"Lost Virginia: Vanished Landmarks of the Old Dominion" was an all-too-familiar subject for organizers of Saturday night’s lecture at Ware Episcopal Church.

But the members of the Rosewell Foundation learned that they were fortunate in at least having a set of preserved ruins, as architectural historian Calder Loth detailed just a portion of the countless historic Virginia homes and other structures where little remains other than the photographs he has collected in his 40+ years with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Loth, co-author of "Lost Virginia," has worked for the Department of Historic Resources since its establishment in 1968. Although now "technically retired," he continues to play an active role in a number of organizations dedicated to preserving the state’s architectural heritage, according to Rosewell Foundation board president Jeff Klee, who introduced him at the talk. More than 100 people filled Ware Episcopal Church to hear the lecture.

In his time cataloguing Virginia’s man-made treasures, Loth has seen buildings succumb to fire, neglect, flood and, in the case of aging structures in more urban settings, the developer’s bulldozer.

"It’s a depressing subject," Loth said of the theme both of his book and of Saturday’s slide show presentation, "Lost Virginia." The book contains some 300 mansions, courthouses, churches, mills, etc., that are no longer standing, and Loth said that he could have easily written four or five volumes.

When people speak of Virginia, they picture bucolic homes and winding country roads, Loth said. "But sadly, a lot of Virginia is like this," he said, as he showed a slide of bumper-to-bumper traffic with strip malls and fast-food restaurants in the background. "We are losing our cultural landscape."

Some of "Lost Virginia" was lost long before Loth began his life’s work. "We know very little of what Richmond looked like before the Civil War," he said. One of the few buildings that was spared, at least partially, from the fires set by the retreating Confederate Army was the Exchange Bank on Main Street.

The façade of the 1841 building, with its imposing columns, remained intact, and the bank was rebuilt. The building was demolished in 1935, although the columns were preserved … for a while. In 1959, the state eventually took the columns and ground them up for marble chips.

Mills, he said, are especially vulnerable. Most went out of business by the 1950s and were abandoned to the elements. Combined with their position along the flood plain, these buildings are becoming increasingly scarce in Virginia.

He rattled off a number of other structures that are also vulnerable, from the corner drug store and courthouses to railroad depots and colonial churches. Virginia had as many as 300 colonial churches in the 19th century; today, there are only about 50, "including this wonderful church," he said, as he glanced around the pews of Ware Episcopal.

Urban renewal projects of the 1960s and ’70s, which Loth called "the most misguided program unleashed by the federal government," did much to destroy the heart of Virginia’s cities. He illustrated it with starkly different photos of Norfolk before and after urban renewal, with the "after" picture resembling one huge parking lot with only a few buildings remaining.

Loth has been acquainted with Rosewell since his days as an architectural history student at the University of Virginia. "We all had to take our sample brick," he joked, adding that his professor had said that if all the bricks taken by all the students were returned, Rosewell could be entirely rebuilt.

In the late 1960s, Loth took a photo of a piano stool made of a piece of woodwork from Rosewell. The design, he said, matched carvings of the staircase at Tuckahoe. When the stool’s owner Richard Mann Page Jr. died soon after, Loth learned that Page’s heir was planning to take the stool out of the state. Instead, Cecil Wray Page Jr. interceded and was instrumental in getting it placed in the collection of the Virginia Historical Society where it remains today, although it is not on public display.

"I don’t see why you can’t borrow this" and put it on display here, Loth added.

He spoke of Fairfield, the ancestral home of the Burwell family that was lost to fire in 1897. "I really would have loved the opportunity to study it," he said. Loth did come across a wooden fragment from Fairfield that had been used to prop open a door at Timberneck.

Thanks to the Virginia Landmarks Register (which now has 2,800 separate entries), zoning ordinances and preservation easements, Virginia is "not losing places of such quality today." Heading into the future, he said, the biggest threat to Virginia’s architectural heritage comes from development.

"Private property rights should be balanced against community values," Loth said. "We don’t want our next book to be on the ‘Lost Beauty of Virginia.’"