ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609230013
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
DATELINE: PRICES FORK
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS
They say the mark of a well-lived life is what we leave behind us. If that's true, then Patricia Givens Johnson's life was exemplary.
Books are the legacy of this foremost New River Valley historian, who died earlier this month at 64. There are 15 of them, written and published on her own, and they tell fascinating stories of people, events and places in by-gone days.
People have all sorts of pastimes and hobbies. Johnson's was researching and writing history. She did so with a diligent commitment to ensure that the past wasn't forgotten.
It's an unfortunate characteristic of our community that Johnson wasn't nearly as well-known or recognized as her bookstore, the blue-frame shop with the "New River Books" sign that sits in front of her house on Prices Fork Road.
Many people have driven by the somewhat forlorn bookshop and wondered about its purpose. Fewer have purchased or read Johnson's books, and that is a shame. Obscurity was something she learned to accept.
"I just store books in there. I don't know how to run a bookstore," she told me with a rueful laugh when I last spoke with her about a year ago.
The occasion of our gathering was to discuss the publication of her latest work, "Kentland at Whitethorne." The book details the history of Kentland Farm in western Montgomery County, which has been an important patch of real estate from pre-Colonial days to the present.
Like her other books, "Kentland at Whitethorne" is engagingly written. And it recaptures an important - yet mostly overlooked - tale that connects past and present.
Kentland was the lesser-known parcel in the controversial 1986 land-swap involving Virginia Tech's old horticulture farm, located at Peppers Ferry Road and North Franklin Street. The trade saved this prime farmland estate by placing it in public ownership, while the university's old property has mushroomed into the Marketplace complex.
Thousands of New River Valley residents drive by Marketplace each day. To them, the complex is either retail heaven or a commercial cancer. Not many see Kentland, a beautiful expanse of rolling hills tucked away in a western Montgomery County bend of the New River.
Unless you read Johnson's "Kentland at Whitethorne," you can't fully understand why the land swap may be a better deal for the future than many people believe.
That's typical of the trenchant topics Johnson chose for her books. Her motivation was to educate us by filling in local gaps of information and awareness. She wrote about early settlers, Indians, Revolutionary War heroes, and familiar places such as Mountain Lake Resort.
My favorite is her book about the little-known Civil War campaign that brought fierce warfare, notable soldiers and two future U.S. presidents (Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley) to the New River Valley in 1864.
Johnson tells about the war's largest battle in Southwestern Virginia at Cloyds Mountain, the burning of Dublin, the artillery barrage across the New River at present-day Radford, the ransacking of Christiansburg and Blacksburg by Union troopers, the liberation of hundreds of local slaves, the pitched battles between the Blue and Gray at Gap Mountain and Newport and the Northern army's skedaddle across Salt Pond Mountain.
This epic episode ought to be intimately known by every schoolchild in the New River Valley. Yet even avowed Civil War buffs don't know it occurred - even in their own back yard.
I know enough local history to know that our community falls short of Plutarch's admonition to "Know thyself." A sense of continuity between past and present has been lost over the past 30 years, the period of fundamental change when Virginia Tech and Radford University grew from sleepy colleges to major universities and brought in many new residents.
In her way, Patricia Givens Johnson stepped in to fill that breach. A lively interest in history came naturally to her, stemming from her family's deep ancestral roots. Her mother, Lula Porterfield Givens, was a longtime teacher who wrote her own history of Christiansburg and Montgomery County.
"If Southwest Virginians don't write the history of their own region, no one else will," Johnson once told me.
She financed each succeeding book with the meager proceeds from its predecessor, never earning a dime for the lonely hours she spent chasing down old records or peering at musty documents. "I always say this is the last one," she sighed. But she always found herself back at a library or once again sitting at the keyboard of her word processor.
Johnson was a frequent speaker to local historical or genealogical groups and gave much of her time to Virginia Tech's Smithfield Plantation. Yet as of the last time we spoke, she had never been invited to speak before a college class or autograph her books at a bookstore.
There was a sad bit of irony last year, illustrating how the present can overwhelm the past, when a row of stately century-old maple trees in front of Johnson's house was cut down to accommodate the widening of Prices Fork Road.
Losing those trees pained her deeply, as did the thought that their sacrifice meant more people could drive faster and more heedlessly past the spot where they had grown.
We're fortunate that the landmarks she worked so hard to build remain for the ages, despite her passing. I suspect she'll be appreciated more for her devotion to her community and her craft with each passing year and each succeeding generation.
Every book Patricia Givens Johnson wrote represents a small gift to all of us.
Robert Freis is a reporter in the New River Valley bureau of The Roanoke Times.
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