Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 7, 1995 TAG: 9509070064
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Explore Park plans to announce today gifts totaling $1 million to house the park's first restaurant in a two-century-old wooden hotel.
The project will funded by gifts of $750,000 from the Horace Fralin Charitable Trust and $250,000 from the Beirne Carter Foundation, according to Rupert Cutler, Explore's executive director.
They constitute the biggest individual donations Explore has ever received.
The Fralin trust is a charity tied to the estate of the civic leader and developer who was president of Fralin & Waldron Inc. in Roanoke. The trust earlier contributed $85,000 to Explore to reassemble a schoolhouse at the living-history park in Roanoke County, now in its second year of operation.
The Carter foundation is a charity set up by the late Salem businessman who headed Carter Machinery. It already gave Explore $250,000 to rebuild a barn.
The gifts will be announced at 10 a.m. by Norman Fintel, president of the River Foundation, a charitable organization created 10 years ago by local business leaders to start Explore.
With the gifts imminent, crews last week began to dismantle the Brugh Tavern where it sits in a pasture alongside Interstate 81 between Troutville and Buchanan.
It will be reassembled at the park but will remain off limits to visitors until it opens in April 1997, Cutler said. Warren Stevens and his family sold the building to Explore in 1989.
The Brugh Tavern was an important stop on the Great Wagon Trail that led through the Valley of Virginia in the late 18th century. It has long sat empty.
The money will be used to preserve and restore the three-story structure just inside the park at one end of a planned 1.5-mile connector road from the Blue Ridge Parkway.
"We'll use as much as possible of the old material, particularly the hand-hewn beams and wooden-peg trusses in the roof structure," Cutler said.
Explore intends to contract with a restaurateur to pay a portion of the business' gross receipts to the park for the right to run the restaurant and profit from it.
Explore leaders have long hoped to open a high-profile restaurant at the park, believing it will help lure more tourists off the Blue Ridge Parkway.
They also hope the reopened Brugh Tavern will become a magnet for Western Virginia residents in much the same way that the restaurants at two other Blue Ridge Parkway attractions, the Peaks of Otter and Mabry Mill, are major draws.
by CNB