Email - tmayes@savingplaces.org

Tom Mayes is chief legal officer and general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. As chief legal officer, he oversees the National Trust’s legal defense fund, which advocates for the protection of significant places and defends and strengthens historic preservation laws throughout the United States; the historic preservation easements program, which protects over 135 historic places throughout the country; and the full range of corporate law matters for the National Trust, including specialized areas of historic site management and museum law. Tom serves as the National Trust’s representative on the boards of the Montpelier Foundation, Main Street America, and the National Trust Community Development Corporation (NTCIC).

Tom 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. A lifelong preservationist, Tom serves as a member of his local historic preservation commission in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize in Historic Preservation in 2013, Tom is the author of Why Old Places Matter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018).

Tom 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.