Buildings of West Virginia provides a comprehensive guide to the state's built environment, from the prehistoric mounds that are its earliest structures to buildings that have shaped its image--log cabins, elegant spas, and coal company towns--to its everyday commercial, industrial, government, religious, and domestic structures. Buildings and sites are described and interpreted in some 1,000 guidebook entries illustrated with approximately 375 photographs and keyed to 60 maps. Throughout, West Virginia's architecture is related to its distinctive geography, natural resources, early prosperity and later economic decline, and colorful history, first as part of the colony and state of Virginia and then as the Mountain State. About the Buildings of the United States Series : Buildings of West Virginia is the ninth volume to be published in the monumental Buildings of the United States , a series that Edwin McDowell of the New York Times has called "one of the most ambitious in publishing history." Sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians, the series is modeled on and inspired by the Buildings of England, the classic, multivolume work written by the eminent British architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner.