Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 29, 1993 TAG: 9307290209
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"The house has no electricity, no water, no appliances, so you can't say the fire may have been caused by a curling iron that was left turned on or anything like that," Park Superintendent Kenneth Abschnikat said of the fire at the Robinson House. "It was just a shell of a house that we used for storing chairs, desks and supplies."
Abschnikat said park officials are looking into whether the fire at the house, on the site of what was once a freed slave's home, might have been racially motivated or linked to graffiti that appeared on the house this month about gays in the military. The graffiti, which had been removed, said, "Gays in Army Yeah."
The two-story frame house, whose interior was not open to the public, dates from the 1920s and occupies the site of an 1855 one-story frame house that was owned by a free black man, James Robinson, known as "Gentleman Jim."
"It's another act of hate very similar to what mankind has experienced throughout the ages," said Robinson's great-great-grandson, Richard R. Robinson, 55, a retired Army colonel and retired U.S. Census Bureau security director, who lives in Washington, D.C. "A marker has clearly and publicly identified the house as a freedman's place as of about a year and a half ago."
During the Civil War's two battles of Manassas, in 1861 and 1862, the original house was used as a field hospital for Confederate troops, Abschnikat said.
Robinson also built an inn near the original house.
Although the current house bears little resemblance to its historic predecessor, it is valuable as a visual landmark on the site, according to U.S. Park Service literature. The original house was expanded in the 1880s and demolished and rebuilt in 1926.
by CNB