Meet The Author

Mark C. McDonald has served as President and CEO of The Georgia Trust for Historical Preservation since June 2008. Since that time, The Georgia Trust has dramatically improved its budget performance and extended its programs and revolving fund activities. He has over 37 years of professional involvement in historic preservation and a strong business background. He has served as the executive director for three preservation organizations in the Southeast, including the Historic Salisbury Foundation in North Carolina from 1986-1990, the Mobile Historic Development Commission in Mobile, Alabama from 1990-1998 and the Historic Savannah Foundation from 1998-2008. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Architecture of the Last Colony

Architecture of the Last Colony surveys the most important extant buildings in the state of Georgia, focusing on structures that showcase successful historic preservation practices and techniques. Richly illustrated with full-color, large-format photographs of these structures along with descriptions of their architectural significance, this book tells the story of how Georgia’s built environment reflects its growth from 1733 to the present. While numerous books about Georgia architecture feature buildings that have been lost to demolition, this volume focuses on extant structures that

readers can visit and observe for themselves. The buildings range in style from the folk-art structures of St. EOM’s Pasaquan and Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens to the suburban Craftsman bungalows of Leila Ross Wilburn to the lavish antebellum mansions of Savannah and Athens, Georgia. Noted architectural photographers, including Brian Brown, Diane Kirkland, James Lockhart, Charlie Miller, and John Tatum, provide the companion photographs. The six chapters in the book, written by architectural historians with subject-matter expertise, are organized chronologically and by architectural style, covering the earliest buildings in Georgia up through significant contemporary structures of the twentieth century. These buildings tell a diverse story that shows how nationally significant architects and Native Americans, pioneer, female, and African American architects have all contributed to Georgia’s built environment.