Architectural & Historic Treasures of Washington County, Maryland features 140 articles, including references to original land patents, early settlers and their families, and the establishment of towns throughout Washington County. In addition, this book includes over 500 photographs, plus 64 pages of color photos, maps showing each location, many historic pictures, an extensive glossary and index.Publication of this book was made possible by the Washington County Historical Trust and the volunteer efforts of its members. All profits will be placed in a revolving fund for the preservation of endangered properties in Washington County, Maryland.

"Filled with brilliant insights and tantalizing leads."--

Southern plantations are an endless source of fascination. That’s no surprise since these palatial homes are rich in history, representing a pivotal time in U.S. history that truly is “gone with the wind.” With the Civil War literally exploding all around, many of these homes were occupied either by Confederate or Union troops. Nowhere else in the south were plantations so affected by the nation’s bloodiest war than in Virginia. At times, families fled, leaving behind slaves to manage the property. There are still more than 60 plantations in Virginia today, most of them open to the public. Some have been restored, others undergoing that process. If only the walls could talk, the stories we might hear! That’s what we hope to bring into this book on The Plantations of Virginia. We’ll take the tours and talk to the guides and dig even further if there is more to discover. We hope that travelers will be enlightened before they travel to Virginia, their visits will thus be enriched, and that residents will equally love exploring this deep history of Virginia. Accompanying the text will be photographs, taken by one of the authors, showing, in all their splendor, the exteriors of these plantations, as well as areas of interest inside the buildings.

Winner, 2020 Ron Tyler Award for Best Illustrated Book on Texas History and Culture In this thoughtful tour of 120 historic homes in Waco, Texas, architectural historian Kenneth Hafertepe gives readers a glimpse of the surprising variety of styles and stories captured in the houses built by and for Wacoans. Focusing on the period from the 1850s to about 1940, Hafertepe provides not only snapshots of the dwellings in which the people of Waco lived, but also informed hints about how they lived: everyone from the wealthiest merchants to the humblest day laborers. Historic Homes of Waco, Texas incorporates material gleaned from city directories, fire insurance maps, census and cemetery records, and other archival and published sources to afford the most complete picture possible of how these homes came to be and what became of those who built and lived in them. Over 120 color photographs, also taken by the author, round out the descriptions. The popular enthusiasm for the television series featuring Waco-area “fixer-uppers,” coupled with the burgeoning local industry generated by the show’s two charismatic hosts, has certainly boosted interest in historic homes and buildings in Waco. Indeed, Hafertepe has incorporated a handful of properties featured on the show among the houses profiled in this book. But beyond any current entertainment craze, Historic Homes of Waco, Texas will stand the test of time as an authoritative and entertaining tribute to these important structures and the people who inhabited them.

A detailed study of early historical preservation efforts between the 1780s and the 1850s In Historic Real Estate, Whitney Martinko shows how Americans in the fledgling United States pointed to evidence of the past in the world around them and debated whether, and how, to preserve historic structures as permanent features of the new nation's landscape. From Indigenous mounds in the Ohio Valley to Independence Hall in Philadelphia; from Benjamin Franklin's childhood home in Boston to St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina; from Dutch colonial manors of the Hudson Valley to Henry Clay's Kentucky estate, early advocates of preservation strove not only to place boundaries on competitive real estate markets but also to determine what should not be for sale, how consumers should behave, and how certain types of labor should be valued. Before historic preservation existed as we know it today, many Americans articulated eclectic and sometimes contradictory definitions of architectural preservation to work out practical strategies for defining the relationship between public good and private profit. In arguing for the preservation of houses of worship and Indigenous earthworks, for example, some invoked the "public interest" of their stewards to strengthen corporate control of these collective spaces. Meanwhile, businessmen and political partisans adopted preservation of commercial sites to create opportunities for, and limits on, individual profit in a growing marketplace of goods. And owners of old houses and ancestral estates developed methods of preservation to reconcile competing demands for the seclusion of, and access to, American homes to shape the ways that capitalism affected family economies. In these ways, individuals harnessed preservation to garner political, economic, and social profit from the performance of public service. Ultimately, Martinko argues, by portraying the problems of the real estate market as social rather than economic, advocates of preservation affirmed a capitalist system of land development by promising to make it moral.

This elegant volume, a guide to the Library of Congress's massive collection of architectural drawings, offers a celebration of the ambitious project of designing the nation's capital. Each of its "capital drawings" reflects some aspect of the lives, history, and values of the building's creators and sponsors. 55 color illustrations. 123 halftones.