Following an extensive research and documentation process, the Grinnell Historic Preservation Commission, the Grinnell Historic Neighborhood Association, and additional volunteers received good news in December of 2008: Their efforts to put the North Grinnell Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places had been successful. This area is made up of a 3.5 by 5-block rectangle bordered by Park Street, 6th Avenue, West Street, and 11th Avenue (Map 1).

My MAP furthered my exploration of ceramics, as a means of producing functional pieces that stand apart from ordinary, generic dinnerware sets. My goal was to bring a quality of artistic sophistication to a ritual we experience every day – consuming food off of hand-built yet functional works of art. My set includes five matching dinner plates, dessert plates, bowls, cups and mugs that were thrown using cone-10 clay. Additionally, I made two larger forms for serving food, a platter and a bowl.

This study was interesting to examine how identity is tied to place. Positioned in the minds of those that give it meaning, “sense of place issues in a stream of symbolically drawn particulars-the visible particulars of local topographies, the personal particulars of biographical associations, and the notional particulars of socially given systems of thought” (Basso 1996:144). In other words, movement within a landscape will assign meaning to different places in that area.