Perched at the head of the Bay--where the Susquehanna River flattens out to form the Chesapeake--Harford County, Maryland, takes in 520-odd square miles of land and water and more than three hundred years of history. Named for Henry Harford, illegitimate son of the last Lord Baltimore, the county is a testament to human and architectural diversity.
In An Architectural History of Harford County, Maryland, Christopher Weeks brings together some six hundred photographs and a richly detailed text to explore one of the truly fascinating regions in America. Architecture in Harford County reflects almost every influence, from the earliest colonial folk styles to Bauhaus modern. It is all here: Palladian mansions, some of the country's earliest and finest Gothic Revival churches, the "romantic" stone cottages of the mid-1800s, Belle Epoch mansions of the wealthy, two of the few extant Freedmen's Bureau buildings remaining in the nation, and, of course, the urban tract housing of the mid-twentieth century. Weeks takes us on an architectural tour that includes the country's industrial heritage--quarries in Cardiff and Whiteford, Victorian-era canning establishments in Lapidum, and some of the finest early-nineteenth-century gristmills in the country.
Weeks also introduces readers to Harford's equally interesting citizens. Harford County was home to baseball magnate Larry MacPhail and the famous topiary artist Harvey Ladew, whose gardens draw visitors to this day. It was from here that four generations of the Rodgers family shaped the history of the American navy, Junius and Edwin Booth made pioneering contributions to American theater, and Dr. Howard Kelly and Dr. John Archer made bold progress in American medicine. Harford resident Robert Smith of Spesutia Island proved himself a good friend of Thomas Jefferson. Four generations later Millard Tydings of Oakington proved himself an equally strong early advocate of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. And if Mary E. W. Risteau, who built her house in Harford, deserves praise for championing women's rights in the 1930s, she had rich inspiration to draw on in fellow Harford native Cupid Paca, who had bravely pioneered the rights of African-Americans a century earlier.
Part architectural record and part vivid history, An Architectural History of Harford County, Maryland offers a splendid portrait of one of the longest-settled localities in eastern America.
