The papers of architect and former Virginia Tech faculty member Leonard J. Currie (1913-1996) have become my great challenge. Not the papers themselves, per se. All things considered, they are in good condition. We have received Currie’s papers in four accessions over time, the last two arriving since I came to VT. There are more than 11 boxes of papers, photographs, negatives, and artifacts and it continues to be an on-going process making them available. There are a number of reasons for that, but it isn’t the point I’m making today. Determining what to process when is ever-changing in an archives. Leonard Currie’s papers weren’t necessarily on the top of that list and, if not for happenstance, I might never have decided (happily!) to make it my project. The truth is, it started with a reference question about Six Moon Hill. More specifically, about 16 Moon Hill Road.
16 Moon Hill Road, Lexington, Massachusetts
Six Moon Hill was a community of houses built by architects in The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Currie,who received his Masters from Harvard in 1938, was among this group of young designers. 16 Moon Hill Road was his design andresidence. In 2011, I caught a reference question about the house, around the time the last donation of papers arrived–someone was looking for plans and photographs.
We didn’t have more than two dozen images, but I had to go digging to find them. Along the way, I found hundreds of photographs and negatives from Currie’s travels (he spent a great deal of time working in Central and South America) and from his work in the Blacksburg/Southwest Virginia area.I was fascinated and decided it was time someone started processing. (That someone being me, of course.)
After Harvard, Currie worked with Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius. From 1956-1962, he worked here at Virginia Tech, before going on to become the dean of College of Architecture and Art at the University of Illinois, Chicago. When he retired in 1981, he returned to Blacksburg to live and work. He designed homes, churches, schools, and other buildings throughout the region until his death in 1996. When he and his family lived here the first time around, he designed “Currie House I,” a home on the National Register of HistoricPlaces. (We have plans from that house, but that might make a great future post.) On his return in the 1980s, he designed what he refers to throughout his collection as “Currie House II.” There are hundreds of photographs of the latter in his collection.
Currie’s papers remain, at the moment, a work-in-progress. To date, the photographs and negatives are organized and the paper files (received in no particular order) are underway. We don’t have a finding aid online for the work done so far, but if you’d like to visit us and take a look, we can show you what we have.
As with any college town, August brings to Blacksburg a sudden shift from near-dormancy to feverish activity. Streets clog. Parking spaces disappear. And piles of modern lifes necessitiesfrom box fans to microwave ovens, from flat-screen TVs to mini-fridgesalign sidewalks as families and volunteers move new students into their appointed dorm rooms.
In the early years of Virginia Techthen known as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical Collegestudent move-ins were much different. In 1872, the schools inaugural year, the new, non-local student arrived by train unaccompanied, alighting at the station near Christiansburg. The additional eight-mile journey by hired carriage to Blacksburg could take as long as three hours on roads that were sometimes nearly impassable. It wouldnt be until 1904 that a spur linethe Huckleberry Railroadwould allow for a much easier (though, at a scheduled 40 minutes, still-lethargic) trip from Christiansburg.
Upon arriving, the more sophisticated freshmen were probably unimpressed by their new surroundings. Blacksburg was barely a spot on the map at the time and couldnt provide much comfort and entertainment to young men far from home. The campus itself consisted of but five acres and a single building. Though it rose above the surrounding countryside, the three-story edifice was less than grand. Samuel Withers, who entered the school in early 1873, uncharitably wrote, The architect who planned it must have been a genius, for it was a classic in its ugliness.
Former home of The Preston & Olin Institute, the lone VAMC campus building included classrooms, offices, a chapel, and student lodging.
The building contained only 24 lodging rooms, which made for cramped quarters. Even after packing three cadets to a room, fewer than half of the first years 172 students could be accommodated.
This photo of triple-deckered bunks was taken around 1902, another of the schools frequent growing-pain periods. Note how the bunks are tied together with rope.
As sometimes still happens today, with enrollment exceeding available rooms, students had to find alternative, off-campus lodging. Many acquired room and board in private homes. Others took up residence in structures hastily built by local entrepreneurs who saw in student rentals a potential windfall. One such building, at the corner of Church and Roanoke streets, was officially named Lybrook Row. The building apparently gained a somewhat notorious reputation, however, and was more familiarly known to cadets as Buzzards Roost and Hell Row. Still, these first-year cadets of what was then an all-male military school could take some comfort in living off-campus, where they were less subject to the control of upperclassmen.
Though Lybrook Row had fallen into disrepair by the time this photo was taken, one can see that it was a very basic affair and likely deserved the appellation Hell Row.
As there were initially no dining facilities on campus, students took meals with local families or at the nearby Lusters Hotel. Others formed their own private messes to provide for themselves. By mid-1873, however, the college had erected a mess hall; after the addition of more lodging in 1881, the school required all students to live and eat on campus.
The fare in the early mess halls could best be described as basic, and though the college claimed to make every effort to provide good materials, and to have them properly cooked and neatly served, the mess didnt have the reputation of todays Virginia Tech Dining Services for culinary excellence. In the 1881/82 catalog, administrators noted apologetically, [N]ecessarily, the living at seven and a half dollars per month must be plain. After one too many poorly prepared meals, one student expressed the frustration of many when he wrote in the 1900 Gray Jacket: I am so weary of sole-leather steak / Petrified doughnuts and vulcanized cake / Weary of paying for what I dont eat / chewing up rubber and calling it meat.
Mess hall interior, ca. 1900.
1888 saw the opening of Lane Hall (then known as Barracks No. 1), able to house 150 students. While the accommodations were still meager by todays standards, the new building contained such appreciated amenities as steam heating and, on the ground floor, hot and cold running water. Electric lighting was added in 1890. The furnishings, made by students in the college shops, included austere bedsteads, tables, chairs, and bookcases. Students provided their own mattresses, linens, water- and slop-buckets.
The spare furnishings of a barracks room included a straight-backed chair, a washstand, and a bed that appears somewhat less inviting than the floor.Then as now, students personalized their rooms with decorations. With no members of the opposite sex to be seen on campus, many male cadets adorned their walls with the female formor at least as much of the female form as was allowed by Victorian-era strictures.
As with students immemorial, the VAMC cadets participated in many unauthorized activities and pranks. Though regulations forbade it, they drew water from the barracks radiators to fill the washtubs in their rooms for a hot bath on Saturday nights. And with the new availability of its primary ingredient, the water bomb soon became a campus mainstay, to the chagrin of pedestrians near the barracks.
The housing of all students under one roof brought with it unintended results. Hazingor the “application of extra-curricular controls over the behavior of the freshmen, as Douglas Kinnear called it in his 1972 history of Virginia Techbecame ritualized after the construction of Lane Hall and probably caused many a first-year cadet to wish hed never heard of Blacksburg.
In the middle of any given night, a new student was likely to be dumped from his bed, a favorite practical joke inflicted by upperclassmen. This scene, probably staged, was photographed in 1899.
Despite all of the inconveniences and discomforts endured by the new students, they came to love their school devotedly and, as alumni, to remember it fondly and support it proudly. It must have been exciting for that first generation of students to watch the continual improvements made in the campus and to see it grow into the university it had become by the mid-20th century. There can be no doubt, though, that when they visited, they could be heard to comment upon how easy their successors had things.
The University Archives contain a wealth of materials that offer glimpses into the early days of Virginia Tech. The photographs, campus maps, student scrapbooks, and published histories in our collections trace the schools evolution from a one-room school to the dynamic, modern research university that it is today.
Its the beginning of August, which for those of us living in and around Blacksburg, means the blocking off of Main Street and the beginning of Blacksburgs biggest festival- Steppin Out. The annual street festival, which features hundreds of arts and crafts vendors and tens of thousands of attendees, has been a Blacksburg tradition since the late 1970s. It began as an effort to revitalize the downtown and generate revenue for various local charities. But while digging around in Special Collections Vertical Files (where we collect news clippings and articles on various local subjects), I discovered that in the early days, the festival had a much wilder, and unfortunately, darker side.
An article from the Roanoke Times on August 12, 1976, noting the first Deadwood Days festival in downtown Blacksburg
Photos in the Roanoke Times from the second annual Deadwood Days festival in downtown Blacksburg in 1977
Article in the Roanoke Times from July 9, 1980, discussing the Blacksburg Town Council’s ban on the Deadwood Days festival.
The annual festival was first organized in 1976 as Deadwood Days, based off of a successful annual festival of the same name held in Deadwood, South Dakota. The original Deadwood Days festival commemorated the shooting of Wild Bill Hickok, an infamous outlaw of the Old West, on August 2, 1876, in the town of Deadwood, and the Blacksburg version was held for the first time a week after the shootings 100th anniversary.
Thus, for the first four years, the three-day festival had a Wild West theme, and really lived up to that theme in more than just the decor. A 1980 article in the Montgomery News Messenger described it as a rip-snorting, music-and-dancing-in-the-streets gathering enjoyed primarily by the under-40 crowd, adding It has also earned the reputation of a three-day beer bust and drug festival. Festival events during those first four years regularly ran past 1am, with increasing rowdiness and numerous arrests made by the Blacksburg Police for marijuana and cocaine possession.
All of that came to a head in 1979, when the Deadwood Days festival was marred in tragedy. After leaving Deadwood Days on Saturday night, a 17-year-old Blacksburg High School student was shot dead by two teens that hed given a ride from the festival. The teens had reportedly been drinking heavily at the festival, and had no trouble getting all the beer they wanted from downtown bars in the hours immediately proceeding [sic] the murder. In the aftermath, community members blamed the free-wheeling, shoot-em-up atmosphere of Deadwood Days for encouraging the murder, and in July of 1980, just one month before the 5th annual Deadwood Days festival was scheduled to begin, the Blacksburg Town Council voted 5-1 to ban the event.
In the wake of this decision, one council member was quoted in the Blacksburg Sun saying the festival would have to be planned two steps this side of Mary Poppins if it is even to come off in 81 or 82. And in August of 1981, with the strong support of Blacksburgs downtown merchants, a family-friendly arts and crafts festival called Steppin Out was held. The festival changed from a three-day to a two-day festival, with an ending time of 9pm, and included more kid-friendly activities and a much more wholesome atmosphere. Needless to say, Steppin Out was still a hit, and 2014 will mark 33rd year of the this downtown Blacksburg tradition.
2007 Steppin’ Out festival program
1989 Steppin’ Out festival program
Article from August 5, 1988, in the Roanoke Times about the Steppin’ Out festival.
So if some curiosity for Blacksburg history suddenly strikes you while enjoying this weekends festivities in the historic downtown, remember that the Vertical Files in Special Collections has information on many of the buildings, events and people that have made this town what it is today, and were here to help you answer your local history curiosities Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm, every week. But until then, enjoy your weekend, but dont get too wild!
