People: Miriam Rutz

HISTORIC PRESERVATION PLANNING

She recently helped with the restoration of the Michigan State Capitol, designing the outside gardens in a manner compatible with the edifice. She is currently working on a project to restore Caspian, a little town in the Upper Peninsula that saw its heyday during the mining era.

MSU associate professor of geography and landscape historian Miriam Rutz performs many outreach services in a specialized area known as historic preservation planning. 'My specialty involves land,' she explains. 'I came to MSU in 1976, and it took me 18 years to find my place (as a landscape historian). But it's very important. Geography is people and places. And that ties very much into history.'

On the Capitol grounds, she and recent graduate Jennifer Hanna researched Victorian flower beds to produce a design that 'fit perfectly with the building.' She says of Caspian: 'It's a tiny, forgotten town whose heydays were in the 1920s, but it's a very vibrant community and now the third generation is moving back in and starting small businesses.'

She and MSU student Stephanie Hall is helping them rediscover their historic buildings and resources through MSU extension's community and economic development program. Last year she also published Emma Genevieve Gillette: Nature's Guardian Angel, a children's book illustrated by daughter Kristi Rutz, '93. The late Gillette (see Winter 1985, p. 9) was a lifelong conservationist and founder and first president of Michigan's Parks Association. 'Genevieve loved nature and wanted these special landscapes saved forever,' says Miriam of MSU's first woman to graduate in landscape architecture.

Rutz notes that her book is available at the Michigan Women's Historical Center in downtown Lansing.