ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 10, 1996 TAG: 9611080011
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETSY BIESENBACH STAFF WRITER
WHEN LOUISE KEGLEY was growing up in Roanoke during the 1930s and '40s, her life, in many ways, was fairly ordinary. She lived with her mother and grandparents in a house near Memorial Bridge at the corner of 13th Street and Wasena Terrace.
She and her mother moved there when she was 2 years old, after her parents divorced.
She remembers playing with the neighborhood kids, walking a few blocks down the street for an ice cream cone on a summer evening and listening to her favorite shows on the family's console radio.
The only difference between her and the other kids was that she was living in what was then the biggest house in town, and her grandfather, Junius Blair Fishburn, was one of the wealthiest and most influential men around.
Fishburn was one of the founders of the National Exchange Bank, which later became Dominion Bank; a partner in the Stone Printing Co. and the American Bridge Works Co.; and one of the original investors in the Incline Railway up Mill Mountain.
In 1909, he bought The Roanoke Times, and, in 1914, he became the owner of the Evening News. During his nearly 80-year career, he was on the board of directors of more than 30 corporations.
He donated the land for Highland Park, Mill Mountain Park, South Roanoke Park, Norwich Park, Lakewood Park, Wasena Park and Fairystone State Park in Patrick County and gave 2,500 acres of land in Montgomery County to Virginia Tech.
"He loved parks and trees," Kegley said. "He would often walk outside two or three times a day" just to look around and feed nuts to the squirrels.
Fishburn also loved Roanoke, Kegley said.
When he died in 1955, his final gift to the residents of Roanoke was the 40-room house on 13th Street, which he called Mountain View, but is better known as the Fishburn House. His will stipulated that it was to be used "solely and exclusively for public recreation purposes."
"It's a wonderful, wonderful place," said Tom Clark of Roanoke's Department of Parks and Recreation. For the past five years, he has been in charge of senior-citizen programming, which is based at Mountain View.
Every day of the week, small groups of senior citizens gather there for bridge games, classes, lectures and socializing in the elegant surroundings of Junius Fishburn's beloved home.
A humble start
For all of his achievements later in life, Junius Blair Fishburn came from humble beginnings.
He was born in Franklin County on Sept. 27, 1865, one of eight children of James Addison and Louise Fishburn. The family was poor and, when Junius was 2, they moved to Kentucky in search of better opportunities.
But life there was just as hard as it had been in Virginia, so, in 1880, when Junius was nearly 15, they returned to settle in Big Lick, a railroad boom town, where Junius' father and uncle opened a general store. Junius worked there as a clerk for several years.
He keenly felt his lack of formal education and tried to educate himself throughout his life by reading and traveling.
In fact, he accumulated so many books that he often gave hundreds of them away to public and school libraries. The books that were the foundation for the Virginia Collection in the downtown Roanoke public library were donated by him.
"He was a very generous man," Kegley said. In addition to his public donations, he often quietly gave dimes and quarters to people who stopped him on the street.
In 1889, his uncle, Tipton T. Fishburn, organized the National Exchange Bank. At age 24, Junius, who, according to Kegley, could do complex mathematical calculations in his head, including compounding daily interest, became the youngest bank cashier in Virginia.
His business interests took off from there and, as they grew, so did his ambition to own the biggest and best house in town.
In 1906, he bought nearly four acres of land from the Exchange Building Co., which he owned, moved the house that was on the property and began building.
Fishburn had an incredible memory for detail, Kegley said, and was a meticulous record-keeper. According to his notes, the cost of the "land, grading, house, stable, and two-room servants' house" was $91,573.86. Today, the same house on similar property would cost $1.5 million to build, said Lynn Vernon, parks planner for Roanoke.
When the stable burned in 1917, it was replaced with a garage, hothouse and servants' quarters at a cost of $13,000. Leftover materials were used to build an elaborate brick chicken coop, complete with dentil molding around the eaves. It was never used, except for storing tools. The tile roofing used on the main house and the outbuildings was guaranteed by the manufacturer for 400 years.
Gilded chandeliers
In 1908, the work nearly complete, Fishburn, his wife, Grace, whom he married in 1893, and their three children, Junius Parker, 13, Evelyn, 10, and Louise, 8, moved in.
Granite steps lead to the entrance, which is framed by columns and a two-story portico. The porches, which wrap around the house, are also supported by similar decorative columns.
The front door opens to a glassed-in foyer, which leads into a grand hall with a view of the huge staircase and the landing above. Because of the high newel posts at the ends of the wide, smooth banisters, they were "not good for sliding down," Kegley said, shaking her head, her disappointment still apparent after all these years.
All of the woodwork downstairs is mahogany. It is so dark that Clark says the cleaning crews complain that they can dust it one day, and it will look like they never touched it the next.
For all its grandeur, the front entrance was rarely used, Kegley said. Like many families, the Fishburns preferred to use the side door. Their side door, however, opened onto a stone-paved carriage drive, complete with a mounting block set into the steps.
The side door leads to the two rooms on the left side of the entrance hall, which the family used as sitting rooms. Together, they measure 20 feet by 39 feet.
Fishburn liked to nap in these rooms.
He was a small man, less than 51/2 feet tall, Kegley said. "He was very busy, very active. He didn't walk, he ran."
If someone arrived less than 15 minutes early for an appointment with "Mr. J.B.," she said, "they were late."
The house also has a formal parlor, measuring 16 by 20 feet, which Kegley said was used only at Christmas. The molding here is carved in a Greek key design and, under the tarnish, the chandelier is gilded.
Soon after the house was built, a porch off the dining room was enclosed in glass and used as a conservatory. Kegley said her grandmother kept plants on the marble-faced heat registers that run the length of the curved room.
Off the dining room is a series of pantries, the kitchen and the servants' dining room. The Fishburns usually had several servants, including a cook, a chauffeur, a gardener and a nanny when Kegley was a girl. This was shortly after the Lindbergh kidnapping, she explained, and the family was reluctant to leave her unsupervised.
As a girl, Kegley spent most of her time in the kitchen. "Cook and I were great friends," she said. The servants lived in a two-room house in the back yard or in an apartment over the garage.
The entire rear of the house is a wall of glass. There are two sun porches and a breakfast room. The family radio was kept on one of the porches, but the breakfast room with its decorative tile floor was rarely used because it was too cold, Kegley said.
There are two sets of stairs in the house, one in front and one in back.
On the lower landing of the main stairwell, there are leaded glass windows that look down from a second-story enclosed porch, which Kegley calls "the pencil sharpening room," because when she lived there, a pencil sharpener was the only thing in the room.
There are five bedrooms and four bathrooms upstairs. She said she learned to swim in one of the bathroom's old, claw-foot bathtub.
And when she was a teen-ager, Kegley and her cousins would go to an upstairs sleeping porch to smoke. Because the house was so big, she said, nobody was the wiser.
On the third floor, there is a storeroom, where the family kept luggage and, during World War II, certain hard-to-get staples. Kegley remembers seeing boxes of toilet paper stacked there.
Also on the third floor are three bedrooms, which were intended for guests, but which were rarely used, Kegley said, laughing, except for visiting relatives the family didn't like. Kegley's mother and her siblings used to roller skate in one of these rooms when they were kids.
The bathroom on the third floor is the only room in the house that has a clear view of the mountains.
Idiosyncracies
The house has several idiosyncratic features that reflect Fishburn's personality. The lighting fixtures, for instance, are fitted both for gas and electricity. Kegley said her grandfather didn't trust the new-fangled electricity.
In the kitchen, the hall and one of the bedrooms is an early intercom system that connected to the servants' quarters. It never worked, Kegley said.
Fishburn also feared house fires, so he installed fire hoses in various closets throughout the house. He was proud, in fact, that the house had nearly as many closets as it did rooms, although most of them are small and shallow and practically useless.
Fishburn was worried about security. Most of the doors and windows have double or triple locks, and the stairs leading from the main hall to the basement were closed off and blocked by furniture.
If there ever had been a fire, Kegley said, "we would have never gotten out."
In this case, Kegley said, the fear was real: During the Great Depression, there were several break-ins.
For all of his quirks, Kegley remembers her grandfather as a kind man who loved children. Despite his taste for huge houses and cars - he drove gas-guzzlers even during World War II - he believed in moderation, doling out treats such as chewing gum and Lifesavers to his grandchildren one piece at a time.
Fishburn hoped to live to be 100 years old. He was able to maintain much of his vigor until the end of his life, Kegley said.
When his knees began to bother him, he refused to use a cane, and insisted on making his daily rounds from his office at the newspaper building to his office at the bank on foot. Although he retired from the bank in 1919, he remained on the board of directors until his death.
Unbeknownst to him, the family had the chauffeur follow him in the car as a precaution.
On his 80th birthday, The Roanoke Times put out an extra edition to honor him. The headline read: "Roanoke's First Citizen."
Kegley said her grandfather's health and interest in life took a turn for the worse in 1950 when her grandmother died.
Gift to the city
Although he loved the house, after his wife's death it seemed too big, too cold and too empty, and paying for its upkeep was more than he could manage. Just painting the exterior cost $3,000 - and that was in the 1950s, Kegley said.
The family spent several years looking for another home, but couldn't find one that suited him. They were still looking in 1954 when Fishburn's only son, Junius, suffered a fatal stroke in Washington, D.C., while attending FCC hearings on the brand-new entertainment medium, television.
His son's death was the final blow for Fishburn. He died the following year, just a few months short of his 90th birthday.
Fishburn knew the family didn't want the house, but he was afraid that if it were sold, it would be divided into apartments, Kegley said. So, shortly after his death, Kegley's mother, Louise Fishburn Fowlkes, turned the keys over to the city.
Very few people know where Kegley grew up and she doesn't like to talk much about it. She didn't want to be photographed for this story. And although the idea of living in a house like Mountain View sounds exciting, she never particularly liked it. "There was a stigma - growing up in the biggest house in town," she said.
But she does have fond memories of the time she lived there. Most of her days were spent playing on the extensive grounds. Her mother and her uncle grew irises, and there was a garden full of them. They grew vegetables, too, and there were tennis courts at the bottom of the hill.
An inveterate tomboy, Kegley once scaled the outside wall, hanging onto outcroppings of brick with her fingers and toes, to scare her mother by peeping in her second-floor window.
Kegley said she and her family have never regretted giving up the house. Her grandfather wanted people to use it, she said.
Every few years, she comes back to visit, sometimes bringing her children and grandchildren. Her feelings of nostalgia last about 30 seconds, she said.
"It looks smaller every time I come back."
LENGTH: Long : 232 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. 1. The imposing main staircase is madeby CNBfrom carved mahogany. 2. Ionic columns and a wraparound porch grace
the neoclassical mansion. 3. House plants thrive in the light-filled
greenhouse (above). 4. Fishburn was wary of electricity, so the
mansion's light fixtures (right) were fitted both for electricity
and gas. 5. The Fishburn House on 13th Street was donated to the
city of Roanoke in 1955.