A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina by Catherine Bishir, Michael T. Southern (review)

54 ARRIS Volume 9 1998 Book Review 311 Johnson Street, New Bern, NC. Photograph courtesy of the C. Murray Smart Media Center, University of Arkansas School of Architecture. Catherine Bishir and Michael T. Southern. A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1966. There is an old saying that North Carolina is a "valley of humility and contentment between two mountains of conceit ." The point is, of course, that Nmth Carolina can seem a little humble given the pretentious claims to historic importance of its neighbors Virginia and South Carolina. One is reminded of this more modest history when perusing this guide book to the architecture of eastern North Carolina. Because of the peculiarities of navigation, the state did not develop a major port city in the colonial period. The Outer Banks were too treacherous, so trade often went to nearby states. As a result, while there are some spectacular high style buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the region, there are not many and only a few of them can compare with the splendors of Virginia's James River plantations or South Carolina's Charleston. But this is not a book about high style architecture. It is a guide to the region, and what is impmtant and instructive here are not the buildings that fit into the national framework, but instead the many small scattered farms, villages, fishing towns and tobacco barns that form a distinctive regional legacy. It is the humble, special character of these buildings that is at the heart of this book. The Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina is the first of three projected volumes sponsored by the State Historic Preservation Office, North Carolina Division of Archives and History. North Carolina is a big state (some 500 miles across) and it has been fortunate in the number of historic structures that have survived, so there is a lot to record. The second volume, already underway, will treat the mountainous western region while the third will deal with the Piedmont, the broad central plains in the center of the state. The authors of the guide, Catherine Bishir and Michael Southern, have worked for the No1th Carolina SHPO for some twenty-five years and are the acknowledged experts on the architecture of the state. Bishir was a co-author of Architects and Builders in North Carolina (1990) and the author of the big, gloriously illustrated volume North Carolina Architecture (1990), which won an earlier SESAH book award. But both of these earlier books were scholarly tomes. One dealt with the practice of building and the other was a thematic study of the state's architectural resources. By contrast, this is a guide book meant to be small enough (despite its 483 pages) to fit into a glove compartment and comfortable enough to carry along while exploring a town. One can simply sit down and read it, as this reviewer did, but it would have been much more fun to take it along on a journey. In fact, it is Iikely that the book may inspire such sojourns. The clearly laid out maps, the tantalizing photographs, and the rich descriptions are going to entice quite a few architectural buffs to take to their cars book in hand. And so it should be, for despite all its humble humility , the Tidewater and Coastal Plain are areas, which have much to offer. This was, after all, the place where the first English settlement in the New World took place. Sir Walter Raleigh sent two ill-fated groups of settlers to Roanoke Island, the first in 1585 and the second in 1587. The mystery of what happened to the second group (they had disappeared by the time supply ships returned in 1590) has been the subject of both a 1921 movie and the longest running outdoor play in history . Paul Green's The Lost Colony, performed first in 1937 as a Federal Theater Project under the WPA is still playing each summer for visitors to Roanoke Island. Tourists can also enjoy a reconstruction of Raleigh's fort, a modem version of an Elizabethan sailing vessel...