Old house, Beaufort, Carteret County, North Carolina

Noted architectural photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) created a collection of early American buildings and gardens called the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South (CSAS). This collection, created primarily in the 1930s, provides more than 7,100 images showing an estimated 1,700 structures and sites in rural and urban areas of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and to a lesser extent Florida, Mississippi, and West Virginia. Johnston’s interest in both vernacular and high style structures resulted in vivid portrayals of the exteriors and interiors of houses, mills, and churches as well as mansions, plantations, and outbuildings. The survey began with a privately funded project to document the Chatham estate and nearby Fredericksburg and Old Falmouth, Virginia, in 1927-29. Johnston then dedicated herself to pursuing a larger project to help preserve historic buildings and inspire interest in American architectural history. The Carnegie Corporation became her primary financial supporter and provided six grants during the 1930s on condition that the negatives be deposited with the Library of Congress. The Library formally acquired the CSAS negatives from her estate in 1953, along with her extensive papers and approximately 20,000 other photographs.

This is another AI-assisted collection, this time it features 20K+ images of manors. A manor is a large country house with lands, the principal house of a landed (country) estate. This collection took about 15 minutes to make, including adding about 18,000 relevant images as "manors" and removing portraits of people with "Manor" last names. Of course, image recognition was already done before and that process required much much longer time and machine resources. Please contact us if you need large image sets or need to tag your own large collections using our neural networks.