Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy Of ... (ISBN 0813923522)

Great book on early TN and VA antiques:
What a wonderful book if you are interested in 18th and 19th century Southern antiques. I really only bought the book for the section on furniture and still love it!

A gorgeous and useful book:
For anyone interested in the material history and decorative arts of the American South, this is a must-own book. It covers an important, previously undocumented transitional region where characteristic styles developed as seaboard craftsmen moved westward through present-day southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, along the stage route that came to be known as The Great Road. A project of the William King Regional Arts Center, the originating project's goal was to broaden the record of objects made by hand in the region prior to 1940 and to develop a representative picture of the region's role in American decorative arts. The resulting book is based on an exhaustive first-hand survey that produced over 2000 objects. Betsy K. White and her research team organized and provided a highly readable narrative for this stunning collection, itself the result of thousands of hours of primary research. The contents are organized into chapters on furniture, chairs, textiles, pottery, paintings and decoration, metalwork, baskets, and musical instruments. White has the gift for capturing the range, sources, and influences for each category without a hint of pedantry or archivist mumbling. Her prose is sharp, her grasp of the subject sure, and her overviews skillful and succinct. White wisely lets the objects speak for themselves through the splendid photographs of James H. Price. Rarely does photography do such credit to its objects! A pair of silk stockings made in 1860 in Smyth County, Virginia, is given an entire page, for instance. The reader is forced to scrutinize what he otherwise might have glanced at quickly turned the page. His eye is drawn to the complex design, is led to the maker's initials and the date of construction. The ample white space and the fine photography create an appreciation for a relatively humble creation and remind us of the omnipresence of home construction of even the simplest items. The chapter on furniture alone is worth the price of the book. I still find myself touching the 1859 walnut food safe on page 56, my fingers almost feeling its complex punched tin panels. And what about the early 19th-century cherry corner cupboard on page 59? At first glance, it looks like a rather typical 18th-century mahogany Virginia piece, a strong base with ogee-curved feet and wooden panels topped with a glass-doored top. But no, those panels are punched tin. And that mahogany is American cherry. This is a piece used to store both dinnerware and what goes onto that dinnerware. The chapter on pottery is also particularly beautiful and well done. Each chapter concludes with a list of known craftspeople, based on census and other records. This listing alone is a gift of great value. It and the signatures of many of the pieces remind us this road was traveled primarily by Scots-Irish with a strong German contingent. This is a gorgeous and useful book, a fitting document to the thousands of hours of first-hand research that went into the project from which it grew. In presenting the objects they created and routinely used, the book gives us the people who settled along the Great Road, and they are an interesting and complex population. I cannot imagine one growing weary of this book. It is a joy.