Book Description

From Fayetteville, Little Rock, and Hot Springs to Jonesboro, El Dorado, Arkadelphia, Texarkana, and scores of places in between, the latest volume in the Buildings of the United States series provides the most comprehensive, authoritative, and up-to-date guide to the architecture of Arkansas. The result of a lifetime's research and fieldwork by the esteemed historian and preservationist Cyrus A. Sutherland, this book captures the range and richness of the state's buildings and landscapes, whose stories can prove as fascinating and gripping as a novel's plotline. Nearly 500 building entries, accompanied by 250 illustrations and 24 maps, encompass the state's major regions--the Ozark Plateau, the Arkansas River Valley, the Ouachita Mountains, the West Gulf Coastal Plain, and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain (commonly known as the Delta). The places canvassed include everything from works by Arkansas natives E. Fay Jones and Edward Durell Stone to Sam Walton's Five-and-Ten and Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to Bill Clinton's birthplace and presidential library. The volume highlights the role and resilience of mountain, valley, and Mississippi River communities; surveys significant state and national parks; and traces the lively history of such resorts as Hot Springs and Eureka Springs. Along the way, it offers compelling accounts of sites from the well to the lesser known--the magnificent Toltec Mounds near Scott, the New Deal-era Dyess Colony, Tyronza's Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, the Rohwer Relocation Center and McGehee Japanese American Internment Museum, Central High School in Little Rock--and considers modern buildings that herald a renaissance in the state's cultural, economic, and political history.