Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 21, 1993 TAG: 9304210183
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Medium
The retired Earth science teacher (and Golden Olympics swimmer) is head of the county's Courthouses Display Subcommittee, and some of the rocks and fossils gathered by her and her students over the years are displayed on stairway walls in the recently restored courthouse on Main Street.
The permanent exhibit, titled "Stepping Stones," gives courthouse visitors a sense of Pulaski County's geological history. Graham also gave a talk recently at the annual New River Symposium in Wytheville on historic legacies of the New River Valley.
Although Claytor Lake State Park and the outdoor drama "The Long Way Home" draw thousands of visitors every year, Graham said there are relatively new developments in Pulaski County that are not yet as well known.
The rock panels will be extended along the stairway all the way to the third floor as funding becomes available, Graham said. She looks at it as a "teaching wall."
The courthouse also will have a three-dimensional scale model, being built in the Virginia Tech architectural department, of the New River. Other walls will feature Claytor Lake and New River Trail State Parks. An American Indian exhibit will be featured in the building's community room.
Also to be displayed are Civil War letters, historical photographs and, this summer, pen and ink drawings of past courthouses, including the early one at Newbern - destroyed by fire in 1893 - and Pulaski's stone structure gutted by fire in 1989 but restored.
"We've got a terrible record. We have a courthouse burn down every 100 years," she said.
The Newbern community attracts history buffs all by itself. The New River Historical Society opened the Wilderness Road Museum there in 1980, Graham said.
It is open 33 hours a week and by appointment, with rooms devoted to each participating locality - the counties of Pulaski, Montgomery, Floyd and Giles and city of Radford.
The museum logged about 25,000 visitors in 1992. Graham said its Civil War items - including a muster book and drum - seem most popular with visitors. Its next project is rebuilding an old log kitchen on its stone foundation.
In Pulaski, a train station is being restored by the town, which bought it five years ago. It will contain a museum, visitors center, the Pulaski County Chamber of Commerce offices now in the municipal building and a model 1890 railroad ticket office.
Restoration is 75 percent complete, Graham said. Norfolk Southern Corp. has donated a restored caboose for the outside of the facility.
The 57-mile long New River Trail State Park, on an abandoned railroad bed from Galax to Pulaski donated by NS, comes to within two miles of the train station. Plans are to extend it into town to the future visitors' center. "And then the park will be 59 miles long," Graham said.
Visitors already can get information on these and other attractions at the seven-day-a-week center operated by New River Valley HOSTS volunteers at the Dublin Comfort Inn. The 2-year-old visitors center has served more than 10,000 people so far, Graham said.
by CNB