"Architecture of the Old South: North Carolina is one of a distinguished series of handsome volumes that comprehensively survey the historic buildings of the antebellum South in excellent photographs, old prints and drawings, newly done plans and elevations, and in a very readable text. These volumes describe and illustrate each Southern state's most important and beautiful buildings in a practical chronological and stylistic order, all set in a brief cultural and social background that is free of any dogmatic architectural thesis." "As this volume so clearly demonstrates, North Carolina has long suffered from an unjustified cultural inferiority complex. Despite an early start, North Carolina, with shallow harbors and unnavigable rivers, developed slowly, but finally produced architecture of great variety and beauty. The colonial buildings of New Bern and Edenton, the Moravian buildings at the frontier metropolis of Salem, the magnificent Capitol at Raleigh - the first great Greek Revival building in the South - are well known. But there are surprises as well in North Carolina, little-known buildings of great interest and importance: among them Old Brick House, an 18th-century dwelling with fully paneled interiors; Little Manor, the most sumptuous house of the Federal era, now in ruins; Cooleemee plantation, with its extraordinary cruciform house taken from a mid-19th-century pattern book. There are some two hundred North Carolina buildings featured in this book, with evocative photographs, historic prints and drawings, and newly drawn plans." "Especially important to the history of North Carolina architecture is the entire chapter devoted to the work of the famed New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis. Except for Virginia, Davis produced more buildings in North Carolina than in any other area outside of metropolitan New York. These commissions were important to Davis, and, as the photographs and drawings here show, must not be overlooked in the history of Greek Revival and Romantic building in America."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved