Thompson M. Mayes

Tom Mayes is Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. He has written and spoken widely on preservation law, the underlying purposes of historic preservation, and the future of preservation. For many years, he taught historic preservation law at the University of Maryland. Mr. Mayes is the National Trust’s representative on the boards of the Montpelier Foundation and Main Street America and serves as a member of the historic preservation commission in Shepherdstown, WV. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation in 2013, Mr. Mayes is the author of Why Old Places Matter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).  Mr. Mayes received his B.A. with honors in History in 1981 and his J.D. in 1985 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University.