Joe Frazer Smith
Joe Frazer Smith was an American architect and author.
Early life
Joe Frazer Smith was born on March 25, 1897, in Canton, Mississippi. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1921.Career
Smith became an architect in Memphis, Tennessee in 1922. With Herbert Burnham, he designed the mansion of the president of Rhodes College in Memphis in 1926. He designed Castle Crest in Jackson, Mississippi in 1929–1930, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1938, he designed Dixie Homes, public housing for African Americans in Memphis.Smith authored a book about historic mansions in the Southeastern United States. It was published as White Pillars: Early Life and Architecture of the Lower Mississippi Valley Country and later retitled Plantation Houses and Mansions of the Old South. In particular, Smith describes plantation homes in Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. In a review for The Journal of Southern History, Edwin Adams Davis called the book "a delightful combination of architecture and history" as well as "a major contribution to southern historiography."