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  • Orlando Ridout V, October 13, 1953–April 6, 2013
  • Edward Chappell (bio)

After observing a night of jolly conversation with Orlando in Williamsburg, a young Purcell Carson remarked to her parents, Cary and Barbara, “When I think about giants, I think of Mr. Ridout.”

Perhaps it was that larger-than-life personality that initially made me uncertain whether I liked the fellow when he materialized in the architectural design studio at the University of Virginia in 1975. I felt mildly uneasy as this black-bearded undergraduate spoke expansively to our fellow design students about life at Scottsville, a historic upper James River town that remained as scruffy in the 1970s as it did in Jefferson’s time. Who was this brash new settler in the dirtball landscape of my own small-town Piedmont?

Proprietary feelings evaporated several days later when, leaving school together, Orlando and I casually decided to have lunch. We soon discovered a shared great love for well-told stories of our own adventures, stories that usually involved hitchhiking, extreme discomfort, and a little danger. Subsequently, over long nights drinking on the back porch in Scottsville, the stories were retold and the details committed to memory. In later years we joked that a good friend’s chief value was in remembering particulars the originator had long forgotten.

It falls to me, then, to relate how Orlando, alone, resourcefully caught a ride in the engine of a South Dakota freight train that wrecked spectacularly en route to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Shaken by this brush with mortality but unscathed, he spent a pleasant night in a highway culvert on the outskirts of Minneapolis, soothed to sleep by the rumble of tractor-trailers overhead. An essential element of his stories, and life, was complete honesty and reliability. One must never stoop to confabulated stories, he observed, because it destroys the credibility of the narrative and diminishes the value of real experience.

Friendship was cemented by shared sentiments of a more professional nature. Both of us viewed all but our youngest architectural history teachers with good-natured disdain—although only Orlando expressed it by dangling the Cary D. Langhorne Professor of Architecture over the Temperance Spring water at Bremo plantation.

In consequence, we learned the most outside the classroom, in reading and fieldwork. Exploring the countryside with our Charlottesville classmate Camille Wells and colleague Dell Upton in Richmond, we learned to apply archaeological skills in exploring unsung buildings, sorting them out, and judging how they supported or challenged theories about which we read.

Always a hands-on worker, Orlando had planned to become a restoration carpenter, but he was discouraged by a lack of interest among preservation architects and found more agreeable company in architectural history and field study.

It is therefore supremely appropriate that Orlando asked those making donations in his memory to give them to a VAF fund for fieldwork. Ours was a fortunate generation in that we arrived on the scene when generous federal monies were distributed to state historic preservation offices to fund such work. Most states used the funds relatively well. A handful used them extremely well, leveraging the grants to pay fieldworkers to spend multiple years on a single county. The Maryland Historical Trust was already a superior office [End Page xi] when Barbara Cooper and Orlando moved to Annapolis in 1978 and he began work for the MHT.

For four years he conducted a model MHT survey of Queen Anne’s County, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. He intensively surveyed some five hundred buildings, writing about a dozen National Register nominations each year. This had to have been one of the finest county surveys done in the United States since the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act made them possible. Orlando explored the buildings, recorded them in measured drawings and photos, and carried out archival research to place the builders and their properties in contexts within their community and the region. His essay drawing on this work and the 1798 Federal Direct Tax records, to be posthumously submitted to Buildings & Landscapes, exemplifies his skill in interpreting both documents and field evidence.

In 1982 he moved to management. From then until 1986, he coordinated...

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