John W. Reps
Tidewater Towns: City Planning in Colonial Virginia and Maryland.
Williamsburg, Virginia: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1972. Williamsburg Architectural Studies. First edition. 0910412871 xii/345 pages.
Large-format oblong volume, measuring approximately 12.75" x 9.5", is bound in dark blue cloth spine and light brown cloth-covered boards, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket, with price of $15 on front flap, shows light shelfwear. Jacket is preserved in mylar cover.
"The story of how a new nation was carved out of the wilderness of North America has a mythology of its own, as every historian knows. One widely held myth has been that towns and cities, especially in the thirteen original colonies, were not planned, they just happened: some settled in a likely spot, others came along, and soon a community of houses and churches and streets had appeared.
Yet the orderly vistas of Williamsburg and the imposing circles of Annapolis gave clear proof that in those places as well as some others, imaginative planning had been done right from the start. And now Professor Reps demonstrates that the myth had little foundation anywhere in the Chesapeake Bay colonies.
This carefully documented and thoroughly illustrated study of the origins of towns in tidewater Virginia and Maryland shows that in almost every instance the towns were laid out on paper and staked out on the ground before the first house was built. Indeed, largely because of easy water transportation throughout the tidewater area, the efforts preliminary to establishing towns often were more impressive than the results achieved. Time and again the plans for settlement ended right where they started -- on paper. In other cases the planned town became a reality: Baltimore, Norfolk, Hampton, Alexandria, and others, all began with someone's plan of how the initial settlement should be laid out.
The author examines the red and reproduces plans, maps, and views of a large number of tidewater towns, both great and small; his range extends not only westward to Richmond, but to that postcolonial landmark of city planning, Washington, D.C. His greatest attention focuses on Williamsburg, and he attacks and presents a solution to a puzzle that has mystified many scholars: the W and M cipher of Governor Francis Nicholson's original plan for the colonial capital."