Rockbridge Vignettes

12/11/2025

Our favorite stirrer of local social and political pots, the Rockbridge Advocate, has a charming item in its history roundup this month about one Charles D. Kellogg, then age 24, whose act was booked to play the Lexington Opera House (today best known as the old Troubadour Theatre) on Dec. 5, 1892. Mr. Kellogg achieved worldwide fame for being able to imitate birds perfectly. He didn’t merely whistle like a bird — lots of performers did that, and whistling was big on the vaudeville circuit. No — Kellogg warbled from his throat across a 12-octave range and lived in a hollowed-out redwood log, which he had mounted on a Nash truck bed and drove around the country to raise awareness of the plight of California’s forests.

12/11/2025

Rockbridge was a hotbed of classical-style architecture until the eve of the Civil War, when the Gothic style emerged (think of the Presbyterian Manse, 1848, or the entire VMI post, beginning with the barracks, 1851). This view of the Manse shows the east façade, looking from Main Street.

12/10/2025

Forest Oaks is in contract to be sold! The original part was built in 1806 and it has been added to several times, beginning in 1812, resulting in today’s 13-room manor house and two dependent cottages situated on 46 acres near Natural Bridge. In 2011, Chris Walker and Cliff DeVito, refugees from Phoenix, acquired Forest Oaks, by then dilapidated. They’ve spent the years since then massively rehabilitating it, most recently converting the estate’s carriage house into a bakery. Forest Oaks entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, and Walker and DeVito received Historic Lexington Foundation’s Founders Award in 2018 for their restoration.

12/10/2025

311 Jackson Avenue was built in 1884 as part of the block-long speculative development aimed at tradespeople of modest means. It has a double front gable and a double front door with an understated bargeboard (that is, the decorative façade attached to a gable to give it strength and decorative appeal).

12/09/2025

The 212-year-old Ward House in the center of Brownsburg is an unusually well-preserved example of early Shenandoah Valley log construction, simple in design — originally just a single room on the main floor (with 20-foot oak beams spanning it) and a loft above, reached by a corner stairway. It has a half-basement with an “English” window (with vertical sashes) that was once a root cellar. A kitchen with a room above was added in the late 1800s. We don’t know who Elizabeth Ward was. The house is up for sale, but sadly, we don’t get a commission for this mention.

12/09/2025

Rockbridge minutiae: George C. Marshall's favorite drink was the old-fashioned.

12/08/2025

We told you the other day about the first issue, in 1884, of the County News, the front page of which contained jokes, poems and Wikipedia-like articles about the world’s miscellany. By 1900, the front page was dense with advertising — but still no local news. Instead, you could read about men’s shaving accidents in Chicago, dreams that helped solve crimes, and the new cabinet picked by the governor of Cuba — and perhaps be tempted by advertisements for, among many products and services, “health-giving” Coldbrau lager beer, the Baltimore Sun or the New York Sun.

12/08/2025

Today, at a local institution of higher learning

12/07/2025

Washington and Lee’s student newspaper, the Ring-tum Phi, ran a feature article disclosing that 20% of W&L’s grads go into finance, and inquiring: “Why?” The answer, of course, came down to the same reason Willie Sutton said he robbed banks. Meanwhile, a headline said the decision by Rockbridge County to tighten by one hour its noise-control enforcement on weekdays meant that student parties have now been “shut down by police.” The Phi expects the change to devastate a student tradition: “For years … as often as four nights a week to party with bonfires and bands,” mostly on Windfall Hill and at the so-called Pole Houses, both near Greenhouse Road just north of Lexington. Area residents say they need their sleep. Students say the residents live in a college town and shouldn’t be upset by a little night music.

12/06/2025

12/06/2025

. . . and Southern Virginia University.

12/06/2025

Hopkins Green yesterday, downtown Lexington. News-Gazette photo.