Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, September 23, 1995                   TAG: 9509230006
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: TODD JACKSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GEM OF A ROAD TO KEEP PART OF ITS RED LUSTER

The road - the main thoroughfare for travel between Georgia and Philadelphia during Colonial times - used to snake through Franklin County. According to history books, George Washington and Daniel Boone, among other notables, used the road.

Today, one of the most visible segments not overgrown or bulldozed runs through a Ferrum-area recreation park, which the county is developing.

The county needed access to two ball fields and had plans to pave most of the remaining Carolina Road segment as the easiest route into the park.

But in stepped Dr. Francis Amos of Rocky Mount, a well-known local historian, and Roddy Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College.

At a Board of Supervisors meeting Sept. 5, they asked that the road be spared.

"This is a diamond in the rough," Amos said. "It needs to be cut and polished - not smashed with a hammer."

The board agreed to form a committee to study the issue.

The panel - made up of Supervisors Wayne Angell, Charles Ellis, Gus Forry and Hubert Quinn - walked the site the day after the meeting with Doug Beatty, the county's resident engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation.

The board met Tuesday and voted to go with another plan: A new road will be staked and built to run alongside the existing roadbed, Angell said.

The old road probably will be incorporated into the park as a hiking and biking trail - a historical use that would make the park unique, Amos said.

"This is a good compromise," he said. "And I have to compliment the Board of Supervisors. They really spent the time and effort to make this thing work."

Beatty said VDOT will start staking the new path for the park's access road on Monday.

He said bids on the work will be obtained soon.

The road's estimated cost is $318,000 - a figure that, if it holds, will be cheaper than the project that called for paving the Carolina Road segment, Angell said.