Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 31, 1994 TAG: 9405310012
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICH PATCH LENGTH: Long
Figured he'd die there, too, and be buried at the church up the road.
It's not much of a place - couple of bedrooms, cramped living room, weathered porch. It didn't have indoor plumbing until four years ago, when Angle sank more than $1,800 into a septic field and modern bathroom.
Over the years, he'd also put on a new roof, replaced old boards, installed new siding, planted gardens and trees, raised horses, sheep and cattle, and five children.
Though he and his wife, Clo, were tenants on the property, it came to be their home after 41 years of living there.
"I got it so I could live and die here," Angle, 65, said last week during a break from digging up a young chestnut tree out back. "What'd we want to move for? We're living in heaven here."
Besides, they were paying only $17 a month in rent.
In mid-March, the Angles got a registered letter, as did the half-dozen other folks who have lived most of their lives in this strip of heaven at the foot of the Rich Patch Mountains in southern Alleghany County. The letter was short and polite. It said they had to move out by May 31.
"When she opened it up, I thought I'd have to take her to the hospital," Angle recalled of his wife's reaction. "She was gonna have a heart attack. She still ain't plum over it."
Nettleton Real Estate Inc., the property owner, waived rents for April and May, but offered no explanation of why the tenants had to leave.
"I still can't figure it out," Floyd "Tom" Brown said, shaking his head.
Brown was a young man when he moved into a ramshackle two-story house on Virginia 616 in 1941. He made improvements at his own expense and eventually put running water in, but never a bathroom.
A well-worn footpath from the back door to the privy can still be seen through the grass that's grown knee-high since he left in the first part of April.
"I'd gotten used to the place. It seemed like home to me," Brown said in a strained, high-pitched voice that sometimes disappears in mid-sentence.
"It hurts," he said, tapping his breast. "It hurts."
He and his son are paying $200 a month now - more than 10 times their old rent in Rich Patch. But money's not the thing, Brown said. He would gladly have paid a little more rent for the old place, just to stay.
Brown said he heard rumors in February that the property was being sold. He asked the caretaker if he should put in a garden.
"And he said, `Don't plow.' I knew then something was going on, but when I got that letter, that was it. That shocked everybody down there in Rich Patch," Brown said. "Why in the name of God didn't he tell people?"
A century ago, Rich Patch was a thriving community. The Low Moor Iron Co. extracted ore from the rugged mountains near Covington to feed the country's growing hunger for industrial steel. The company built rail lines, stone furnaces, smelters and a machine shop, as well as company homes for the miners - 50, maybe 75 houses.
Then the iron industry shifted north, and the land was put up for sale during the Depression.
Charles B. Nettleton, according to one person's recollections, ran the company's commissary and had saved up some money. He apparently bought the 10,000-acre chunk of Alleghany County for anywhere between 50 cents and $1 per acre.
Nettleton built a lumber yard, farmed, and at one time had the world's largest watercress farm, recalled his nephew, George Nettleton, who lives in Midlothian.
When he died in 1949, the eldest of his two daughters, Carolyn, returned home from her job with the Red Cross in eastern Virginia to take over the family business.
She turned the lumber yard into a successful operation and won a statewide award from the male-dominated lumbermen's association. She also came to own a hardware store and several concrete plants, at a time when women just didn't do such things.
"She was quite a businesswoman," George Nettleton said. "She was quite a gal, no question about it."
Her renowned business acumen was such that when a former Covington city manager suddenly left, the voters installed her as temporary manager.
Carolyn Nettleton's younger sister, Mary Blakeslee Nettleton, apparently didn't care as much for the business world. She married Allan Chase, and they live in Atlanta.
Carolyn Nettleton never married; she was dedicated to her church and community, said the Rev. John Pedlar, who worked at St. Stephen's Anglican Church in Clifton Forge. She served on the church's executive committee with the same style she showed in business, Pedlar said.
So why, then, would a shrewd, fiscally conservative businesswoman allow her tenants to pay almost nothing in rent?
"She would be the first one to have them pay enough and not feel like they were getting charity, but enough that they could afford," Pedlar said. "I can't speak too highly of her."
Over the years, the best-quality timber was cut from the mountainous property, leaving behind a young hardwood forest. It's great for wildlife, but won't be commercially valuable for another 70 years or so, said Steve Bennett, who owns a lumber yard in Low Moor and knows the family slightly.
He remembers that about 15 years ago, Carolyn Nettleton asked Virginia Tech to study the land's potential recreational value, including horse trails and camping spots, but he doesn't know what became of those plans.
Carolyn Nettleton died in 1983 in Mexico, where she'd gone to seek treatment for cancer. That's when the rumors began.
Most people think she gave the land, or her interest in it, to Virginia Tech.
"People have been making noises for years about giving it to us," and Tech would entertain the idea of acquiring it for research or as an investment, university spokesman Larry Hincker said.
But Tech does not own the property, Hincker said, and it knows nothing about the evictions.
Deed books show that Nettleton Real Estate owns 9,366 acres in five parcels in the area, plus several lots in Covington. Only one of the large parcels has buildings on it, and that one is valued at $25,800.
Mary Blakeslee N. Chase is listed as president of the real estate company, as well as the Nettleton Foundation and C.B. Nettleton Inc., in the state's corporation files.
Calls to Chase's Atlanta home went unanswered, and the Covington phone directory has no listing for her.
John Rocovich Jr., of Moss & Rocovich in Roanoke is Chase's attorney. He also is secretary and treasurer of the Nettleton Foundation and is on the executive committee of the Virginia Tech Foundation, which handles gifts and endowments to the university.
The land has not been sold, Rocovich said Friday, nor is it up for sale.
His law firm recently advised Chase that the tenants posed too great a legal risk to allow them to stay, he said.
"There was nothing to gain. They were paying token rent," he said. The best course legally was "to go ahead and protect ourselves and get them off," and Chase gave her consent, he said.
Rocovich declined to elaborate on why the decision was made at this time, and why the tenants were not given more than two months.
In his view, he said, the Angles, Browns and other families had received a "fantastic gift" from the Nettletons for many years.
And under Virginia tenant/landlord statutes, he said, "Two months is a pretty long time."
Rocovich said he frequently gets calls about the land, and, if the price were right, Chase might sell.
Bennett,who lives next to the property, said he'd like to buy it, but can't afford it. "It's a lot of land. You can walk for days in there."
"What it is," Bennett said, "it's the end of the mining town."
Robert Angle has heard that the six homes left in Rich Patch will be torn down once the tenants are gone, just as the other houses were torn down one after another as the miners moved out.
"They want all the houses gone; they're going to smash them to pieces," he said. Like his former neighbor, Tom Brown, Angle isn't concerned about having to pay more rent now. "Only thing is, the uprootin' and everything," he said.
Last week, Angle replanted the chestnut tree from his old place to the trailer he and Clo will be living in about five miles away.
"This has been my home," said Clo, sitting at her kitchen table stacked with appliances and dishes ready for packing. She's tried to resign herself to the fact that she's leaving, but it's hard, especially when she doesn't know why.
Clo called Barbour, the lawyer, the day the letters arrived. He was nice, she said, but didn't tell her much.
"I was real upset, because we didn't know where we were gonna go on such short notice." Rental houses in the country are hard to come by, and run from $295 to $350 a month. Living in town "on top of somebody" was out of the question.
A mobile home on their son's property was all they could afford, after refinancing their truck and car.
"A trailer? I'll, hmmm, I'll just have to get used to it," she said.
Her mother-in-law, who lives up the hill and also got the letter, doesn't relish the idea of living in a mobile home, either.
"I used to say I'd never live in one. And now I have to," Mary Angle said. At 79, she is the oldest of the Rich Patch folks who must move, and has one of the nicest homes left in the community.
She called on her sisters, brothers, children and grandchildren to help her pay $2,000 for a secondhand trailer, and $3,500 for the utility lines and foundation. Her monthly rent will go from $30 to $100, so she'll have to stretch her Social Security check a little further.
Tom Brown moved into his new rental house in Low Moor soon after getting the letter. It's a quaint, two-story house, with a large kitchen. And a bathroom, which his son likes.
He's dug a garden and planted some lettuce. The neighbors are friendly. His cat seems content in the new place.
It's all right, Brown said. But it's not home.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***