The team digs into the lesser-known artifacts that speckle Grounds, the kinds of things that won’t be part of the official UVA tour. Like why are so many parts of the Rotunda scattered about, and why did some of them explode? For answers, see here:
A 204-year-old university is literally filled with rarities and relics, but not all of them make a good Obscura deep dive.
“It has to be visually interesting,” Angelich said, “and it has to have an interesting backstory.”
Like Lambeth Field, which now looks like just a regular old recreational area. But did you know it was once one of the largest college football stadiums in the country? And that President Calvin Coolidge stopped by for a game? And that, in the 1900s, UVA had one of the best football teams in the nation?
When an Obscura story like Lambeth Field is finished, the team uploads the results to Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram and LinkedIn. It’s most popular on Instagram, where comments frequently echo this one: “I love this series!”
“I would like for the people who live in Charlottesville, faculty, staff, students, to actually want to go to these places and experience them,” Angelich said. Every find gets loaded onto a map “so you can actually pull it up on your phone and walk around. I want people to go out and feel immersed in the history of this place.”
That’s something that spoke to Angelich when she transferred to UVA in 2009. And, if she looks way back, that’s also when the kernel of UVA Obscura popped, even though she didn’t know it then.
“I remember looking around at all the brickwork, the shutters, the (Rotunda column) capitals and all the architectural details, and just thinking, ‘This place has been here for 200 years,’” she said. “I’m walking around history.”
Years later, when Angelich went to work at UVA Communications, she noticed another bit of history tucked into UVA Today’s story-tracking software program. It was a folder of images from University photographers showcasing offbeat and peculiar items around Grounds. There was a notion the images could be a photo essay one day, but the folder was just sitting around collecting digital dust.
The folder’s name was “Obscura.”
“And I remember talking to (University photographer Sanjay Suchak) and telling him, ‘This would be super cool to put on a map, or blow this out like a big project,” she said. “But it was always like, ‘That would be great, but who has time?’”