Lost Virginia

Book excerpt: 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.