$39.95 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover with four-color jacket
300 pages with 261 maps, plans, paintings, engravings, lithographs, photographs, postcards, logos, advertisements, newspaper items, and other digital media
9.0″ x 11.0″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN 978-1-938086-50-2
Published in December 2020
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Published in association with the Institute for Visual Studies at James Madison University and the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society.
Events and Exhibitions
August 28 to October 13, 2017
Picturing Harrisonburg: Visions of a Shenandoah Valley City since 1828
Exhibition
Duke Hall Gallery of Fine Art
James Madison University
Monday, September 11, from 5-7
Opening Reception
by David Ehrenpreis
Foreword by Kenneth E. Koons, and contributing essays by Randall B. Jones, Kevin Borg, Dale MacAllister, Scott Hamilton Suter, and Henry Way
Picturing Harrisonburg examines, as no previous book has, the history of Harrisonburg, Virginia, once a frontier town settled during the 1730s but now a burgeoning urban center centrally located in one of America’s most beloved, historic, and beautiful regions—the Shenandoah Valley. The book offers a unique perspective on historical representation by focusing on how images of every kind reveal and represent a community’s evolving ideals and aspirations that change over time.
Organized chronologically around six distinct themes and periods of time and accompanied by 261 illustrations, many of them previously unpublished, Ehrenpreis and his contributing essayists explore the evolution of Harrisonburg’s built environment, its iconic “places of memory,” and how idealized visions of the community were often at odds with lived reality and the historical context in which the visions arose. The informative essays and captivating visual presentations begin in 1828 and include historic maps, sketches, lithographs, and plans, a pivotal 1867 panoramic oil painting of Harrisonburg, early-twentieth- century postcards, mid-twentieth- century documentary and commercial photographs, newspaper accounts and ads, images of “Urban Renewal,” then/now photographs, and the graphic designs, logos, and conceptual plans pertaining to the twenty-first- century city.
In so many ways, Harrisonburg’s urban history resembles that of other American towns and cities. As David Ehrenpreis writes, “While Harrisonburg has a unique history and distinct character well-known to Virginians, the challenges and problems it has confronted over time are common and familiar regionally and nationwide. Thus, Picturing Harrisonburg offers a new approach for understanding the evolution of other American communities, towns, and cities through their respective iconographic histories.”
About
About the Author
David Ehrenpreis was born in 1963 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is Director of the Institute for Visual Studies and a professor of art history at James Madison University, where he has taught since 1998. He completed his undergraduate degree in foreign languages at Hamilton College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in art history at Boston University. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Art Book, CAA Reviews, Centropa, German Studies Review, Woman’s Art Journal, and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, among others, and he has curated numerous exhibitions, including one on the work of the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. In addition to receiving support for research from the Arts Council of the Valley, College Art Association, German Academic Exchange Service, and James Madison University, he earned a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from Harvard University. He resides in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
About the Contributors
Kevin Borg was born in 1961 in San Bernardino, California, and grew up in nearby Rialto, California. He is a professor of history at James Madison University, where he has taught since 2000. After an early life shaped by industrial arts shop classes, followed by work as an auto mechanic and architectural woodworker, he completed his B.A. in history at the University of California, Riverside, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American history and the history of technology at the University of Delaware. His articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Journal of American History, The Journal of American Studies, Notes on Virginia, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, and Technology and Culture, among others, and he is the author of Auto Mechanics: Technology and Expertise in Twentieth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007; paperback, 2010). In 2015, he and Bradley Andrick received a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Open Grant to support development of “Spatial History in the Public Square: Maps, Images & Archives in the Community,” an online historical map and research tool; and, in 2017, received a JMU Provost’s Research Grant to expand that project. He resides in Bridgewater, Virginia.
Randall B. Jones was born in 1957 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the Maryland suburbs and Rockingham County, Virginia. He completed his B.A in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2005, he has served as a public information officer with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in Richmond and, as a freelance writer has authored articles for James Madison University’s alumni magazines, Montpelier and Madisonian, and for numerous other publications. Previously, he served as a book editor at the Center for American Places, a national nonprofit organization once located in downtown Harrisonburg, where he helped bring to publication—in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University Press, University of Chicago Press, and dozens of other publishers—books that have won more than 100 best-book awards and honors in 31 academic fields. He resides in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
Kenneth E. Koons was born in 1954 in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a farm near there. He is a professor of history at Virginia Military Institute, where he has taught since 1982. He completed his B.A. and M.A in history at Shippensburg State College and his Ph.D. in history at Carnegie Mellon University. His articles have appeared in a number of edited collections, including Archaeological Perspectives on the American Civil War, edited by Clarence R. Geier and Stephen Potter (University Press of Florida, 2000), and Home Front to Front Line: The Civil War Era in the Shenandoah Valley, edited by Jonathan A. Noyalas (Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, 2009). He is also co-editor, with Warren R. Hofstra, of After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800–1900 (University of Tennessee Press, 2000). In the realm of public history, Koons has served as a consultant to museums, government agencies, attorneys, and various non-profit organization on issues relating to the history of agriculture and rural life. He has received numerous awards and honors, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Jessie Ball DuPont Seminar, the British Council, Belfast, Ireland, and a Virginia Historical Society Mellon Research Fellowship. Among his many research and teaching awards at VMI, he has been appointed as a General Edwin Cox 20′ Institute Professorship in History and Economics. Koons resides in Spottwood, Virginia.
Dale MacAllister was born 1947 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and grew up in nearby Singers Glen, Virginia. He is resident historian at the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society and an adjunct instructor at James Madison University. He completed his B.A. in physics at Bridgewater College and his M.S. Ed. at James Madison University. Since 1971, he has spent his classroom career teaching middle school in Rockingham County and then supervising middle and high school student teachers for JMU. His articles about local and Shenandoah Valley history have appeared in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society and Shenandoah Valley Folklife Society newsletters, and he is currently completing a biography of Lucy F. Simms, Harrisonburg’s most famous African-American teacher. He resides in Singers Glen, Virginia.
Scott Hamilton Suter was born in 1962 in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and grew up in Rockingham County, Virginia. He is an associate professor of English and chair of the English Department at Bridgewater College, where he has taught since 2002. He completed his B.A. in English at James Madison University, his M.A. in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his Ph.D. in American studies at George Washington University. He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in 1996–1997. His essays have appeared in numerous books, among them Ceramics in America (Milwaukee, WI: Chipstone Foundation, 2005), Encyclopedia of American Folklife (M.E. Sharpe, 2006), Rough South, Rural South: Region and Class in Recent Southern Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2016), Shenandoah Valley Apples (Columbia College Chicago Press, 2013), and The Philosophy of David Lynch (University Press of Kentucky, 2011). He is also the author of Shenandoah Valley Folklife (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) which was a Virginia Book Award nominee, Places, Faces, and Traces: Historical Photographs of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County (Silver Lake Mill, 2005) and Images of America: Harrisonburg (Arcadia Publishing, 2003), both collaborations with Cheryl Lyon. He resides in Spring Creek, Virginia.
Henry Way was born in 1980 in Bristol in the United Kingdom, where he also grew up. He is an associate professor of geography at James Madison University and the interim associate dean of the College of Integrated Science and Technology at JMU, where he has taught since 2008. He completed his B.A. in geography at the University of Oxford, a M.Phil. in geographical research at the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in geography at the University of Kansas. His articles have appeared in Cultural Geographies, Historical Geography, and in proceedings of international conferences on the subjects of urban planning and cultural and urban geography. He resides in Harrisonburg, where he is also Chair of the Harrisonburg Planning Commission.
Slide Show
Wilson Miles Cary Fairfax, Plan of Harrisonburg, 1828. The first-known map of Harrisonburg appears in a surveyor’s book, tracing a possible route for an east-west turnpike across the Shenandoah Valley, from Richmond to Franklin, West Virginia (then a part of Virginia). 
Emma Lyon Bryan, “Town of Harrisonburg, Va. 1867,” oil on canvas. Bryan’s famous panorama offers a detailed, idealized vision of Harrisonburg in the aftermath of the Civil War. 
Detail of Emma Lyon Bryan, “Town of Harrisonburg, Va. 1867.” By 1867, many African-American freedmen lived in this row of houses in the town’s “Jail Hill” neighborhood, which would later be leveled during the Urban Renewal era (see slide 10). 
Detail of Emma Lyon Bryan, “Town of Harrisonburg, Va. 1867.” A view of Court Square, the commercial and administrative center of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County 
“Bird’s Eye View, Harrisonburg, Virginia.,” ca. 1910, postcard. A turn-of- the-twentieth century double-postcard showcases the town’s new Rockingham County courthouse, designed by noted architect T. J. Collins, and the growing city center around Court Square. 
“Rockingham Memorial Hospital, Harrisonburg, Virginia.,” ca. 1910, postcard. Built on a hill southeast of downtown, the new hospital’s Neoclassical facade reflected the progressive optimism of its founders. 
Kavanaugh Hotel, “A Pictorial Map: Harrisonburg in the Heart of the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia,” ca. 1936. This map demonstrates the city’s desire to become a regional tourist destination during the 1930s. 
Photograph of Dan Hartman’s Service Station (ca. 1938) by Lupton Kaylor. A sizeable part of this local photographer’s business was promoting local businesses such as this “filling” station that also included a restaurant and motor freight company. The automobile age was fully embraced by Harrisonburg, which had become a well-known tourist destination by this time. 
Photograph of Friddle’s Barbers at 80 South Main Street (1941) by John Vachon. This image, taken by a Farm Securities Administration photographer, not only depicts small-town America, but also promotes a New Deal federal employment program. 
Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority, aerial view of Urban Renewal areas north of downtown, ca. 1965. Photographer unknown. This photograph was taken by the city’s Redevelopment and Housing Authority to document the “progress” being made to encourage commercial development by widening arteries such as U.S. 11 (bottom and right) and North Mason Street (center) and leveling traditional working-class neighborhoods (lower left). 
Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority, 138 East Effinger Street, facing west, 1958. Photographer unknown. Compare this photograph with the next one, as they are the same location. 
Photograph of the same location as in the previous image, but now featuring the Rockingham County Administration, 2015. Photograph by David Ehrenpreis. 
City of Harrisonburg’s digital rendering (2014) of an “improved” East Market Street (U.S. 11). Harrisonburg has made great efforts to improve the city’s quality of life and, as part of this twenty-first- century vision, has become regionally known as a pedestrian-space and bike-friendly community for residents and visitors alike. 
Bird’s-eye photograph (2014) by Art Pekum of a holiday parade on Main Street near Court Square. With the growing success of revitalization efforts, more residents and visitors are returning downtown. 
Aerial view of James Madison University, looking east, 2015. Photographer unknown. One of the city’s largest employers, J.M.U. started as a women’s teaching college in 1908. In recent decades, it has been regarded as one of the finest universities in Virginia and the region and now has more than 21,000 students and nearly 1,500 faculty.
Praise
“Where we live is important. As a result, understanding the places where we live is a meaningful endeavor. Picturing Harrisonburg takes a deep dive into the evolution of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and, in doing so, provides a rich case study for reading urban landscapes everywhere. The book presents a wealth of information with implications for how we envision, construct, and remember our communities. One of the key lessons is that Harrisonburg, like all cities and towns, is not an accident. The town developed into a major urban center through specific and willful human actions that, in this innovative book, are revealed in the visual representations of that place.
“We are an adaptive species, and planning and designing our habitats are among our strongest tools for adaptation. The arts of planning and design advance through learning what has worked and what has not in the past. Picturing Harrisonburg reveals much about the evolution of an important Virginia city that provides insight into how we understand and care for all places.”
—Frederick R. Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Academy in Rome