Historic Preservation...Why Bother?
The following is taken from a letter written by James Dorsett in 1986; clarification added and comments by Meghan H. Dorsett, 2009
September, 1986
To some degree, the restoration of the Christiansburg Depot provides a practicum on historic preservation in an era when public monies (federal and state) are no longer available for such philanthopies and by individuals whose personal financial circumstances are suth that they can derive no benefit from the shelters (even though as in this case the restoration has qualified for such treatment by the NPS and IRS).
To return to your question of "Why?" I teeter between the extremes of bragging and being self-effacing...neither of which we desire. I guess that we restored the Cambria Depot because it outh to have been done. It was simply the last of its breed. The Town of Christiansburg had ordered it razed as a safety hazard, which it certainly was: leaning 15 degrees out of plumb over the street and supported by little more than iniertia and the stubborn integrity of its basic structure of timbers and beams. Much of the vocal, local sentiment (which we heard repaeted to the point of exaspiration during the period when the intial structural work was begin done, voiced by countless strangers) was that the building hulk ought to be torn down in favor of what they really needed, a parking lot. My stock rejoinder was that I would be happy to do so as soon as they, retruning from their most recent vacation...or any vacation...could shom me all the photos of parking lots they had taken:
"Isn't the Grand Canyon lovely in the late afternoon with the deepening shadows playing over the varied colored rocks?"
"I don't know...but let me show you the really neat photos we took of the really great parking lot on the South Rim!" etc.As the work progressed, I think we began to question the certainty of our own motives. WE had raised the war chest for the structural work by mortgaging about everything of substance that we owned up to the hilt: house, car, collectibles. We were betting that we could restore the basic structure within the strictures of that budget. Therefore, much of the work that could be done by us (interior restoration) was done by my wife, my daughter, and myself (estimated 1200 hours of work).
Daily you monitor the rapidly shrinking budgt and gauge the work yet to be accomplished by contractors, conscious of the fact that there is no acceptible "half-way" point where you can pause and regroup with some slim chance of survival. You review every decision and search for yet another way that the work can be done at a lower cost without compromising the integrity of the job. For instance, instead of replacing window sashes in which pockets of dry rot had affected one part of a framing piece, we borrowed a technique from a local sign painter who seals the edges of exterior plywodd signs with Bondo...i.e., resin auto body patch. Chiseling out the pockets of rot as a dentist might repair a tooth, we filled the cavities in the remaining good wood with successive layers of Bondo...thus achieving the dual goals of restoration and solvency!) But after months of contending with successivly revealed and unanticipate horrors (i.e., regardless of how carefully you study the project before hand and budget accofdingly, you reallly haven't the foggiest notion of what the job really entails until you remove the first stick of wood. They you know..and on successive days you begin each day by revising yet again the work orders and the budget.), you start to lose sight of your goals under the welter of small decisions in the on-going process. You begin to lose sight of the "Why?" of the whole thing. You go home every night and bathe away the accumulation of 100 year old soot with Babo...and the sharp edges of your original "Why?" are no longer as crisp as they once had been. You see no end in view and begin to question the fit of madness that launched you in the first place.
I guess we had gotten to that point late one afternoon as we were swabbing down the blackened interior of the track-side waiting room with Sal-Soda (trisodium-phosphate) in 1984 when a young guy, maybe 24 or so, came through the door with a young daughter on his shoulder. He was a real string-bean of a kid and the girl was maybe 4 or so. He ducked down under the door opeing into the room and began his inquiry with the same line we had learned to expect from the parade of doubters who value parking lots above all: "Are you the people who are doing this?" (That was usually followed by the suggestion that "we certainly must have a lot of money to waste.") I thought to myself, "Don't say it! You're too young to be so jaundiced.") Then he continued, "I don't want to bother you but we would really like to take a look around. I told my daughter that I would show her what a depot really looked like." After he left, we returned to the job of swabbing down the walls but with a sharpened sense of the "Why?' of the thing. Perhaps a hundred years from now, when Jim and Helen Dorsett have been pushing daisies longer than memory will serve to recall their names, a young guy with a kid on his shoulder will duck through the door and look around because "this is what a depot really looke like." And that's the "Why?" of it that no photo, no written description, no recording of fading memories will serve. That's why it was important to try to save a rotting, leaning old hulk that had become an embarrassment and a danger.
There is a Spanish proberb which, roughly translated, says: "Let us be crazy...but not stupid." We have from the outset tried to be the one without being the other. Without public monies to augment the effort, The Depot is, of necessity, a commercial building which must pay its own way...even though it is in the Virginia Resgister and the National Register....In the forseeable future, it will remain a commercial building...of necessity. Any further work (paint?) will have to be covered by the income it generates (unless some philanthropic pocket can be picked...aside from our own).
June, 2009
A week ago, while rehabbing the floor and working on the trim paint in the front entry, an older man and his grand daughter stopped by because he "promised to show her what a depot really looked like." While entering through the front entry was out of the question, I walked back to the freight house, opened one of the sliding freight doors, and invited them in to look around. The flood on May 15th, left us with some significant water damage to the front floors, and a good portion of the stuff housed in the front of the building had been shifted to the freight house, so the place was chaos embodied. On the street side of the freight room, the freight scale still stands as testiment to the history of the building. It is a counterweight scale and has round 1000 and 2000 pound discs that function in much the same way as the scales at a doctor's office. The grand daughter took an inordinate amount of pleasure in picking up the equivalent of 5000 pounds, a feat she was certain even her oldest cousin couldn't claim. While she sat at our "board room conference table," (an old work bench converted to other uses) and looked at the large beams that run the length of the building, she asked "what did they do here?" For the next half an hour, I told stories I had heard from Bill Harmon (the last station master) years before about Sears Mail-Order Houses and Christmas gifts, china and factory pressed dining room chairs, produce and livestock, new cars and farm implements, and soldiers and coffins arriving and leaving through Cambria. For almost 100 years, from 1868 to 1960, nearly everything that came to Montgomery and Floyd Counties, whether Christiansburg, Riner, or Floyd, Yellow Sulphur Springs or Blacksburg, came through Cambria and through the Cambria/Christiansburg Freight Station. In that 100 year span, the depot saw the deployment of soldiers to four wars (Spanish American, World War I, World War II, and Korea) and saw the coffins return. From 1868 until 1907 , the Cambria/Christiansburg depot functioned as both the freight station and the passenger station, and as such was the point of entry for the immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, who came to Montgomery County because of the mines. Indeed, one can not talk about the development of both Montgomery and Floyd Counties without talking about the depot.
Twenty-six years after the first "why?", we are still answering the question with the same phrase..."because somebody ought to." Not only is the building worth saving, but so too is the legacy. The history of the depot is not the history of great acts. It is, in many respects, the embodyment of what Historian J.D. Furnace would have called "the history of the mundane, of the hearth...domestic history." It is, as noted above, the history of Sears mail orders from an early wishbook, of families travelling and returning, meeting loved ones, kissing loved ones goodbye. Not, per se, the history studied in school or printed in text books. It is, instead, a central thread woven in the local fabric. In 1913, Sanborn released a map of Christiansburg and Cambria. Depot Street started at Courthouse Square and wound around Zion Hill to Cambria, crossed the tracks and headed up hill to Yellow Sulphur Springs. The road running to the east passed the 1907/08 depot before circling the east side of Zion Hill and joining with Rock Road (now know as Roanoke Street). Wagons coming from Floyd came north on Franklin Street, crossed Courthouse Square, and continued around Zion Hill to reach the only shipping point for the entire County. Wagons from Riner came north up Five Points Road/ Main to Courthouse Square, turned left and followed the same route as those from Floyd. All shipping came through Cambria. A comparison of the two towns indicates that Cambria was the industrial center of Montgomery County, not surprising given the railroad. Cambria, like Lafayette, declined with changes in transportation and shipping modes and new routes that bypassed old patterns. The construction of Route 11, which followed Rock Road into Christiansburg from the east, joined with Main Street, and then wandered west towards Radford, and the coming of the truck signaled the decline of Cambria. The collection of china shops, jewelers, hardware stores, and general stores disappeared. Rather than remaining central to the County, Cambria became anonymous. When we bought the depot in 1983, very little of the Cambria Business District was left, destoyed by fire and neglect. Indeed, Cambria was no longer its own town, having been annexed by Christiansburg ten years earlier. This is the history worth saving. This is also the answer to "Why?" Do we want our history marked by a graceful old depot or by non-descript boxes distinguished only by the signage above the front entrance?
We are still dealing with the challenges presented by the depot and by the surroundings. Since 1983, the roadbed and the railbed have risen between 18 and 24 inches, so stormwater has become a constant threat. After surveying the damage from the flood on May 15th and mopping up the aftermath, we are now to the point of having to deal with the depot's surroundings. Now, as then, repeating the ruminations of my father, I sat at the kitchen table this morning, feeling a bit like Sisyphus, and played with a budget, trying to figure out how we were going to retrench the drainage way on the trackside of the building and construct berms and rain-gardens around the building. While the flood damage to the depot was not nearly as extensive as it was across the street at the Cambria Emporium, it effectively closed down our businesses for over a month. When it reopens in July to parents bringing children to see "what a real depot looked like," the Cambria Toy Station (the toy store established to support the longterm maintenance of the building and pay the land rental fee to the NSCorp--a fee that climbed from $680 dollars per year to $6000 last fall) will have relocated to the street-side waiting room and the workshop for Dorsett Publication and the museum and miniatures will reopen on the track-side. Perhaps by the end of the summer, we will have the berms and rain gardens built, replacing the front parking area with a small park and shifting parking to the street side of the depot. Even after 141 years, the depot is still a work in progress.
What will become of the depot and Cambira in the longrun depends on a number of factors, not the least of which is for the broader community and for the Town of Christiansburg, to begin to look at historic areas and answer "Why?" with "because we ought to.
CHRISTIANSBURG (CAMBRIA) DEPOT
THE CAMBRIA TOY
STATION MUSEUM
SHOP
CAMBRIA, 1913
HISTORIC PRESERVATION... WHY BOTHER?
THE SCALE CABINETMAKER AND DORSETT
PUBLICATIONS
CAMBRIA &ENVIRONS
Letters from the Past - your letters, full of memories of old Cambria
