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

Literally hundreds of Virginia buildings of architectural or historical interest have vanished. Most were demolished or burned, while others were abandoned as populations and needs shifted. The consequence is that important models of architectural accomplishment and key symbols of human aspiration and achievement have disappeared and are largely forgotten. Lost Virginia is an effort to document and reconstruct the appearance of Virginia architecture in earlier times, when the nation's destiny and history were intimately tied to the Old Dominion's landscape and buildings. It seeks to recover, at least on paper, an impression of our lost architectural heritage. Organized into categories of domestic, civic, religious, and commercial buildings, the more than three hundred vanished structures illustrated within include slave pens in Alexandria, George Washington's singular sixteen-sided barn, a one-room schoolhouse in Greene County, and the 18th-century Valley homes--long mistaken for forts--of German-speaking settlers. Soldiers in both blue and gray tramped by the now-lost Rockingham County courthouse, and a cathedral-like federal post office in Roanoke joins Rockbridge County's fantastic Alleghany Hotel on the list of exceptional but short-lived buildings. Also documented are creations like Frank Lloyd Wright's Larkin Company Pavilion, destroyed just months after it had been erected for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exhibition, and the Thomas Jefferson-designed Barboursville in Orange County. --jacket.

The development of many artisans in the fine arts, textiles, furniture, clocks, rifles, ironwork, and pottery is traced from 1750 through the post-Civil War years.