Georgia Inside and Out: Architecture, Landscape, and Decorative Arts follows the publication in 2003 of the First Henry D. Green Symposium—The Savannah River Valley to 1865: Fine Arts, Architecture, and Decorative Arts, also edited by Ashley Callahan. The symposium series is named in honor of Henry D. Green (1909–2003), who beginning in the 1930s established himself as a pioneer in the appreciation and study of Southern heritage, particularly Southern decorative arts. Under Callahan’s direction, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens brings a welcome focus on its home state. For decades the study of American art and architecture has seen the South long overshadowed by attention on the Northeast; and when the South is studied, communities in Virginia, along with Charleston and New Orleans, tend to command most scholars’ attention. This volume makes a valuable contribution to remedying the neglect of Georgia within studies of the Southern built environment.

One of the benefits of a volume of published papers from a symposium is the opportunity to bring together topics typically treated in isolation—namely, the three areas of inquiry here: architecture, landscape, and decorative arts. The combination is refreshing, offering a strongly social perspective on the history of the built environment that addresses the lives, as well as the works, of various craftsmen, designers, artists, and preservationists. Like going to a party attended by many unfamiliar people, this volume encourages us to mingle, making acquaintances with subjects that would otherwise be addressed in highly specialized literature and with practitioners we would be lucky ever to encounter at all. The book comprises ten essays, the transcript of an address delivered by Green in 1978 at Williamsburg, and a preface and foreword. Given the wide variety of topics and different modes of presentation, the apparent logic of the organization of papers into a group of five relating loosely to indoor subjects followed by a group of five outdoor subjects (this sequence evidently dictated by the title of the symposium) easily escapes the reader’s notice. Some editorial comment in this regard would have helped give the book greater coherence.

The foreword, written by Wendell Garrett, provides an excellent and succinct historical overview of Georgia from its chartering in 1732 up to the 1830s, with the beginning of the “period of the common man” signaled by the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. His summary of the social character of Georgia is particularly helpful, informing the reader that its wealthiest citizens formed “an aristocracy of the middle class, a ‘squirearchy’ of energetic and opportunistic businessmen willing and able to exploit labor and land in order to grow rich quickly” (12). The majority of farmers belonged to a yeoman, or middle class, of common people whose religious affiliation was less likely Anglican, which predominated in other American colonies, than Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, or Presbyterian. The invention of the cotton gin on a Savannah plantation by Eli Whitney in 1793 was, as Garrett rightly notes, the key event in Georgia history, one that rapidly revolutionized the Southern economy (13) and made the state the leading cotton producer in the world from 1820 to 1860. In setting the context for the variety of papers in this volume, Garrett aptly quotes Samuel Johnson, who observed, “The true state of every nation is the state of common life” (13).

The opening essay, John McKay Sheftall’s “Restoring The Cedars Inside and Out: The Odyssey of Keeping a Homeplace in the Family,” sets the tone for most of the papers in the volume by combining the factual with the personal. Sheftall’s account offers a fascinating dialogue between a house, its occupants, and the many furnishings and possessions that help cement that relationship over several generations. His personal connection to the house played a strong role in its restoration and made surprising insights possible. For example, paint analysis revealed that the original creamy ochre paint in the formal parlor matched the color of the Old Paris tea set from the 1830s of the original owner, his great-grandmother (25). One wonders how many color choices in other historic houses around the country were informed by the desire to match rooms to the objects they contain, but where such connections have been severed by changes of ownership.

Among the first group of essays, two stand out for their scholarship and relevance to broader movements outside of Georgia. In “Bits and Pieces, Paper and Pattern: Researching Wallpaper in Nineteenth-Century Vernacular Georgia,” Maryellen Higginbotham asserts that wallpaper “is the least researched or documented area” within the decorative arts (29), and accordingly sees her paper as “providing the foundation for researching wallpaper in nineteenth-century Georgia” (38). Following a brief historiography of the sparse discussions of Georgia wallpaper, she begins building that foundation by providing a meticulously documented reconstruction of the history of wallpaper in the state, illustrating it with five case-study houses. Similarly, Tania Sammons sheds light on a generally ignored component of the modern house in her essay, “Feeling Gravity’s Pull: The Andrew Low House Bathing Room, A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Example.” Her paper nicely contextualizes the findings of various archeological studies of the Low House within contemporaneous discussions of indoor plumbing and domestic bathing facilities, most notably the writings of A.J. Downing. Like a paleontologist assembling a dinosaur skeleton from multiple specimens, Sammons pieces together evidence from other houses in Savannah and elsewhere to reconstitute a sense of how an actual bathroom from that time looked and functioned.

The inclusion of a biographical essay about Green provides the reader with a much greater appreciation for the namesake of the symposium series. Authored by his daughter, Mary Burdell, “Sharing Henry Green” recounts through personal reminiscences the evolution of her father’s pathbreaking interest in historic Georgia furniture and historic preservation efforts. Bizarrely situated fourth among the ten papers (as opposed to first, where it would promptly inform the reader about Green’s importance), the essay calls out for some editorial trimming, especially concerning his youth.

Finest among the second group of essays, those addressing “outdoor” topics, is Paul Manoguerra’s “The Weight of a Perpetual Creation: George Cooke’s Tallulah Falls and American Tourist Representations of Waterfalls” for its fresh approach and depth of inquiry. “Instead of discussing Cooke’s 1841 painting and other images from the era solely in terms of aesthetics and high art,” he adopts a material-culture approach that “conceives of paintings like Tallulah Falls as participants in a discourse of the concerns of mid-nineteenth-century Americans” (104). Manoguerra connects Cooke’s painting to contemporaneous conceptions—manifest in both art and literature—of the American landscape that associated its wild and uncultivated character with the sublime and that linked ideas of nature and religion. Whereas paintings of European landscapes emphasized the picturesque and its focus on the past, American landscapes evoked a sublime present and future. New World waterfalls, specifically, “were viewed as a sign from God of the millennial promise of America” (111). Manoguerra’s analysis helps explain why such associations made sites like Tallulah Falls and Niagara Falls significant tourist destinations.

While less analytical than Manoguerra’s fine essay, other papers in this section contribute interesting information about their respective areas. In “Westville and 1850 Gardening in the South,” Thornton Jordan insightfully explains how the prolonged American fascination with formal-style gardens in the mid-nineteenth century, in contrast to the European preference for naturalistic gardens, stemmed from the relationship of the people to the larger landscape. For Americans, a formal garden represented a modicum of control over nature in the face of an apparently boundless wilderness on the nearby frontier. The thrust of Jordan’s essay, however, addresses the practicalities of maintaining a garden at that time—the importation of plant species, insect control, and fertilization—in the context of a recreated nineteenth-century garden at the assembled historic village of Westville near Lumpkin, Georgia. Michele Gillespie sheds light on the ironworking trade through her analysis of a single practitioner in “From Artisan to Entrepreneur: William Price Talmage, Ironworker.” What makes Talmage notable was that he maintained a journal for over forty years that documented both personal information and public events. Most valuable for the historian is the insight it offers into the professional life of an ironworker at a time when writings by artisans were essentially unheard of.

The volume concludes with a transcription of a speech entitled “Adventures of a Collector” that Green delivered in 1978 at the Williamsburg Antiques Forum. Green muses on the challenges he faced in the early decades of his collecting. The piece is a fitting conclusion to the book in its offering of a personal perspective on how one man sought to preserve the material culture of a region’s history. Indeed, Georgia Inside and Out, through its selection of papers, offers a wonderful sense of individuality to the various areas of the decorative arts.

Overall, the book mirrors perhaps too closely the content of the symposium, with the papers, according to Callahan, “printed as they were presented” (7). Besides an unevenness in the quality and significance of the essays, closer editing might have eliminated a few sloppy errors, such as a reference to Greenfield Village being located in Massachusetts (116)—it is in Dearborn, Michigan—or a caption for an image of the University of Georgia Arch (136) dating it to “c.1950” when the text mentions 1857 as its date (135). Despite such problems, the book as a whole contributes greatly to the broadening of knowledge concerning topics typically outside the purview of art and architectural historians.