Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9307300426
SECTION: DISCOVER PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But the reservoir provides something more valuable than a cool drink or a hot shower to the folks who choose to make their homes on the adjacent, craggy mountainsides.
It gives them insurance. The 2,000 city-owned acres surrounding Falling Creek and its northern partner, Beaverdam Reservoir, provide a policy against overdevelopment. The public is not even permitted to visit the land, said Craig Sluss, manager of the Roanoke City Water Department.
Some of it, they probably wouldn't want to, he said. The steep, rocky terrain provides a perfect habitat for residents of the long, scaly and poisonous variety.
"Big thing, we got lots of snakes," said Sluss, who recently killed a 4-foot copperhead near the reservoir gate. Rattlesnakes also abound.
But some of the land has known other uses, such as the fertile area behind Weaver Knob, known as Jeter's Chapel, where locals once made a living growing and canning tomatoes.
"The reservoir took a lot of prime farm land," said Glen Sage, pastor of the church after which the mountain community was named.
It wasn't Beaverdam Reservoir - built in 1925 - that destroyed the tomato industry at Jeter's Chapel, however. It was World War II.
Sage said people left the mountainside canneries in droves during the 1940s, when wartime production created factory jobs in the Roanoke Valley.
Some, like Willie St. Clair, continued to work in the canneries off and on until the 1960s.
"They're all torn or fallen down now," said St. Clair, who has lived in Jeter's Chapel more than 60 years.
Many of her former neighbors have died or moved off the mountain. Those who remain are retired or work in the valley. Lower down the mountain, new families seeking to escape the stress of city life have moved in.
Woodrow Flowers left twice - both times to find work during the Great Depression - but hated being away from the mountains. Now 81, he lives just yards from the 200-year-old log cabin in which he was born.
Does he ever feel isolated in his tiny frame house in the shadow of Weaver Knob?
"Only when the power goes off," he said. "When you're born and raised in a place, you grow with it."
Jeter's Chapel is growing as he speaks. Parked in his front yard are earth movers and other equipment being used to widen Va. 635, a road he and his neighbors have long complained of as hazardous.
It's a touchy subject for the locals, who can't believe anyone would even ask why the road is being widened.
"Cause we need it!" answers Frances Foster, St. Clair's sister.
"We've been after them for years," chimes in St. Clair.
"All my life," her sister adds.
Too narrow to be safe under normal conditions, the road has become particularly dangerous at night, said Flowers, when people drive up the mountain to drink beer out of view of the local sheriff's deputies.
They're not the only nuisance that ventures up from the valley, he said. In recent years, people have come to steal. His house has been burglarized three times.
It's just another way in which things have changed, said Flowers. Once, the worst intruders people feared were the snakes.
But Sage said they need the road for another reason - for all the former community members who return on Sunday for chapel.
People have been worshiping on the same patch of land on this mountain top since 1865, said Sage. First in a one-room log school house, later in a white-frame building that went up in 1875. It's still there.
A.M. Jeter deeded the land to four churches - Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist and "Tunkers," or Church of the Brethren - for $5 back in 1870, he said. Initially, the different religious groups took turns worshiping (each got one Sunday a month) but attended each other's services.
Today, the missionary-focused church serves only the Church of the Brethren, Sage said. As people moved out of the valley to find work, it gradually became what he calls a "drive-in church."
He estimates only 25 percent of the congregation still lives on the mountain.
"Life on the mountain is pretty much like life in the '40s," said Sage, who lives in Roanoke.
Not so on the other side of the watershed, where most of the homes climbing the sides of Stewart Knob date back only 22 years.
"We're all kind of newcomers to the area," said Nelson Vest, a Realtor who lives in the Falling Creek subdivision behind the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Vest moved up to the mountainside from Vinton 15 years ago because he "just liked it over here. It's quiet. Got nice size lots, nice size houses."
Julian Ferguson, one of Falling Creek's developers and a member of the community, said the 250 acres of property was once three farms. Local folklore has it that during the Civil War, horses were kept in pens on the land in case they were needed in battle.
Ferguson and his partner built 220 homes on the side of the mountain. But the area is so steep they couldn't develop it all, he said.
"The rest of that mountain probably won't be developed because of that," he said.
Some older homes still dot the mountainside, including a few abandoned log cabins. But most of the residents are families who have earned enough to spend at least $120,000 on a home with a terrific view.
And then there are the passers through.
Like John Flannery and Sarah Fry of Montoursville, Pa. They stopped at the Stewart Knob overlook one recent hot July afternoon on their way back from a vacation at Lake Norman, N.C.
"We're just kind of hanging out," said Fry, who found the view of the Roanoke Valley "beautiful, gorgeous," and much different than her hometown view of the Allegheny Mountains.
There are visitors of another sort, too, said a park ranger who asked not to be named.
Rangers recently destroyed a shack full of women's clothing in the woods near the overlook, he said. Rangers believe it was used at night by a group of cross dressers.
by CNB