Evaluating Damage to Historic Buildings, Sites in Mississippi

"Many curators, archivists and preservation advocates...are beginning to tally the losses in the areas hardest hit by the hurricane, even as emergency workers turn to the more essential tasks of gathering the dead and providing supplies. For preservationists in Mississippi no less is at stake than the region's architectural patrimony.

"'Our concern is that people might think we care more about buildings than people, but buildings are them and their community,' said Jennifer Baughn, an architectural historian for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. She and David Preziosi, the director of the nonprofit Mississippi Heritage Trust, joined this reporter and a photographer with a full tank of scarce gasoline and drove from Jackson, Miss., to Biloxi on Sept. 1 to begin to survey the damage.

"'You can lose what makes a place a place,' Ms. Baughn added. 'The character it had won't be there.'"