Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Our Identity and Well-Being

This book explores the reasons that old places matter to people such as the feelings of belonging, continuity, stability, identity and memory, as well as the more traditional reasons, such as history, national identity, and architecture. This book brings these ideas together in evocative language and with illustrative images.

Thompson McCord Mayes, vice president and senior counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has spent his professional career preserving old places. In 2013, Tom was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation by the American Academy in Rome, and subsequently spent a six-month residency in Rome as a Fellow of the Academy. The essays that are collected in this publication came about as a result of that experience. They were previously published in 2014 and 2015 as a series on the National Trust’s Preservation Leadership Forum Blog, http: //blog.preservation leadershipforum.org.