The LOEB Fellowship

Elizabeth Watson works to enhance communities and landscapes. The Loeb Fellowship contributed to her growth as a confident facilitator as well as a creative regional planner with wide-ranging interests in urban design, rural communities, natural resources, historic preservation, and nonprofit action. Her passion is working with teams and communities to enhance great places and pursue great missions, using strategic planning and innovative programs. In an increasingly digital world, she cultivates human connections, wise interaction, and strong advocates who can carry forward plans she helps to create.

She co-authored Saving America’s Countryside, the guidebook published for the National Trust for Historic Preservation that inspired a generation of rural planning practitioners. Her work on a pilot project for that book led to the groundbreaking listing in 1983 of 25 square miles of Oley Township, Pennsylvania, in the National Register. Today, more than 60 percent of this widely admired cultural landscape is permanently protected. In 1992, she co-produced film for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Chesapeake: Living off the Land. Both book and film won major awards and demonstrate her combined interests in history, landscapes, and the environment.

During her Loeb year she worked to establish a system of National Heritage Areas when just three existed. Today, Congress has recognized 49 of these unique American regions and the National Park Service has overseen the granting of millions of dollars to associated programs. She completed plans for the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor in eastern Pennsylvania in 1993 and 2014 (the first with Mary Means & Associates). From that first D&L plan, she and her partners at Heritage Strategies, LLC (founded in 2009) went on to create plans for National Heritage Areas serving the Shenandoah Valley, northeastern Iowa, Abraham Lincoln territory in Illinois, the Erie Canal, Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Niagara Falls, and Revolutionary War landscapes in New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.

Watson was the founding executive director of the Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area, a state heritage area serving four counties (2002-09) and has participated in planning for all heritage areas serving Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where she now resides. She has also created a plan for Southern Maryland combining interpretive themes for the Star-Spangled Banner and Potomac River National Historic Trails and the Religious Freedom National Scenic Byway. In North Carolina, her home state, she produced the corridor plan and successful nomination for North Carolina’s Outer Banks National Scenic Byway and led the historic preservation plan for Asheville and Buncombe County, NC. In the Smokies, she facilitated conversations on transportation issues in Cades Cove in the national park (Tennessee side) through two consulting teams’ sequential efforts to address those issues.

Elizabeth Watson holds a master’s degree in regional planning from Penn State, which included study at the Preservation Institute on Nantucket, a program of the University of Florida. In 2017, Wake Forest University named her a Distinguished Alumna, and in 2018, the American Planning Association named her a Fellow in the College of the American Institute of Certified Planners.