New Orleans Architecture, Volume IX: Carrollton by Robert Cangelosi Jr., and: Building of Mississippi by Jennifer V. O. Baughn, Michael W. Fazio and Mary Warren Miller (review)

One of Frederick Law Olmsted’s central arguments in The Cotton Kingdom was that the institution of slavery in the South did not contribute to the improvement of its cities and built environment. The profits made from the labor of enslaved people and the cotton they produced went not to “dwellings, libraries, churches” but to the purchase of more enslaved people.¹ Jennifer Baughn and Michael Fazio’s Buildings of Mississippi reframes Olmsted’s argument through a synthetic analysis of the built environment in what that they call the “deepest of the Deep South states.” Mississippi, they state, is a rural state and symbolizes “the good and the bad in American culture, especially regarding its struggles with race and civil rights.”² This clear framing of the guidebook as a means to address the ways that Mississippi’s “built landscape tells a story of race relations in America” situates its plantation houses and vernacular cabins of enslaved people in a context that replaces the traditional narratives of an elegant and refined Old South, pierces the bubble of Lost Cause narratives, and links architectural history to other histories of race and region.

This critical framework is particularly important for a guidebook published in a publicly accessible format that can easily be taken on a road trip and used to invent itineraries to explore Mississippi beyond its best-known tourist destinations. The book is sold in the gift shops of plantation houses that otherwise elide the history of slavery, continuing to promote a romanticized vision of plantations as elegant places of repose, attracting weddings, family reunions, and tour buses full of sightseers in search of the mythical Old South. While some of these historic sites have begun a process of rethinking and realigning the stories they tell and how they tell them, there remains work to be done to reinterpret the meaning of our built environment for contemporary audiences.³ Buildings of Mississippi, with its clear, plain statements about “white nostalgia for the Old South” is an important tool in creating a public narrative for the state as a whole that countermands Lost Cause romanticism without losing the ability to advocate for the formative relevance of the state’s landscapes and architecture to the story of the United States.

The realignment of southern architectural history that Buildings of Mississippi engages has significance beyond tourism and is directly related to the policies and funding that shape what we preserve and how, and how cities and towns invest in redevelopment. Indeed, the linked missions of architectural history and historic preservation are made clear by the book’s co-authors. Fazio, a longtime professor of architecture at Mississippi State University, was the author of the much-used textbook Buildings Across Time as well as an urban and architectural history of Birmingham, Alabama, Landscape of Transformations. His ability to write both local history and global history for a broad audience underpins the book. Jennifer V. O. Baughn is the book’s co-author and chief architectural historian for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The book’s careful curation of sites reflects contemporary discourse in historic preservation about the need to rethink how we choose our landmarks to represent a fuller architectural history.

The book updates the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States (BUS) format by more clearly creating a portable guidebook. It is a welcome change. Buildings of Mississippi feels less like a textbook than some other BUS volumes. Baughn and Fazio’s division of the state into regions makes the creation of itineraries a relatively simple task. It also highlights the varied ways that water defines Mississippi’s...