Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 4, 1993 TAG: 9307010064
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GROSECLOSE LENGTH: Medium
If she started the first grade in this building in 1928, how old is she now?
To work that problem, the children must reach into the old wooden desks and pull out slate and chalk, just as Hall, who is 71, did more than 60 years ago.
That they can do so in the tiny, one-room building, restored to its original state, is largely thanks to the Lindamood descendants, now living in Roanoke.
Particularly Betty Grubb Norris. She recently donated $25,000 in her mother's and father's names to the schoolhouse and the adjacent Settlers Museum of Southwest Virginia.
A ceremony dedicating the museum as the Alpha L. Grubb Visitor's Center wound up as part of another celebration, when a cycling tour of Southwest Virginia rolled past the 180-acre living history park June 21.
Among those cycling across the territory settled by Lindamoods and Grubbs in the 1800s was Roanoke's Barbara Duerk, granddaughter of Alpha Lindamood Grubb.
As others on the five-day bike tour stopped for water, bananas and a tour of the schoolhouse, Duerk took the arm of the museum curator and said a few words in the name of her ancestors.
But in the eyes of Avis Cassell, a former one-room school teacher from Rural Retreat who is now in her 80s, it was the bike tour that was making history that day.
Standing at the gate to the museum with Bertha Umberger, another former one-room teacher, she almost appeared to be part of the exhibit.
"We wanted to see the cyclers and everybody else," she said.
by CNB