David Fogle, a University of Maryland professor who started a historic preservation program for students to work on projects around the world, including a 17th century English countryside estate built by the family that founded Maryland and its namesake university, died June 25 at a hospital in Annapolis, Md. He was 94.
The cause was a heart attack following a bout with pneumonia, his nephew David Sommers said.
An international authority on historic preservation and urban planning, Mr. Fogle founded U-Md.’s preservation program several years after joining the school’s architecture department in 1970. In exchange for room and board, students got hands-on experience saving historic properties.
“I think the most effective teaching tool for preservation is fieldwork,” Mr. Fogle told the Baltimore Sun in 2000.
The Chalfonte, a Cape May, N.J., hotel built in 1876, was one of the program’s first major projects. Beginning in 1980, U-Md. students spent multiple summers scraping paint, replacing ceilings and repairing dining room plaster, among other laborious tasks for which they earned three credits.
The Presidential Suite there now books for more than $400 a night.
In 1985, a newspaper article about Mr. Fogle’s work at The Chalfonte caught the attention of Leonard Crewe, who was then chairman of the Maryland Historical Society and a trustee of Kiplin Hall, an English estate built by the Calvert family.
Crewe asked whether Mr. Fogle’s program could help restore the dilapidated three-story, red-brick home on 800 acres in northern England.
“Kiplin is like a lovable great-aunt,” Mr. Fogle told the Baltimore Sun in 1996, after his students had been working on the property for more than a decade. “It’s sort of shabby, but it grabs you.”
Kiplin is now open six days a week for tours.
When Mr. Fogle retired from teaching in 1999, Prince Charles (now King) of England sent him a letter.
