Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 4, 1993 TAG: 9301040011
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
AN ORDINARY LIFE, MEMORIALIZED
MARY BLADON died in obscurity in a Roanoke poorhouse 35 years ago. But her name lives on at a bed-and-breakfast in Old Southwest. This is her story.\ Famous people live forever. Their names and their histories survive for generations in the monuments, streets, towns and people named for them.
But ordinary people fade from memory soon after they die. Ask old-timers in Roanoke's Old Southwest neighborhood who Mary Bladon was and they'll say the name sounds familiar, but they just can't place her.
They know her name from the sign that hangs in front of the house at Washington Avenue and Fourth Street. The Mary Bladon House opened in 1985 as Roanoke's first bed-and-breakfast inn.
Bladon lived in Roanoke during the first half of this century, spending 30 years in the neighborhood now known as Old Southwest.
She was an ordinary person who left little of herself behind. Not even a photograph survives. The only information that exists about her can be found in census reports, deeds, wills, death records and the recollections of the few people who still remember her.
Some of them paint a romantic picture of a brave, blind woman who supported herself after her family died. Other people knew a more lively Mary, a feisty old maid, not blind at all, who was set in her ways and died as she had lived, lonely and alone.
The house was named for Bladon by a subsequent owner, Sally Pfister, who opened the bed-and-breakfast in 1985. A neighbor, now dead, told Pfister stories of a blind woman who rented rooms and sold greeting cards to make her living.
Pfister ran the bed-and-breakfast for five years, until the job became too much for her. She sold the Mary Bladon House in 1990 to Bill and Sherri Bestpitch, who have been running the business since.
The Bestpitches are from Richmond. "We just decided we wanted to get into the B-and-B business," Bill Bestpitch said. "We were looking for inns that were on the market, ones that were already operating."
When the Bestpitches bought the house, they also inherited Mary's story.
Mary Bladon was born in Bedford County in 1883, eight years after her father, Samuel Steele Bladon, emigrated from England.
The Bladons lived first in Powhatan County, where Samuel, who worked as a railroad clerk, met his wife, Mary Lucy Hanes, called "Lucy" by the family. After their marriage, Samuel and Lucy moved to Montvale in Bedford County, where Mary and her brothers, John Oliver and Frederick William, were born.
By 1888, Samuel had followed the railroad boom to Roanoke. He worked as a clerk for the Norfolk and Western Railway, and he lived at the City Hotel, where Milan Brothers' tobacco shop now stands.
Lucy and the children probably joined him around 1890, when Mary was 7. The family lived on Day Avenue - then called Seventh Avenue - most likely in a boarding house.
By 1895, they were living on Salem Avenue in another boarding house. This one was operated by Lucy herself. At that time, Salem Avenue was an unpaved street, lined with wooden storefronts and famous for its many saloons. Roanoke was booming, and there was a great need for rooms. Mary and her brothers probably helped Lucy with the work.
Soon after the Bladons moved to Salem Avenue, the wooden buildings that lined the street began to be replaced by the brick warehouses that are there now. The Advance Auto warehouse at Salem Avenue and Fourth Street now stands near where the Bladons once lived.
Possibly because of the development on Salem Avenue, the family moved back to Day Avenue at the turn of the century. The boarding house they ran was home to 15 boarders, a servant and Samuel's sister and brother-in-law. The Bladons may have operated the establishment in exchange for room and board.
In the meantime, Samuel was making big plans. His father, John Bladon, had died in England in 1894, leaving behind a large estate. Samuel inherited one-fourth, which amounted to several thousand dollars, a large sum of money for the time.
In 1901, soon after the estate was settled, he bought the lot at the southeast corner of Franklin Road and Walnut Avenue. The house that was there has since been replaced by a parking lot for the Jefferson Surgical Clinic, but it must have been impressive.
Samuel seemed to have trouble handling money, however. He mortgaged the property several times and even borrowed against property in Louisa County that belonged to Lucy and the children.
In 1911, a suit was filed to force Samuel to honor a contract of sale. The house sold for $12,750, four times his purchase price. Almost half of the proceeds went into paying off mortgages on the property. The rest was used to buy a house at 381 Washington Ave., which would be known someday as the Mary Bladon House.
The family owned the 10-room home for the next 20 years. It had front and back parlors, a music room, quiet breezy porches and four upstairs bedrooms.
With its period furniture, the house probably looks much like it did then, and still has a pleasant, homey atmosphere. Former neighbors remember coming there for musical evenings and piano lessons, given by Mary.
Although the three children were grown, they still lived at home. No one knows why, but none of them ever married.
Frederick, the youngest son, was Roanoke's first municipal electrician. According to a 1916 history of the Police Department, he was in charge of the "installation and maintenance of everything electrical." One of his jobs was to cut electrical wires during fires, to keep firefighters from being "knocked cold" by exposed wiring.
In 1919, Frederick died of pneumonia at age 33. His brother, John Oliver, who worked for the railroad, died the following year of tubercular laryngitis at the age of 38. In March 1920, Samuel died, too, from what the death certificate listed as "paralysis of the brain." Mary Bladon, age 37, had lost her father and both brothers in just 16 months.
For 12 years, Bladon and her mother, Lucy, got on as best they could, mortgaging the house and taking in boarders for extra money. Mary continued to give piano lessons and sold merchandise from the house, possibly the greeting cards her neighbor mentioned.
The stock market crash of 1929 may have affected the women's finances. In 1932, a year after Lucy died of "infirmities of old age," the house was foreclosed, and Bladon found herself alone and homeless.
There is no indication of where she lived the next three years. Unless she left town - which is unlikely because her only relatives were cousins living in Roanoke - it's possible Bladon lived in a boarding house, a common arrangement for women in her position at that time.
When her name did reappear in the 1936 city directory, Bladon, who was in her 50s at this time, was living on Second Street with the family of Ralph Goode. Goode's parents took in boarders there, and Ralph and his wife and children lived with them, as did his brother Sam, who was in the military. Bladon's room and board cost $15 a week.
The Goode brothers still live in Roanoke.
In a recent interview, Ralph Goode said the story about Bladon's being blind isn't true. In the evenings, he said, the boarders would sit in the living room and read. Bladon especially liked the newspapers.
"She never read to herself," Ralph Goode said. "Her reading out loud was very disturbing to Dad. He would say: `Who are you talking to, Mary, the devil?' and she would say: `No, because then I'd be talking to you.' "
Ralph's brother, Sam, remembers her playing scales on the piano "interminably." But the brothers say she spent most of her time in her room, rocking in her chair and talking to herself.
Bladon never said much about her past, Ralph Goode said, but "she didn't seem unhappy."
By 1945, when Bladon was 62, church records indicate she was living at Mercy House, the forerunner of McVitty House, which in turn became Richfield Retirement Communities.
Mercy House was opened in 1934 as a home for the indigent and infirm. The cost of keeping a patient there was $2.50 per week, and although the facilities were described as "makeshift," it was better than living at the dirty and dismal city poorhouse.
She left Mercy House by 1949 and was living with Carrie Lynskey on Montrose Avenue in Southeast Roanoke. Although Lynskey kept several boarders, her son James remembers Bladon and her eating habits.
"She was an old maid, and kind of picky," he said. She liked her soft-boiled eggs "almost raw" and loved to eat chicken wings and drumsticks, cleaning them right down to the bone.
When Carrie Lynskey died in 1952, the house was sold, and Bladon went to live on Campbell Avenue, renting a room from a seamstress. Bladon was 69 and suffering from arteriosclerosis. By this time, there was no one left to take care of her. According to James Lynskey, she was living on public assistance.
In early 1955, Bladon was taken to the dreaded poorhouse. For years, living conditions there had been terrible, but shortly after she arrived, some improvements were made. The building was painted inside and out, and for the first time, trained nurses were on duty 24 hours a day.
The facility was closed the year she died, but the building still stands as the fine arts building on the Virginia Western Community College campus.
Bladon spent 2 1/2 years at the poorhouse, sharing a tiny ward with five or six other women. She suffered a stroke on Aug. 8, 1957, and died three days later. Ralph Goode remembers his mother saying that after her death, Mary Bladon was wrapped in a black shroud.
She was buried in the family's plot at the Evergreen Cemetery in Southwest Roanoke. She lies close to her parents, and brothers John and Frederick are buried a few spaces away.
There is no monument to mark the spot.
\ AUTHOR Betsy Biesenbach is a part-time staff writer and a free-lance title examiner. Under contract for the Bestpitches, she researched and wrote a history of the Mary Bladon House.
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