ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701200057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
``A town is saved not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods that surround it.'' - naturalist Henry David Thoreau, as quoted in a 1965 study of Mill Mountain by Blue Ridge Parkway designer Stanley Abbott.
With the wind howling outside, Roanoke's guardians of Mill Mountain Park brainstormed for a solid 10 hours Saturday about how, if at all, the mountain should be changed.
They peered out at it from the frosted third-floor windows of businessman Ralph Smith's stone mansion, Rockledge, near the mountaintop. They saw speckly silent-movie footage of an early-model car careening and crashing along the mountain's old switchback road. They rode around in a city van and examined the summit.
But mostly they talked and talked about the mountain, just as their City Council-appointed body, the Mill Mountain Development Committee, has been doing for the last 30 years.
After at least four consultant studies of the mountain since the mid-60s, "It's time to stop studying and get some action," urged committee chairman Carl Kopitzke.
The newest members of this old commission are worried about the house-building that's cozying right up to the boundaries of the 535-acre park.
Some questioned whether the mountaintop Mill Mountain Zoo - growing to seven acres and perhaps expanding further someday - ought to be on the mountain at all.
After the meeting, one member suggested it move down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Explore Park - an idea he conceded would be hard to sell to baby boomers who grew up seeing their first exotic animals on Mill Mountain and want to take their kids to do the same thing in exactly the same place.
Kopitzke suggested hot-air balloon rides on the mountain. Member Mary Elizabeth Kepley proposed a reconstruction of the old Rockledge Inn, a hotel and restaurant that sat near the peak until it burned in the 1970s. She said such an inn should be made of wood and stone, like Smith's house and others built by long-ago mountain owner Will Henritze.
Ralph Smith, another committee member, wants a restaurant or some other new attraction on the mountain, but one that won't stand out like a sore thumb. "I don't want a skyscraper on top of it, but I want to be able to come and use it," he said of the mountain, in ways besides just hiking and biking and going to the zoo.
Some members, like Scott Shackelford, grandson of the man who gave the city most of the mountain more than 50 years ago, proposed only better nature trails and landscaping for the park.
Throughout the discussion of commercial development, Betty Field sat and listened, her face subtly twisting at the talk of tourist attractions and big crowds on the mountain.
The quiet, shy woman in her 60s has hiked the mountain for years and is the most stalwart defender of its wildlife and old oaks. She wasn't invited to the meeting, but she came anyway and brought her photographs of bluebirds and forest scenes.
She left the meeting without comment. She has asked repeatedly to be named to the committee but has been told there's no opening for her.
Committee chairman Kopitzke is vice president for campaigns for United Way of the Roanoke Valley. Vice chairman is Barry Thomas, rates and tariffs director for American Electric Power Co.
Other members are lawyer Thompson Hanes, former president of the zoo's board; rental property owner Kepley, a zoo board member; Jordan Peck III, manager of the Roanoke branch of McDonough Bolyard Peck, a construction management and engineering firm; retired businessman Shackelford, grandson of J.B. Fishburn, the Roanoke banker, newspaper owner and philanthropist who donated 174 acres of the park in the 1940s and 1950s; businessman Smith, chairman of Roanoke's Republican committee; Democratic City Councilman Jim Trout, who was one of the committee's first members from 1967 to 1977 and recently was reappointed; and Betty Winfree, long a leader in the Mill Mountain Garden Club. Only Winfree was absent Saturday.
The committee will take a few weeks polishing its mission and vision statements that were begun Saturday, then will develop a strategic plan. Its next meeting is set for 4 p.m. Feb. 12 at the city's office for parks and recreation.
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY STAFF. Participants in a visioning workshopby CNBfor Roanoke's Mill Mountain Development Committee trade visions of
the future for a view of the present as they tour one of the
overlooks Saturday. color.