ROANOKE TIMES Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times DATE: Monday, April 29, 1996 TAG: 9604290128 SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER note: above
THE HARRIS FAMILY has lived in the old house since it was built in the 1870s. This is the second time U.S.221 has made itself felt.
Legend has it, when southbound U.S. 221 first rounded the bend on a collision course with Benjamin Harris' back yard, he swore he'd never paint his home - an intended affront to passing motorists.
Some say Harris was annoyed that the new highway had been rerouted behind the old homestead, which faced the route taken by the original dirt road to Bent Mountain. Others say he was retaliating because the road plowed through the middle of his garden.
Since the homestead was already nearly 50 years old and had yet to see its first coat of paint back around 1930 when the highway project began, it's likely the tale has been embroidered over the years.
Horace Harris, Benjamin's son, says his father did indeed fight state officials over the road and the compensation offered him for damage to his property.
"He took them to court, but I don't think it done no good," Horace said. His wife, Lillian, says Benjamin didn't seem to hold a grudge against the highway in his later years.
"Mr. Harris would go out and sit in the flower garden and watch the cars go by. He wore a great big old cowboy hat. People would blow the horn at him and he'd throw his hand up," she recalled. "He didn't talk a whole lot. What he wanted you to know, that's what he said. He was one that didn't show his anger a whole lot."
Benjamin Harris died in 1963. A decade later, Horace and Lillian got their first indication that U.S. 221 was going to disrupt yet another generation of Harrises.
"The first time I knowed anything about it was when they surveyed back in 1974," Horace said, "and that was the last I heard of it till they started all this bull again."
He leaned forward and tapped his cigarette ash into the fireplace in the dining room, where the family gathered last week to discuss the road project that inevitably will bring traffic even closer to their century-old home and perhaps even cause its destruction.
"We're in the middle," Horace said.
Like his father, Horace isn't the type to say two words when one will do. He's a small, wiry man, but his hands are large and powerful from years of working with automobiles. As a boy, Horace managed to attain two nicknames - Shorty and Sleepy - both of which have stuck with him.
"They said his mother fought fire while she was carrying him," Lillian explained. "That's what caused his eyes to droop like that."
However, the blue work shirt he wears and those hanging from nails along the wall of the dining room all have patches identifying him as Shorty.
The reigning patriarch of the Harris family has lived on the homestead all his life except for his service in the Pacific during World War II and the first three years of his married life, when he and Lillian lived in Mt. Pleasant with her parents.
Lillian, a vivacious woman with salt-and-pepper hair and an eager smile, fills the gaps in conversation with stories about their grandchildren, pointing to the photographs she has pinned to the dining room curtains.
The floor, walls and doors of the Harris house are made of the same unfinished poplar and pine boards that are seen on the exterior of the building. Many of the boards are more than a foot wide. Some are so large that one door leading to the rear of the house is made from just two of them.
Outside, the two-story house is decorated with Christmas lights strung in the shape of a star. Inside, only one room bears traces of flowered wallpaper, faded to a dim memory by smoke from the wood stove.
"This is just plain old home here," Lillian said.
When preservationists look at the structure, however, they see a historic treasure. The Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation has asked state road officials to maintain 221 as a two-lane road to avoid damaging the farmstead.
Although it dates from the same period as the Poage home, farther south on 221, the Harris house has remained unchanged since it was built in the 1870s by Horace's grandfather, with two exceptions: The room where Harris women baked bread daily for decades has become a modern bathroom, and Lillian coaxed her father-in-law to allow electricity into the house in the 1950s for a refrigerator when her youngest son was born.
The Poage house "is the house that you'd rather be living in, but it's not the house that tells you about the history of the county," preservation foundation member Robert France said.
"Our point is not entirely historical, either," France added. "What you want to preserve is the rural character of the valley. It's not really the house we're trying to preserve. It's the Harrises we're trying to preserve."
The Harrises aren't entirely clear on why anyone would be interested in their home or family.
"I don't know much about the historic value of the house," Lillian said. "The only thing I can say is it's old and built good."
As for the history of the family itself, Horace said, "It was very little wrote down."
"The only thing my father said, one time, he said, they come into Bedford County and split up. Now, where they come from into Bedford County, I have no idea, or how many it was of them."
Some of the family photos that share a bedroom wall with a brittle 1952 calendar don't match up easily with the names printed on the yellowed pages of the Harris family Bible. Nor can every relative buried in a small family graveyard be identified.
It's not important for the Harrises to be able to recite the vital statistics of each ancestor who has passed through their home. Their heritage is more closely associated with the knowledge that the next generation has always been present to care for its elders, even as 20th century life has scattered most families.
That heritage doesn't mean today's Harrises will greet officials from the Virginia Department of Transportation in the same way Benjamin took on the old Department of Highways.
"I would like to save the old house," said Bobby, the oldest son, who lives with his parents. "But we could get another house out of the deal. We could put it up on the hill. That's up to VDOT. If they work with us, we could probably work with them."
Actually, it's not up to VDOT or the Harrises. The Virginia Historical Society already has determined that the Harris house is eligible for historic designation. Eligibility alone prevents a road project from touching the house without the society's concurrence.
VDOT will choose a consulting firm by early summer to make a recommendation on how to straighten out the tricky S-curve on 221 that starts just south of the house. The historic value of the house is just one factor the firm will study - along with environmental and financial issues - in determining the path of the new road. Construction engineer Pete Sensabaugh said the road certainly will be closer to the Harris house, and could require that it be relocated or removed. But, he added, neither option is available to VDOT unless the historical society rules that no alternative exists and the road project is essential.
Construction is scheduled to begin in 2001 at the earliest, and life goes on at the Harris home. A pickup is parked in the body shop awaiting a fresh coat of paint, and the garden has been plowed in preparation for a summer harvest of potatoes, lima beans and cucumbers. Still, the family can't help but eye the road that has carved the garden into a wedge-shaped fraction of the one Benjamin tilled.
"You live here in a house so long, you get an awful lot of memories," Lillian said. "You hate to see something like that tore down, but when they're building a new highway, something's got to give."
LENGTH: Long : 141 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. CINDY PINKSTON/Staff< The Harris house at the edgeby CNBof U.S. 221 harks back to an earlier era, when the highway to Bent
Mountain was a dirt wagon trail and homesteaders didn't paint
buildings made of poplar boards. color
2. Lillian and Horace ``Shorty'' Harris call it ``just plain old
home," but the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation has asked the
state to avoid damaging it. color