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 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 county'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 has been home to baseball magnate Larry MacPhail and the famous topiary artist Harvey Ladew, whose gardens draw visitors to this day. It was from Harford 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 when Mary E. W. Risteau, who made her home in Harford, championed women's rights in the 1930s, she could draw inspiration from fellow Harford native Cupid Paca, who had bravely pioneered the rights of African Americans a century earlier.

1. 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.