Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 24, 1994 TAG: 9411280006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Long
Its first- and second-floor corridors, stairwell and New River Room will give visitors glimpses of Pulaski County's past back to prehistoric times. The exhibits range from ancient fossils up through events in the 1990s.
A 1770s ledger from McCorkle's Store in Dublin; medical instruments belonging to Dr. Perry C. Corbin (1887-1952), the county's first black doctor; a variety of products from county industries; and even a 1992 newspaper proclaiming the Pulaski County High School Cougars state football champions are a few of the exhibits visitors will find.
A Native American Exhibit focusing on the county's American Indian heritage includes newly researched material on the county's earliest inhabitants.
``You can't go anywhere else and read it, because it has never been done,'' said Elrica Graham, the Exhibits Committee chairwoman.
One of the exhibits includes 156 arrowheads, spear points and other early tools uncovered during construction of Claytor Dam. Graham Simmerman has identified them on an accompanying chart.
A dedication program for the exhibits will start at 10 a.m. Saturday, with self-guided tours continuing until noon.
A year ago, the Exhibits Committee hired Jonathan Jager, a Martinsville consultant, to coordinate the exhibits that had already been prepared and to plan, design and produce the others.
Jager, who worked at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville before starting his own Designing Eye business three years ago, has been in the museum and exhibition field for about 25 years. He has worked with Roanoke's Transportation Museum and Explore Park among other projects.
What made this project different, he said, is ``that it's just kind of spread out around the building'' instead of being in one room or space. Jager used a number of techniques to bring a consistent look to the varied exhibits, including titles on signs reflecting the same color and architecture as the courthouse doorways.
Parts of the exhibits will be changed periodically, but most of them will remain as yet another attraction for visitors along Pulaski's Main Street.
Along the ground floor corridor where a display case features 18th- and 19th-century documents and artifacts, the opposite wall will show off a Landstat-5 Earth satellite photo of Pulaski County.
Photographs of Confederate veterans and other county residents, the Lindsey Hotel that once stood in Allisonia, the pre-integration Calfee School faculty in 1923 and artists' drawings of the county's courthouses over the years will fill other display areas.
The historic stone courthouse was gutted by fire Dec. 29, 1989. It was rebuilt, improved and rededicated exactly three years later as part of a $2.9 million bond issue approved by county voters. A photo of the dedication can be seen inside. The courthouses project is continuing with an expansion and upgrading of the neighboring brick courthouse behind the older stone building.
On another wall are photographs and a map of past railroading and mining activities. The corridor outside the New River Room displays geology along the river.
The New River Room itself has a variety of exhibits featuring American Indian artifacts, displays on early settlers, Claytor Dam on the New River, and the Claytor Lake and New River Trail state parks.
In Treasurer Rose Marie Tickle's office on one side of the corridor, the old clock from the original county courthouse at Draper can be seen. Tickle said it has been interesting to see the exhibits shaping up along the corridor and how people are already stopping to see and read about the displays.
On the walls leading upstairs to the second floor are fossils and rock exhibits titled ``Stepping Stones in Time.''
``We do have some plant fossils here that have not been discovered anywhere else in the world,'' said Graham, a retired geology teacher who helped preserve many of the fossil exhibits.
The second floor includes a natural resources display and a section of a county tree with prominent dates, starting with 1776 when the nation was born, shown at the points to which the tree had grown at those times.
Not all of those involved in the three-year project lived to see it come to fruition.
Chauncey D. Harmon, a Pulaski County educator who died last year, has been honored by the establishment of a memorial fund in his name to maintain the black heritage exhibits in the courthouse.
A tribute to Marvin D. ``Bud'' Webb, who was heavily involved in the American Indian research, has been placed alongside that exhibit in the New River Room.
The ``Stepping Stones'' stairway exhibit is dedicated to the memory of Sylvia Raines Killen (1923-84) and her niece, Lorna Raines Crockett, a 1992 murder victim. As a student in Graham's geology class, Crockett had alerted her teacher to the fossils that could be found on the property of her aunt, and Killen agreed to allow them to be dug up for posterity.
The project got funding from the C.E. Richardson Benevolent Foundation as well as the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities & Public Policy. Edmonds Printing Inc. furnished limited-edition prints of the courthouse to raise money. Two books by Conway Howard Smith, ``Colonial Days in the Land that Became Pulaski County'' and ``The Land that is Pulaski County,'' provided reference material for the project.
The Fine Arts Center for New River Valley on the opposite side of Main Street has Old Courthouse memorabilia including prints, Christmas ornaments and Pulaski County Pride T-shirts on sale.
by CNB