The Toll House kitchen on Blue Ridge Turnpike about a mile east of Fincastle circa late 18th century. File Photo BV.

The Southern Shenandoah Valley Branch of Preservation Virginia will hold its Annual Meeting on Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 1:30 pm. The meeting and program will be held in the auditorium of Kendal Retirement Center at 1:30 pm with a reception immediately following.

Dr. Ann McCleary will be the guest speaker and will focus on “The History and Development of Early Turnpike Towns in the Valley of Virginia.” According to Kurt Russ, Branch director, “This topic will tie in nicely with our branch’s recent focus on the Lewis and Clark Eastern Legacy Trail initiative. It will allow us a unique perspective or glimpse of what the corridor of travel traversed by their expedition looked like in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Ann is not only from Augusta County but she is THE expert on the Valley’s architectural history and we feel very fortunate to have her as our speaker.”

Dr. McCleary has her Ph.D. from Brown University with a concentration in Early American History and American Material Culture. She is currently Associate Professor of History & Coordinator of Public History for the Department of History at the University of West Georgia, Carrollton GA.

For her lecture at the Southern Shenandoah Valley Branch’s annual meeting, she will use publications that specifically relate to what she describes as her “Turnpike Towns Lecture.”These include:

1)”Forging a Regional Identity: The Development of Rural Vernacular Architecture in the Central Shenandoah Valley, 1790-1850,” in Kenneth Kooks and Warren Hofstra, editors, After the Backcountry, University of Tennessee Press, 2000.

2)Entries for “The Valley of Virginia, “Augusta County,” “Rockingham County,” “Waynesboro” and “Harrisonburg” for A Guide to the Architecture of Western Virginia, edited by Anne Carter Lee, part of a series of guidebooks on state architecture sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians and published by Oxford University Press.

3)”Ethnic Influences on the Early Architecture of the Shenandoah Valley,” in Michael Puglisi, Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier, University of Tennessee Press, 1997.

4)Historic Resources of Augusta County, Virginia, Eighteenth Century to Present, Virginia Department of Historic Resources, 1983.

5)“The Turnpike Towns,@ in Warren Hofstra and Karl Raitz, editors, The Valley Turnpike, commissioned by the Center for American Places, University of Virginia Press, 2010.

The meeting and lecture are free and open to the public. For further information contact Peggy Crosson, 540-354-9698.