Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 31, 1990 TAG: 9004020184
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MARIANNA FILLMORE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A ring of hardwoods skirts the perimeter of the hillock as if to protect it from the noisy hustle of modern traffic on either side.
Nearer to the spare frame house, walnuts and sycamores raise their spreading branches as if to guard against further encroachment.
The old house stands patiently as workers strip it bare, pulling away the faded weatherboarding to expose its rough-hewn log skeleton. Its chimneys are already gone, leaving gaping holes where the hearths once heated chilly rooms.
The story has a happy ending, however. The house is being moved, restored and preserved, not destroyed.
Carefully, its pieces have been numbered and labeled. Painstakingly, they will be reassembled and the house preserved as a part of the living history of Blue Ridge Town, the proposed 18th and 19th century pioneer village of the Explore project in Roanoke County.
Bill Crosier of Roanoke donated the old home place to Explore. It was built around 1810 about a mile west of Elliston in Montgomery County. When U.S. 11-460 was four-laned in 1950, the eastbound lanes separated the house from the rest of the farm.
Crosier, owner of Crosier Landsales in Salem, used the house as his real estate office for several years. He contacted Ren Heard, master builder for Explore, who was delighted to accept the donation.
"We have been fairly actively looking for buildings that are endangered," Heard said. "There are so many buildings that are just torn down every year with no thought to their past. We're trying to find those buildings. There are many that can stay where they are, but there are many that cannot."
Ideally, Heard said, historic buildings should be preserved where they stand. Sometimes, though, that is not possible; the Crosier house is one such example.
Crosier's sister, Jane Barnett, also is excited about her brother's donation.
"I'm just tickled to death," she said. "I hope to see it restored and visit it again."
Her husband, a ninth-generation descendant of James Barnett, to whom the king of England granted the land, said: "It is good because you see so many older buildings that are vacant burn down or vandalized."
In the past few years people have broken into the house, stolen furniture and removed the etched glass from the front door.
The idea of giving the house to Explore appealed to Crosier because he wanted to save the building, yet really didn't have the funds to restore it properly.
The land on which the house stands was originally part of a grant from the king to James Barnett in 1767. The first known house was a two-story, two-room log cabin with a fireplace at either end. It is thought to have replaced a small, crude log cabin that may have been built as early as 1756.
Around 1820, a timber-frame summer kitchen was added and connected to the main house by a breezeway. Over the decades, a second floor and other additions have been made.
For 100 years, the property stayed in the Barnett family. In 1890, the Elliston Development Co. acquired the house and 117 acres of the original James Barnett plantation. John Flanagan bought the house and 80 acres in 1899.
Bill Crosier's father, a carpenter, moved his family from West Virginia to the Alleghany Springs area of Montgomery County in 1916. In 1923, he decided to try his hand at farming and joined Flanagan in working the Elliston land.
Crosier's sister continues the story:
"Having five children and another on the way, mother and daddy decided they would move to Elliston and farm full time. They moved Oct. 20, 1927, and William Perry "Bill" was born there in the house on Oct. 29, 1927."
Barnett and another brother also were born at the home place, bringing the total number of offspring to eight.
The family truly lived off the land. Cows, hogs and chickens provided meat, eggs and dairy products. Mules and a team of horses plowed the fields. Apple and pear trees and grapevines dotted the hillsides. Vegetables and fruit grew in abundance.
"Daddy had hot beds where he raised vegetable plants for sale," said Barnett. "Tomatoes were so plentiful one year that he decided to set up a roadside stand. It was such a success he built the Crosier Roadside Market in the early 1930s from rocks picked up off the farm land."
The building stands on U.S. 11-460, a "stone's throw" from the house. Local residents patronized the market, as did visitors from Christiansburg, Salem and Roanoke.
Bill Crosier remembered that grocers, coming from West Virginia to Roanoke to buy truckloads of produce, would stop first at Crosier's Market.
"The boys milked the cows," Barnett said, "and mother had a milk separator that separated the milk from the cream. She churned butter from the cream and sold butter and milk as well as eggs from our chickens."
The market was especially popular with Radford arsenal workers commuting from Salem and Roanoke; they often stopped for milk and their week's supply of vegetables and eggs.
Toward the rear of the house stood a spring house and a windmill that in the 1800s pumped water from a well. The bricks for the spring house and the chimneys were handmade from clay at nearby sites. Explore also will use both of these structures.
The farm was sold at auction in 1970 to settle the estate. All the children except one bought acreage. The land was resold, except for the home place owned by Bill Crosier and 11 acres owned by another brother. All eight brothers and sisters still live within 35 miles of the site.
by CNB