ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 20, 1996 TAG: 9609200050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
THE GAINSBORO BRANCH library earned the designation from a state board that will recommend that it also be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Residents of the city's oldest neighborhood have long considered the public library on Patton Avenue special.
As of Wednesday, that's official. The state Board of Historic Resources named the Gainsboro branch library a state historic landmark. The board also is forwarding a recommendation to Washington, D.C., that the library be placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Wednesday's actions were praised by Evelyn Bethel, a Gainsboro activist who spearheaded the drive for historic designation.
"It shows what our foreparents were able to accomplish when all odds were against them," Bethel said. "And it should serve as a motivating force for our present generation to stand together and speak up for services and other opportunities which are being denied our communities."
"I'm really happy about it," said Carla Pullen, chief librarian at the branch for the past 23 years. "I don't know if I can put it in words how I feel about it."
Although the one-story, English Tudor Revival-style building is only 54 years old, the library has a special significance to Roanoke's black community.
It is where many local black doctors, lawyers, teachers and others did their first serious studying. Public schools and libraries were still segregated at the time, and blacks were barred from using other city library facilities. Their schools had none.
The only way they could get a book from a whites-only library branch was to request it through the Gainsboro branch.
Another reason it's held in high regard has more to do with history. The Gainsboro branch is the site of a vast collection of literature, history and letters by nationally famous black authors, composers and scientists such as Langston Hughes, W.C. Handy, Paul Lawrence Dunbar and George Washington Carver.
Former librarian Virginia Young Lee, who died in 1992, compiled the collection during her 43 years at the branch. It has since been named the Virginia Y. Lee African-American History Collection, and the library devotes an entire room to it.
"That room has special meaning not only to people in Roanoke, but to people from outside here," City Councilman Carroll Swain said at council's Sept. 3 meeting. Swain himself studied in the branch during high school and on breaks from college.
That the library was built at all is almost an accident of history.
The first city library in the Gainsboro neighborhood opened in 1921 in a small storefront office that was rented from the Odd Fellows Hall, which has since been torn down.
By 1928, so many students were using it that library officials had to limit its use to one class at a time, according to a history of the building prepared by Dr. John Kerns, director of the Roanoke regional office of the state Department of Historic Resources.
Lee became librarian in 1928; at that time the library held a scant 2,500 volumes (now it has more than 28,000). Sometime during the 1930s, Lee began approaching city leaders with a plan for a real library - a pretty, sun-filled place where black Roanokers could read and think.
Nearby St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church donated the lot on Patton Avenue at Gainsboro Road. Lee found an architect to design the building.
But Roanoke was under pressure to build an armory and stadium during World War II. For a while, it looked as if the city wouldn't have the money for the library's construction.
The city leaders of the time also were none too pleased at Lee's pursuit of the black history materials, said Helen Davis, another Gainsboro activist.
"City officials, in writing, told [Lee] to go slow on such information. ... Later, Mrs. Lee was told to either stop collecting and displaying materials or look for another job," Davis told City Council at its Sept. 3 meeting. "Her reply was, 'If it is going to cost my job, that's the way it will be, because I'm not going to stop.''' And she didn't.
Eventually, Norfolk and Western Railway stepped forward to build Victory Stadium, freeing up funds for the library's construction. It opened in 1942.
Today, the library is used frequently by Gainsboro residents and students from Lincoln Terrace Elementary School, Addison Middle School and Roanoke Catholic School, Pullen said.
Bethel began efforts to get it named a landmark in 1992, but her request sat on a shelf at City Hall for three years. She raised the question again in March 1995, as the city prepared an application for historic designation of the Hotel Roanoke just before it reopened.
The following month, council concurred with City Manager Bob Herbert's recommendation to ask for a historic designation for the library as well, and the application was forwarded to the state.
More recently, questions surrounding the library's future have provoked anxiety among Gainsboro residents. A consultant to the city library board last month recommended it be closed and merged into a huge new main library branch.
Julie Vasmick, of the Department of Historic Resources, said the building's historic designation doesn't confer any particular protections on it. But Herbert and City Council members have indicated they have no intention of closing the library or tearing down the building.
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. 1. The Gainsboro branch is the site ofby CNBa vast collection of literature, history and letters by nationally
famous black authors, composers and scientists compiled by former
librarian Virginia Young Lee. 2. Although the one-story, English
Tudor Revival-style building is only 54 years old, the library has a
special significance to Roanoke's black community. color. 3.
(headshot) Pullen.