Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 13 · column 2 of 5 · from the scan, no model involved
authors include a few paragraphs of history on each of the counties in the Virginia Piedmont, stretching from Loudoun, which borders Maryland to Patrick and Henry, which borders North Carolina. There’s a brief text for each of the houses, but unfortunately, it often seems to say too much about houses that don’t seem to look or be interesting, at least not from what they’ve written about them, and not enough about houses that are. Also, a few of the houses that sound interesting architecturally from the authors’ description aren’t honored with a picture—Pleasant View in Rappahannock, for one.
IN SOME cases, the text accompanying the picture wanders off into genealogy. That’s fine, if those mentioned were of some local or wider fame, but for a general picture book like this, a couple of paragraphs of who married who for several generations is not welcome or needed. Maybe many of the former inhabitants of these houses are worth noting, but the authors ought to at least say why. And all too often, they don’t.
Sometimes the authors give the exact or approximate date that the house, additions and dependencies were built, but in many cases they don’t. Just more genealogy, telling when the original owner of the tract (but not the house) acquired it. Thornton Hill in Rappahannock is an example. An intriguing house from the picture and an ecletic one; a gambrel roof with a gable in the center, pedimented dormers and what seems to be Victorian spindlework for a porch railing. But it’s not an easy house to date, cer
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