"Her camera peers into dark, shaded porches in a shot of turn-of-the-century houses ... then glances down the clapboards of spare, wooden row houses build a decade before," the "Washington Post" reported. "With the exception of a canal boat gliding along the C&O [Canal], there's nothing touristy here. It's Washington as the locals know it." And in 1992 as well, the National Endowment for the Arts presented Highsmith with its largest individual grant, a $20,000 Design Arts fellowship and individual project award. The award funded her and Landphair's travels to the western United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, to photograph examples of historic restoration for the "America Restored" book. Highsmith deepened her affinity for architecture by documenting various stages of buildings' renewal for contractors, architects, and developers. "Shooting enormous spaces in uncertain lighting conditions, her large format images reveal high quality and fine detail, capturing the splendor of the subject matter, be it a building in the midst of destruction or the elegance of a formal room," "American Photographers" magazine commented in 1989. From 2000 to 2002, a three-year grant from the Annie E. Casey Foundation enabled Highsmith to photograph disadvantaged families in 22 cities where the foundation is active. Later, the library's online Prints & Photographs Catalog description of the growing Carol M. Highsmith Archive noted that, "starting in 2002, Highsmith provided scans or photographs she shot digitally with new donations to allow rapid online access throughout the world. Her generosity in dedicating the rights to the American people for free access also makes this Archive a very special resource". In March 2009, the Library of Congress profiled four women, including Highsmith, during Women's History Month. The others were suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony, early-20th-century magazine illustrator Elizabeth Shippen Green, and retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Highsmith's travels took her to more remote destinations, capturing covered bridges from Vermont to Indiana, murals and neon figures, classic cars and old motor courts and a giant blue concrete whale along U.S. Route 66, "doo wop" motels on the New Jersey shore, a mining tipple in Wyoming and shuttered gas stations in Southside Virginia, abandoned steel mills and plantation ruins in Alabama, kudzu-covered barns in the Carolinas, roadside curiosities such as a four-story donut and a giant "Aunt Jemima" that is now a gift shop, storefront churches and drive-in theaters and brick sections of the old National Road alongside a modern interstate highway.