Person
Midge Ingersoll
Midge Ingersoll is a Dorchester County preservation leader best known for her long work at Handsell Historic Site near Vienna. She has helped keep the site’s layered Native, colonial, and African American histories in public view through restoration, interpretation, and community leadership.
Midge Ingersoll is one of the Eastern Shore’s most recognizable local preservation advocates, especially in Dorchester County, where her name has become closely tied to Handsell Historic Site near Vienna.
She is a founding trustee and former president of the Nanticoke Historic Preservation Alliance, the nonprofit organization formed to preserve and interpret Handsell. Under that work, Handsell has been framed not as a single-house story, but as a place where Native history, colonial settlement, and African American history meet on the same ground. That broader interpretation has helped make the site more meaningful than a typical house restoration project.
Public descriptions of Ingersoll’s work consistently place her near the center of that effort. The Maryland State Arts Council describes her as a founding trustee and former president of the Nanticoke Historic Preservation Alliance, and also notes her service with the Heart of Chesapeake Country Heritage Area. Other regional coverage credits her with helping keep Handsell’s preservation work active, visible, and rooted in local history rather than nostalgia alone.
That role has included public interpretation as well as preservation. Ingersoll has spoken about Handsell as a place where several histories converge, and the site’s programming has reflected that approach through living-history events, educational programs, and public outreach that connect the landscape to the people who lived and labored there.
Her work has also been recognized publicly. In 2021, Preservation Maryland selected Ingersoll for the Harrison Volunteer Award for her work connected to Handsell. Reporting on the award emphasized both her volunteer leadership and the larger preservation mission behind the site.
Ingersoll is also known as an artist, particularly for architectural and historic renderings, which fits naturally with the kind of place-based preservation work she has done for years. Taken together, that mix of visual interpretation, organizational leadership, and historical stewardship helps explain why she matters in the local record.
For LifeOnTheShore, Midge Ingersoll belongs in the knowledge base because she represents a real and ongoing kind of Eastern Shore leadership: the patient work of keeping places, stories, and public memory from disappearing.