ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 18, 1997 TAG: 9703180049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM THE ROANOKE TIMES
Robert Bowyer Preston played in the tall grass and tree groves of the Greenfield plantation long before the notion of industrial parks, much less one in Botetourt County, even existed.
Born in 1902, Preston worked on and ranged over the 922-acre family homestead founded by his late great ancestor, Revolutionary War Col. William Preston, when the world was barely industrialized and Botetourt was still just farms and orchards.
As a child, Robert Preston, his parents and nine brothers and sisters lived in the colonial-era mansion Col. Preston had built more than 150 years earlier. They were the seventh generation of Prestons to do so.
The mansion has since burned down and the plantation sold. The farm now belongs to Botetourt County, which has plans to fill it with new industry, a 150-acre recreation area, an elementary school and many natural and historical conservation areas.
All of Preston's brothers and sisters died along the way, leaving him as the last living Preston to be born at the homestead.
Saturday morning, 94-year-old Robert Preston died.
More than 50 years ago he sold his 30 acres of Greenfield to his brother John. He let the whole spread go for $1,000, he told the Fincastle Herald in 1995. That's about $333 an acre.
Botetourt County paid close to $5,000 an acre for it and the rest of the farm in 1995.
But even by the time the mansion burned, Preston had lost his sentiment for Greenfield, he once said.
He had long since left home and made his way in the world. He traveled the country working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said Jane Preston, John Preston's daughter.
Jane Preston said "he was just a gay bachelor until he settled down" and married Jessica "Jay" Gundry of Waco, Texas. In later life, the couple moved back to Botetourt to live on a farm near Buchanan and ran the Mexican Craft Shop in Hollins.
He was a quiet, reserved man who enjoyed playing poker once a month in Fincastle and was "proud of his longevity," his one-time poker buddy, Harry Kessler, said. "Whenever I saw him, he would always tell me how old he was."
He never made too big a deal of his ancestry, either. "He wasn't shy about it, but he didn't go around talking about his ancestry," Kessler said.
His most outward recognition of his family name came in 1974, when he dressed up as Col. Preston for a re-enactment of drafting of the Fincastle Resolutions, which were a precursor document of the Declaration of Independence.
Col. Preston was one of Botetourt's first statesmen, representing the county in the House of Burgesses in the 1760s. But he was best known as a pioneer and soldier who planned military operations along the Virginia frontier during the Revolutionary War. He also was a diplomat frequently called on to negotiate treaties with Indians in the region, including the Shawnee and Cherokee.
In the past few years, Robert Preston depended more and more on the care of his grandson, Devin Moeller.
Jane Preston said she took her "Uncle Robert" to a few of the informational meetings about the county's purchase and development of Greenfield.
"I think he was resigned to it, as I was," she said.
Though the family mansion was destroyed, plans for Botetourt Center at Greenfield include the preservation of some outbuildings, including a colonial-era kitchen and some slave quarters.
In a few years, workers will toil at the plantation again, but it will be in factories and not like when Robert Preston was a boy.
"Everybody worked, everybody was happy" back then, he said in 1995. "We never felt we were having a hard time."
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