Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410100026
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
The grassy knob (elevation 2,300 feet) has a sweeping view of the Blacksburg plateau with Price and Brush mountains receding to the western horizon - the kind of spot that would be prime real estate for condos or some fancy split-level houses.
However, no one will ever have a Palmer Hill address except the family that has called the promontory home for years - the Bovines.
About four years ago, Blacksburg resident Katherine Estes Hoge assured that the 31-acre tract that includes the hill will be forever green. She donated a conservation easement to the town of Blacksburg that manifests her desire to bar development from the property.
Thursday, the town expressed its gratitude for Hoge's magnanimity by unveiling a plaque in her honor.
Beneath a chilly, gray autumn sky, officials and Hoge's kinfolk gathered along the edge of the pasture bordering Graves Avenue to dedicate the plaque, which cites "a gift of love."
"You have assured that the town of Blacksburg will be a special place," Vice Mayor Al Leighton told her.
Hoge, 91, grinned broadly as a shroud was removed from the plaque.
"There are things more important than money," she said three years ago, when a proposal to extend Patrick Henry Drive threatened to bisect the meadow.
Alarmed, Hoge negotiated the easement with town and state officials. In effect, it states the meadow cannot be built upon or paved. Hoge and her heirs will continue to own the property but they will hold the title without development rights.
In return, property taxes on the meadow are substantially reduced, said Ron Secrist, Blacksburg's town manager.
Hoge came to Blacksburg in 1927, newly married to John Hampton Hoge Jr., who operated a family-owned coal mine.
Back then, her Hemlock Drive home was in the county. "Now I'm in the same house and I'm practically downtown," she said. "That's how much things have changed."
The Hoges gradually accumulated acreage for a cattle farm and orchard. They bought the hill in 1948 as part of a larger farm owned by the Palmer family.
John Hampton Hoge Jr. - to whom the plaque is dedicated - died in 1957. "My husband wasn't cold in his grave but they wanted to buy the property and put up all these apartments," said his wife.
"Blacksburg has changed so much. There's very little farmland left," said Betty Joe Estes. Estes is married to Hoge's nephew, Keith Estes, and lives behind the Hoge property, with her own panoramic eastward view of the Ellett Valley.
Having grown up in the days when the farm extended down slope all the way to South Main Street, Estes sees the Hoge pasture as a benchmark of a bygone era.
"There are so many places you can see it from in the town of Blacksburg," she said.
"It's not what we take up but what we give up that makes us rich," said Mike Chandler, the council member who first suggested the conservation easement as a means to preserve her property.
"She has expressed her love for Blacksburg present and Blacksburg future," he added.
It was too cold a day to linger in the field for long, so Hoge and everyone else in attendance got back in their cars and drove away, leaving the meadow to posterity, the cows, the meadow muffins and the golf balls that strayed from the golf course across the road.
by CNB