Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302190194
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
OUT OF THE ASHES . . .
The Thursday after the Christiansburg Livestock Market burned down the farmers came anyway, just to talk and stare at the mess.And the Thursday after that.
It became a ritual, or maybe just confirmed one, continuing through the 10 months it took for the market to be rebuilt.
Bob Boone of Plum Creek said people came each Thursday - the traditional cattle market day - just to watch the builders and talk.
"You caught up on what everybody'd been doing during the week," he said. "It [the livestock market] is a whole lot like home."
It is a new home now - a little smaller, and with a lot more fire-resistant cinder block, steel and aluminum in its walls.
But the livestock market is again open for business.
A local landmark and a gathering place for area farmers since the 1930s, the rambling, ramshackle market off Roanoke Street was leveled in March by a fire of suspicious origin. No arrests have been made.
It officially reopened with a horse sale Jan. 30, the day after owner Joe Stewart's 78th birthday.
The traditional Thursday cattle auction was held the following week.
Stewart said insurance covered less than half the rebuilding costs, which probably will run close to $200,000.
In fact, the Elliston farmer was ambivalent at first about rebuilding the market at all. He decided to do so, he said, because "everybody came to us wanting us to build it back."
Also, he missed it.
"It's been a part of me all my life," said Stewart, who is a member of Montgomery County's Board of Supervisors.
Stewart also has held cattle auctions in Roanoke, Lynchburg and Danville. He says he's sold more cattle than any other man east of the Mississippi River.
Stewart's 6-year-old grandson, Zachariah Milton, rang the bell Feb. 4 to begin the first cattle auction here since last March. By the end of the day, family members said about 500 head of livestock had been auctioned - a much larger number than normal in the past.
Stewart said friends had held onto their cattle through the fall selling season instead of selling them at other markets, out of loyalty.
"We've had people been holding cattle back for two months now," Stewart said. "This thing's been here for years and years, and we've got quite a following."
The market opened in 1933.
Even as a teen-ager, Stewart was so enamored of it he hopped freight trains from Elliston to Christiansburg on market days, family members said.
Stewart took the market over himself in the 1950s. He has run it ever since.
In many ways, the new livestock market isn't much different than the one than burned.
You still can find dusty farmers and cattle buyers hunched over their hands in the sale ring, still hear Stewart's gravelly voice through the loudspeaker urging up the price: "Three forty-five, three-fifty, three-fifty, three-sixty, three-seventy, three-seventy-five."
There are still the same kind-but-busy-looking female faces in the front office. Still the sign out front that absolutely forbids "pen hooking" - selling cattle straight from the pen without giving the market its commission.
Just as before, Dean Caldwell is serving up hot dogs and cheeseburgers at the little restaurant beside the office on market days.
And there is still a crowd. It was so crowded during the first cattle sale that patrons were lined up outside the sale area, waiting for a chance to get in.
Someone quipped Stewart should consider putting his auction on closed-circuit television for the benefit of those outside.
Stewart's two grown daughters, Sandra Weddle and Julia Milton, both were there to help out.
"When you don't have something," Weddle said of the market's reopening, "when you get it back, you appreciate it a whole lot more."
The livestock market has long had a reputation of being a place not just to buy and sell, but to swap odds and ends and tell stories. Old-timers such as Byrd Flinchum used to sit around the pot-bellied stove, talking, whittling and wisecracking.
Flinchum was crowding 100 when he died a couple of years ago, Stewart family members recalled.
They said they were sure the old man would have shown up for the market's reopening, if he could have.
The pot bellied stove will not be replaced. To cut the risk of fire, Stewart has replaced the stove with an industrial-strength heater.
Fire has long plagued Stewart's auction business. The old Christiansburg market burned partially a few times before it was destroyed. In addition, a livestock market in Roanoke, also owned by Stewart, burned partially in 1988. It has not been rebuilt.
Some said they missed the friendly quality of the old stove's heat.
But they stressed they like the new market, too.
"It's clean," Boone said, "and a whole lot newer."
D.F. Cash of Staunton was happy just to sit on a bench in the office, pot-bellied stove or no.
Cash, a former cattle buyer, has been visiting the livestock market for 50 years.
Like plenty of others, he hadn't come to buy this time.
Said Cash, 88: "I just came to see Joe."