Celebrating American Heritage for Forty Years!

Forty years ago, our esteemed Director Richard Beddingfield and I met in the offices of the highly respected New Orleans law firm Stone Pigman and signed the Articles of Incorporation of R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates, Inc. (RCG&A). As professional stewards of American Heritage resources, and today as a much larger corporate family, we remain profoundly committed to protecting American heritage resources and American history and prehistory in all their manifestations wherever they are located. The stories of how we became Americans and how we grew as a Nation are central to who we are as a people, but especially to those of us who have dedicated our lives and careers to American Heritage.

Over the past forty years, RCG&A has grown across the nation and taken the lead in some of our Nation’s most important cultural resources projects. We have worked on many of our Nation’s most important archaeological, architectural and historical initiatives and projects, and in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Mariana Islands in the North Pacific. We have worked on over 240 military installations, and our work for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps has helped our Armed Services to become the leading steward of American Heritage resources. It was RCG&A that developed the training materials, handbooks and instructional films used to teach Department of Defense professionals about stewardship of American Heritage properties. Our Nationwide Historic Context for the U.S. Department of Defense still is referred to at the Pentagon simply as “The Goodwin Report.”

Our work in the energy sector has encompassed the two longest natural gas pipelines built east of the Mississippi River over the past sixty years, one from the Rockies to the East Coast, and the Florida Gas Transmission system that stretches from Texas to Key West, Florida. Likewise, our work in “green energy” has been seminal and includes numerous solar, wind and green infrastructure projects across the nation. Our offshore wind projects literally stretch from Maine to North Carolina, and they date back to the very first offshore wind pilot project in the Atlantic. We remain hugely active in helping to build the next generation of clean energy facilities for our Nation.

Our work honoring and assisting Native American Tribes also has continued unabated since the early 1980s. Working with the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana, we helped to create their first Traditional Cultural Properties and Districts, and recorded the memories and oral histories of Tribal Elders who no longer are with us. One was a classmate of Jim Thorpe at Carlisle Indian School. The Chitimacha honored Dr. Goodwin by naming him an honorary Tribal member in the early 1980s. In the Mid-Atlantic, we assisted the Piscataway Indian Nation in achieving state recognition, and we were honored to participate over multiple years in the Piscataway’s multi-year Sun Dances. The Tribe honored Dr. Goodwin by making him a Pipe Carrier during the last two years of Sun Dances. Dr. Goodwin also was appointed by Governor Glendening to serve as Vice Chair of Maryland’s Native American Recognition Advisory Committee. Our work in the Plains has included extensive collaboration with Plains Indian Tribes, and especially with the Comanche, Apache, Kiowa, and Fort Sill Apache. RCG&A developed the first Traditional Cultural Property report for Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and provided detailed studies of four Native American cemeteries to help assure their protection and to delineate areas still available to the Tribes for burials. Our work off of the Atlantic Coast on wind turbine arrays has delineated areas offshore that were available for Native occupation millennia before the Christian era. These locations, which survived marine transgressive processes, have produced pollen and radiocarbon (C14) sequences dating many thousands of years before European Contact (Paleoindian and Archaic). We continue to work actively with Native American Tribes across the country to assure proper treatment and respect of their cultural patrimony, which we view as absolutely central both to cultural heritage stewardship and to our American identity.

Over the course of our fortieth anniversary year, we will be providing retrospectives on some of our most noteworthy projects across our Nation. Please join me in wishing R. Christopher Goodwin & Associates, Inc. a Happy 40th Birthday! We are looking forward to continuing our service to our American Heritage and to our heritage resources. We remain passionately dedicated to preserving and to sharing our special insights into and our knowledge of these United States for the sake of future generations of Americans.

R. Christopher Goodwin, Ph.D.
President & CEO