Shaker Village

The Kleingers Group‘s reality capture division, TrueScan, was contacted by Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill to document their historic site just outside Lexington, in Kentucky’s Historic Bluegrass region. Locally referred to as Shakertown, the 3,000-acre site contains 34 original Shaker structures. This makes Shaker Village the nation’s most extensive collection of original 19th-century buildings and the largest National Historic Landmark in Kentucky.

Accurate documentation is of paramount importance toward the preservation of this historic treasure. TrueScan worked closely with the Village leadership team to develop a plan that met their current needs, fit within their budget, and paved the way for future documentation efforts. As licensed surveyors in the state of Kentucky, we used a combination of survey-grade GPS and conventional equipment to create a network of survey control derived from real-world coordinates. The established network served as a base for all reality capture methods and a reference for all future data collection efforts. Terrestrial lidar, or laser scanning, was used to measure every inch of the Center Family Dwelling, the most prominent building on the site. Color scans were collected inside and out to document the historic stone façade and intricate interior woodworking.

TrueScan performed unmanned aerial surveying over approximately 56-acres to capture the majority of the historic structures. The drone mapping produced a high-resolution orthophoto as well as a 3D point cloud. Finally, the team obtained aerial lidar from the state of Kentucky to cover the 3,000-acre site. TrueScan combined it with the other data using state plane coordinates to provide a singular, comprehensive 3D documentation of the entire property.