
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 24, 1990                   TAG: 9005240096
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

OLD HOUSE GETS EVICTION NOTICE

First the house was empty. Then it was perched on stilts for a while. For the past two weeks, it's been sitting on the back of a huge truck, waiting to be hauled away.

Town Council is finally fed up with the house on Prices Fork Road, which it recently dubbed "the house on wheels."

"To be honest with you, I've grown tired of looking at it," said Council Member Michael Chandler. And, he said, he's heard from other town residents over the past year and a half who are equally annoyed by the abandoned brick house.

On Tuesday, council unanimously passed Chandler's motion to send the owner a letter advising that if the house is not gone by June 12 - council's next scheduled meeting - the town would begin legal proceedings.

"Well, obviously I have to get back with the mover," said Jim Lucas, who owns the house. "I know that [council] wanted it moved, as we all do."

For almost three years, Lucas has tried to find a home for his house. But the logistics of moving a 50-ton, two-story house along public streets at less than one mile per hour, avoiding electric and telephone wires, are not easy to work out, Lucas said.

He finally found the right spot this winter, just a half mile to the north across some farm fields - no streets involved.

But the weather was uncooperative. And since the warm season began, Lucas said, the Princeton, W.Va., house mover has been swamped with work.

Town Manager Ron Secrist told council that he's been in frequent contact with Lucas about the house, and Lucas has been cooperative.

"This house has become a real burden," said Lucas, a real estate agent and appraiser with a self-professed "weakness for wanting to move houses." He's transplanted about five endangered structures since about 1985.

The 70-year-old brick house across from the heavily populated Hethwood community used to be "way out in the country," said its former occupant, Helen Rowell Miller.

Prices Fork was just a gravel road in 1947 when she and her late husband bought the house.

It has been vacant since she moved in 1986.

The property was rezoned for commercial use and the new landowner, Montgomery Farms Inc., was going to knock the house down to build a motel and restaurant.

Lucas rescued it. He plans to resell it for its original purpose as a single-family home.

by CNB