ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608050117
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV16 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CAMBRIA
SOURCE: KATHY LU STAFF WRITER
Richard Roberts leaned forward from his easy chair and pointed to the dark window in a small black-and-white photograph of a building long gone, in a town long since transformed.
"Something terrible happened in the room through that window 67 years ago," he said with a mischievous smile, as if flames would burst out of the window in the picture. "Something terrible. That's where I was born."
Roberts is one of a handful of people born in Cambria - about a mile north of downtown Christiansburg - who still lives in the area.
Although his home is still in Cambria, on Norwood Street, the independent town where Roberts grew up is gone.
In its place is a historic community of old buildings occupied by new businesses which thrive on a pace that's somewhere between small town lazy and strip mall crazy.
Christiansburg annexed Cambria in 1964, and the threat of the small town losing its identity and life loomed.
"I left the pool hall at about 11 that night. It was cold and windy," Roberts remembered of the February 1947 fire that destroyed the building at Cambria and Depot streets. The post office, bank and bicycle store were in there.
"I ran down to the building and it was so cold that when they threw the water up the two-story building, it came back down ice."
Roberts lived just a few steps away on what is now Cambria Street. He went down to see the fire at about 2 a.m., and stayed until it died the next night.
Though Mrs. George Bell is not a Cambria native - she moved to town in 1939 - she was there to see the 1947 fire in the corner building where the Electrical Supply now stands. It was just across from her former Depot Street home.
"I looked out the window and saw a red blaze and it looked like a big ball of fire," she said. "Then I called the fire department."
Hers was one of the first calls to the department. The building burned to the ground.
Annell Bell Winbery, Bell's daughter, was returning from Emory & Henry College for a visit home when she stopped in Radford to visit some friends and heard about the fire.
"I was told that Cambria had burned down completely," Winbery said.
When Cambria sprang up on the maps in 1878, the town was called Bangs. Roberts believes it was named for the sound of gunshots when someone was shot on a train that came through town.
Whatever the name's origin, Bangs existed because of the railroad depot that Christiansburg built there.
When two railroads proposed to build tracks through Christiansburg, residents objected. As a compromise, the town offered a location over the hill north of town, just out of sight and hearing.
Bangs' took the name Cambria in 1892 - for the more melodic sound and also because of the geological stratum, or rock layer, underlying the area - and the town was officially incorporated under that name in 1906.
Because of its auspicious beginning, predictions abounded that Cambria would lose its identity and wither away when fires leveled major buildings, and again when the depot shut down in 1960, and when the town merged with Christiansburg.
But 118 years after its birth, Cambria still is very much alive.
"If anyone sees Cambria as dying, they haven't been keeping up with it for the past five years," said Kathy Harrison, owner of the 13-year-old Chair Doctor.
"The dynamics here are for resurgence of businesses - the buildings are filling up and a lot of my business comes from Blacksburg, so people obviously don't mind traveling in from Blacksburg."
Many industrial trades have come and gone in Cambria - including a furniture plant, a lime kiln, two flour mills and a foundry - and have been replaced by such local businesses as the Chair Doctor, Electrical Supply and Better Signs, to name a few.
"It's always been a little sleepy, a quaint place," said Robert Filippi, whose Better Signs shop on Cambria Street started in the Depot Station 20 years ago.
"It's a good business climate and we're not out in the boonies here. I wouldn't want to open up a McDonald's, but the types of businesses here have been doing well."
Local business owners aren't the only ones who have proof of a healthy, growing Cambria.
"Over the past three years, our revenue has increased by about 12 percent, which is equal to about $500,000," Arthur Duarte, Christiansburg postmaster, said of the Cambria office.
"The office now also has 11 rural routes instead of the eight routes three years ago, and the post office is designed to only house four."
Because of this increase, a 28,500-square-foot post office will be built near the Marketplace shopping center to serve Cambria, Christiansburg and Montgomery County.
Cambria's post office is expected to close by May 1997.
"It's very cramped in Cambria and we'll also save money by closing the Cambria station," Duarte said. "We're leasing the building right now and we have to hire a contractor who makes three trips a day from Christiansburg to Cambria to deliver the mail.
The old town now is referred to as the Cambria Historic District, which includes buildings such as the Depot Station and the Antique Emporium.
According to the National Register of Historic Places, the Cambria Depot Station is the only complete wooden depot in Virginia surviving the post-Civil War era. James Dorsett, a former Virginia Tech professor, bought the building in 1983 and remodeled it.
"So many people came by and asked why I was bothering to rebuild the place that I got tired of answering," Dorsett recalled.
"Then one day, while I was standing on a scaffolding, a 24-, 25-year-old man walked in with his daughter on his shoulders and said to me, 'I don't want to bother you, but I was just wondering if I could show my daughter what a real depot looks like.' Well, that was the pay for me."
In 1985, Dorsett bought the building across from the depot, where his wife opened the Antique Emporium after it was restored. It was built in 1908 by the Surface Grocery Co., and the building is called the Surface-Lee Block.
The two buildings at the end of Cambria Street that housed the Do Drop Inn are for sale - another piece of Cambria history that, if not preserved, could disappear like snow.
The western half of the Do Drop Inn buildings housed Montgomery County's first hospital. Dr. A.M. Showalter opened the Altamont Hospital in 1912 on the second floor - the first floor was occupied by Hickok's Drug Store.
The hospital had an operating room with a skylight.
By 1913, the east building was added and the two later served as stores and restaurants.
When Herles Dickerson opened the Do Drop Inn in the 1950s, the buildings also served as a home for him and his family.
Dickerson lived there until he died in April 1995. His daughter, Vicki Linkous, is hoping to sell the buildings to someone interested in restoring them. She has also applied to have the buildings registered with the National Register of Historic Places.
As Roberts put his weathered postcards and yellowed newspaper clippings away, he recalled how Cambria had the honor of electing Virginia's first female mayor, Vivian Burnett, in the 1950s.
Roberts had served a two-week term as mayor, but he thought 14 days were about all he could handle.
In his eyes, there lingers a trace of the boy who ran down to the store every time he had a penny for a piece of candy, or who worked at his father's furniture store where the First Virginia Bank now stands, or who would go to the depot to see Billy Gray, a "big ol' fella who worked for the Virginian Railroad."
"He would come in on the train sometimes and then wait to catch a cab to Blacksburg, where he lived," Roberts said.
"He would say that he was so hungry that his navel would be sticking to his backbone and he would always buy a cake. If I was there, we would cut it and eat it, which was a treat for me back in those days."
Though Billy, and much of the Cambria Roberts remembers, came and left with the train, he has no desire to abandon his home - or his memories.
"I still haven't found anywhere where I'd like better to live."
LENGTH: Long : 176 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. & 2. Cambria Baptist Church (inset), dating back toby CNBthe early 1900s, was burned down in 1927. Construction for a new
building broke ground in 1928. The church moved to the corner of
Ellett Road and Cambria Street in 1966. Victory Temple Pentecostal
Church (above) purchased the present location after Cambria Baptist
Church built a new building on the corner of Ellett Road and Cambria
Street in 1966. color
3. & 4. The Cambria Market (inset, Coca Cola sign) no longer stands
since it burned down August 1, 1959. Richard Roberts was born in one
of the second floor rooms. Where Cambria Market used to stand
(right) is now the front lawn for First Virginia Bank. color
5. The Surface-Lee Block building, on the corner of Cambria and
Depot streets. Built in 1908, half of it (left side in the picture
below) burned down in 1947, and what remains is the Cambria
Emporium.
6. Richard Roberts, Cambria native and an avid historian of Cambria.
In the background is the Surface-Lee Block builing, with Cambria
Emporium (right) and Electrical Supply Co. (left). Historic photos
courtesy of Richard Roberts. Present-day photos by ALAN KIM/Staff.
color
7. Courtesy of Richard Roberts. A bird's eye view of Cambria, such
as this 1910 postcard as viewed from High Street, is no longer
possible due to tree growth.
8. Courtesy of Richard Roberts. Cambria Hardware Co. building,
1915. The building is now occupied by Morning Glory Cafe.