Sara E. Wermiel

Sara E. Wermiel is an independent scholar, historic preservation consultant, and teacher. Her specialties are the history of nineteenth-century American technology, industrialization, and urbanization. She has written several books and many articles on the main subjects of her research: structural fire protection, and the development of new materials and assemblies for constructing buildings in the nineteenth century. Her article on the fire insurance industry in the 19th century and its lack of support for fireproof construction is in Flammable Cities (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2012). The first skeleton-frame building in the U.S., the Marine Hospital in New Orleans (1856-60), is the subject of an essay in Before Steel: The Introduction of Structural Iron and Its Consequences (Niggli, 2011). Dr. Wermiel lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.