This abundantly illustrated, wide-ranging volume captures the rich and diverse architectural history of Rockbridge County, Virginia, including the two cities of Lexington and Buena Vista. While recent books have documented the area's social history, this book fills a long-recognized void by tracing the area's architectural heritage, from the eighteenth century to the post-World War II period. Beginning with early log and stone structures on what was once Virginia's frontier, the discussion moves on to the brick construction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that produced some of the finest Federal homes in the Valley of Virginia. The book covers the many styles that would follow, often with their own vernacular interpretation. T he Architecture of Historic Rockbridge is an enormously useful companion to The Architecture of Historic Lexington, itself an invaluable resource now for forty years. Including discussions of towns, schools, churches, resorts, and industrial buildings, the new volume will satisfy the scholarly, while presenting architectural analysis in an engaging manner accessible to a general readership. The book is richly illustrated throughout, with over two hundred color and black-and-white photographs (including the work of internationally recognized photographer Sally Mann), line drawings, and historic maps. Distributed for the Historic Lexington Foundation

Excerpt from Historical Significance of Rockbridge County, Virginia The writer was engaged for nearly three years by the Historical Inventory of the Work's Progress Administration of Virginia in making a survey of old buildings and other items of historical interest in Lexington and Rockbridge County, and as he had kept carbon copies of all reports made and sent in, he thought it might be of interest to publish a brief history of the County, giving some of the salient items which entered into the early days of the settlement of this section. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

In collecting materials for his landmark work on Rockbridge County, Oren F. Morton visited every judicial district in the county and examined their public records. Likewise, he examined the records of the parent counties of Orange, Augusta, and Botetourt, and followed up his exhaustive county researches with an examination of the archives of the capitol and state library in Richmond. The resulting publication, "A History of Rockbridge County," is considered one of the finest county histories ever written. Part One sketches in the history of Rockbridge from its settlement in 1737, with an appreciative eye on the pioneer element of the county--the Irish and the Scotch-Irish. Part Two is a genealogical source-book of Rockbridge County. It the author lists all the names he came upon in his researches, together with the accompanying fact in each instance. In Sections II to XIII inclusive the names are classified according to the source from which they derive. Miscellaneous facts, such as dates of birth, marriage, death, lists of children, and sundry other particulars are given in Section XIV. A complete index to the more than 15,000 names is not given for reasons that all lists are constructed in alphabetical order.There is, nonetheless, a general index to the text.

In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway challenges many assumptions about the development of preindustrial Southern Appalachia's society and economy. Drawing on data from 215 counties in nine states from 1700 to 1860, she argues that capitalist exchange and production came to the region much earlier than has been previously thought. Her innovative book is the first regional history of antebellum Southern Appalachia and the first study to apply world-systems theory to the development of the American frontier. Dunaway demonstrates that Europeans established significant trade relations with Native Americans in the southern mountains and thereby incorporated the region into the world economy as early as the seventeenth century. In addition to the much-studied fur trade, she explores various other forces of change, including government policy, absentee speculation in the region's natural resources, the emergence of towns, and the influence of local elites. Contrary to the myth of a homogeneous society composed mainly of subsistence homesteaders, Dunaway finds that many Appalachian landowners generated market surpluses by exploiting a large landless labor force, including slaves. In delineating these complexities of economy and labor in the region, Dunaway provides a perceptive critique of Appalachian exceptionalism and development.