And then I got some exposure to the historic preservation side, which is its own field. These things are probably siloed more than they ought to be. If you’re working in house museums, you are working in historic preservation. And if you’re a historic preservationist who’s operating a historic site as a museum—that’s a museum. You’re working in museums. But they’re their own tracks and graduate programs for these different fields. And I’m the not super unusual person who kind of does it all. There’s a few of us.
My first full-time job out of graduate school was at Cheekwood in Nashville, which is an art museum and historic site. And that wasn’t the best job. There were some problems there, but I got some connections to the Historical Commission, and they had an opening, and I went to go work there. I was there for five years, and that’s just straight historic preservation. I was working with historic zoning commissions, local governments, helping them set up their local programs. And that’s got a lot of overlap into architecture and civil engineering and urban planning work. So that’s been kind of where I am most hirable now, that experience. There are just more jobs, way more jobs.
I currently work as a historian for civil engineering firm doing their government compliance stuff. It’s not the most interesting, but it’s a good job. And I’m still very involved in all of the museums and historic sites in Nashville that I care about.
It gives people a sense of pride in their community when it looks a certain way, and ultimately a sense of belonging.
FF: Why do you think it’s important to preserve physical history as well as historical accounts? What is it about objects and structures that give them value, either as part of history or otherwise?
JCC: Structures and places and objects, well, they are different. And I love settings where you can see both a really well-preserved historic house museum that has all its original furnishings and decorative arts all together. But in practice, most of the time you’ll have buildings that are preserved but being used for something else, and then you’ll have a museum that maybe is a brand-new building. It has all these artifacts in it, and they’re separated out. And I don’t think that’s bad, but it makes you think of the things differently.
With buildings and structures and places that are physically in our environment, their primary function is probably not to teach us about the past. You’re not walking through a historic district and learning the history of the place. Some people think you are, but that’s not generally the function it’s serving. What it’s providing is a sense of place and a character. Nashville is not the best example as a historically preserved city, but if you are walking through a historic part of Nashville, you are getting a sense and a feeling that you’re not going to get anywhere else in the world. And that is what is missing from a lot of new development suburban retail—strip malls in particular—where you could be anywhere in the United States. And I think that that’s not a terrible way to grow up, if that’s everything you’re exposed to, but you are missing something.
It gives people a sense of pride in their community when it looks a certain way, and ultimately a sense of belonging. And there’s all sorts of urban design theories that you can tap into as well. Ray Oldenburg talked about the third place—human beings need a space that is not home and not work to gather with their friends and their family and to not think about other things going on. And I guess for a lot of people that’s church, but for a lot of people it’s not. And ideally, it’s not just a restaurant where you’re paying to be there, but it’s a public sort of space, and you see them throughout human history, the marketplaces, the piazzas, the parks—we all need that. So that’s what I like about historic preservation is the sense of place, the placemaking that can happen as a result.
And then museum objects—it’s hard to articulate what I love about objects. I think my brother told me one time, when you were little, you had your treasures, and you were so careful with everything. I don’t really remember that, but he noticed it. And old papers and things, too, I wouldn’t want to throw away. They were important to me for some reason. I’m not a huge collector, not someone who has masses of stuff. Maybe because of my profession, I want to keep my own life as a little bit simpler than that. But I do save lots of things that are important to me, especially with my children. I saved their umbilical cords, and I put them in little boxes along with their hospital arm bands. And when I gave Mary Frances her first haircut, I saved the clippings from her haircut. The object just helps you remember. And I guess that’s the purpose that they serve a lot in the broader realm, of remembering the past. To get kind of academic, the earliest objects of human history that we collect and put into museums—they are the documents. They are what teach us the stories. We wouldn’t know the stories without those objects. It was a prehistoric, pre-written-word time, or any written materials have not lasted, but the ceramic shards and tools buried deep in the ground have. So what we know of the history is because of those objects.
And it’s almost as if in gratitude to those objects, you’re not going to just throw them away. Even if we’ve learned what we think we can from them, there might be more that we haven’t pieced together yet. Archeologists never destroy anything. They either leave things as they are—they do an excavation and record things and then cover it back up, leaving it exactly like it was for future archeologists, or they very carefully preserve the artifacts and put them into storage. If the site’s going to be demolished for a road project or something, they’ll save the artifacts. I work with archeologists now too, for the civil engineering side. So I’ve learned a little more about that. And I guess people also see the artifacts as part of their culture and part of their identity.
FF: People in the past tended to build more elaborate, detailed and ornamented structures than we do today. Is that just window dressing or is there another purpose behind the more elaborate structures of the past?
JCC: Yeah, there’s the cliche of “they don’t build ’em like they used to.” And that’s certainly true, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Building materials and labor just used to not cost nearly what they do now. There are certain modern designs that you’ll see for major construction projects. All of that is value engineered; a lot of the aesthetic choices that are made are driven by costs, and that’s too bad. Very rarely do we have pure creative construction of buildings anymore. Everything’s limited by cost of materials and labor. But it’s not an entirely modern phenomenon. I mean, there are certainly lots of buildings that have not lasted because they weren’t constructed as well. What we have, what still remains today, is the stuff that was built the best. So that’s why in the National Register criteria, to be considered historic, it’s not just meeting the age threshold. There are other criteria that have to be met: that the building carries some kind of historic significance, or that it has a distinctive and significant architectural style or engineering ingenuity, for instance, that this was the first time that concrete was used in this way. But then it can also be considered historically significant because it represents a typical type of architectural style. But if it was not built well, not built as a permanent structure, it’s not going to last long enough to become historic. So most of our designated historic buildings tend to be in pretty good shape, built pretty well, and they are worth taking care of.
It does bother me sometimes the way that modern buildings are considered disposable. In a big sort of recent news in Nashville, you may have heard that Nashville has committed to providing the most public funding for a stadium project ever for the Titans Stadium. The Titans are going to get a new stadium, and it’s going to cost like a billion dollars. The current one is about 25 years old. Why is a 25-year-old building considered completely obsolete? That seems insane to me. Would the Romans have ever built the Coliseum if they thought that it was going to only last 25 years? No. That seems to be unique to our times, that we’ll build something that is this massive public infrastructure for thousands of people to enjoy a sporting event, and we’re talking about it like it’s old and decrepit 25 years later. So that makes me kind of sad.
Going back to the Bible, the Scripture section that inspired this [issue], not taking care of your things—that’s a form of waste and profligate behavior, to build something so expensive and to treat it like it’s disposable and let it get obsolete so fast. In that sense, being a better steward, the ultimately more frugal thing, is to actually spend some resources taking care of it.
A lot of work that we did was pretty simple. We wanted to preserve as much Tennessee history as we could.
FF: As you’ve worked for different museums and house museums and for the state of Tennessee and now for a for-profit company, do you see differences in the ways that these different organizations approach historic preservation and their motives for that work?
JCC: At a museum, even though it is a nonprofit—and this isn’t true of every single museum out there, but many of them—there are conflicting interests within the administration. The CEO and the marketing people, the development people, want to get more revenue. At Cheekwood, there’s definitely a lot of pressure to become more of a tourist attraction and launch exhibits that are going to bring people through the doors, sell tickets. That’s why they started doing the holiday lights displays that have nothing to do with heritage at all. But I suppose some people think they’re beautiful, and it was a nice way to spend a holiday evening with your family. So that was a pressure that we had a lot, just worrying about having enough money to execute your mission as a historic site and museum, being provided with those resources to do that work. Because you weren’t ultimately the decision makers about what the money would be used for.
And then for the state government, they probably had, of all the places I’ve worked, the purest intentions about preserving the past, especially the people I worked with anyway. A lot of work that we did was pretty simple. We wanted to preserve as much Tennessee history as we could. There definitely were, though, political pressures to prioritize certain stories over others. And I wouldn’t say in my job that had too much of an impact on my day-to-day—until it did.
The Heritage Protection Act was passed to protect Confederate monuments, and no historian that I know very well went to graduate school for all these years in order to protect Confederate monuments. That’s not history. That’s a certain group’s projection or idea of a history that they want to promote. I mean, the statues have been there long enough. Yes, they are artifacts, but they were not our priority of things to protect, nor did we see them as particularly at risk in most cases. And I believe a community has a right to decide what their public square monuments are going to be. If it’s something that seems offensive to them, they should be able to revisit that. That’s a speech thing: not erasing a history, highlighting a different story. Anyway, that did impact our work at the Historical Commission.
And then working for a private company, I’d say the main motivations, and these aren’t bad, but it’s strictly review and compliance. We’re trying to make sure that we follow the law and don’t plow through some ancient archeological site without getting the approvals first. So for my task most of the time, it’s good if I don’t find anything historic. If there’s a project area where a road is going, my job is to go out there and document all of the houses that are 50 years or older, and a report people will be happy to see would be one that says, “There’s nothing historic in the way. Proceed.”
But I would say I work with good people, and most of the time, if there is something that I really do think is historic, people are willing to give it consideration. There’s not pressure to be like, “Oh, you better find a way to say it’s not historic.” A lot of times our main tactic is avoidance, where we work with knowing where the historic things are. That can go very early into the planning stages so that you’re not rerouting at the last minute. But we’re just the private contractors doing the work that the government doesn’t have time for. So I’m not really a decision maker. I’m just what they call a technical expert, doing this work.
But I get to go out in the field, and that’s fun, with your camera, and I see some cool things. I went to East Tennessee last year, in the mountains, and that was really neat. And here in Tennessee, our main client is TDOT, the Department of Transportation. And TDOT wants you to write a report, a context of these areas. So I do get to do some actual history research and writing, and I’ll go to the local county archives and read the county history books and find what newspaper articles I can that tell a story of that town’s development. And that’s really fun.
The town that we surveyed in East Tennessee, in Hawkins County, was Mooresburg, and that town changed a lot when they built a TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority] dam that flooded some nearby areas. It changed the trajectory of the town’s growth. And reading about the TVA is a fascinating history. Talk about sacrifice. Whole towns were flooded in order to bring electric power to the Tennessee Valley, as a New Deal initiative. And there were certain people who were upset about that, but there were also people who were so grateful for it, because they had electricity for the first time. And then in a Middle Tennessee town, Portland, Tennessee, that we surveyed, I learned a lot about strawberry agriculture in the early 20th century. And that’s cool. I went to the state library archives and found these propaganda photographs from the forties about how happy the migrant laborers were to be there. I was like, “I’m sure this is not the whole story, but yeah.”
I’ve never encountered someone who’s changed their mind.
FF: Particularly when you were working for the state, but also now, do you ever come up against people who want to argue against preserving a historic structure? What kind of arguments do they typically deploy against preserving a particular place or putting it on the National Registry?
JCC: Oh, sure. I did this a lot more with the state than I do now, but when setting up a local historic district, that’s one that comes with the actual rules about what you can do to the outside of your house. You’re always coming up against people who say, “This is my property rights, and I should be able to do whatever I want to my home.”
And sometimes it’s people who are just against historic preservation, but there’s also just a mindset of these same people who might be not the biggest fans of urban planning and zoning in the first place. I mean, there’s a lot of huge swaths of the country that do no zoning at all. A lot of places in Tennessee don’t do zoning. So it’s unincorporated areas, rural areas, they’re not going to do it. There are whole counties in Tennessee that don’t have planning commissions. So that’s a resistance that you come up with.
In more recent years, I think as the housing crisis has gotten worse in the country—and I think a lot of this comes out of California, which has such a housing problem—there are activists who blame historic preservation as a part of the problem with gentrification and pricing people out and limiting the housing supply. And they’ll say that we should be able to build four houses on this lot. There’s room for it, and historic zoning is stopping us. But to them, I say, that’s not what historic zoning has to do. It’s not based zoning. You can have multifamily development in a historic district. I saw lots of that. I mean, I lived in Providence, Rhode Island, for three years. All these old houses are chopped up into four or five units, multifamily, and many of them were even built that way. So that’s my counter argument to that. And as far as causing gentrification, saying this historic designation is increasing the property value so much that it’s pricing people out, that is only one part of the complicated economics that go into the market values of homes. And really, for the most part, in most cities, the historic districts make up such a small portion of the overall housing stock that I don’t feel it’s completely fair to point to them as the villains here.
FF: Have you ever encountered someone who changed their mind on the subject, and how did that work?
JCC: I’ve never encountered someone who’s changed their mind. I have encountered people who maybe upon learning all the facts—maybe they were mistaken about something—maybe that will change your mind. If you realize that your beliefs were based on falsehoods, then maybe that’ll change your mind. But as far as someone just fully believing something and being persuaded to the other side, I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered that in historic preservation.
FF: Interesting. I have one more question for you: what is your favorite building to spend time in, and why?
JCC: It might be the Parthenon in Nashville. I’ve not been to the Parthenon in Greece, but it is the origin of my profession where it all started for me. It is such an interesting building, both the ancient Parthenon’s many uses that it had over the years before it got blown up. It was the ancient Greek temple, then it was a Christian Church, then it was a mosque. In Nashville, it was the center of a World’s Fair, and then it was—it is—an art gallery. It’s a history museum, it’s all the different things. And you definitely get—as a Christian, even though it’s this ancient Greek temple, I see the influence on our Christian houses of worship. This is where the inspiration comes from for sure. The Cathedral of the Incarnation where we go, has an Italian Baroque influence in its architecture, which has the columns and the pediments and all of the architectural features that trace back to ancient Greece. So I think it’s the foundation of western architectural design. And so that’s something I really like about that building.
