Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 1, 1993 TAG: 9307300417
SECTION: DISCOVER PAGE: D-26 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA WILLIAMSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The Southeast Roanokers, returning home from their first visit in 10 years to the mountain top, can't resist a little home video action.
"We saw this bird and this big drop and it was like, what a shot," said Simms, who continued to stare through his camera lens for several minutes, his back to the traffic passing dangerously close on U.S. 221.
Bent Mountain does this to people.
It makes them stop. It makes them catch their breath. It makes them wonder why they don't come up here more often. Sometimes, it makes them pack their bags and move.
Terry and Charlotte Lester left behind linen suits and ties to live on Bent Mountain. They left behind good jobs at a bank and a television station.
"It's `Magic Mountain' to me," Charlotte Lester said. "I was never really happy `til I came to this mountain and I found life."
The Lesters found something else - one of the most expansive views on the mountain from a home that was barely standing and not fit to live in.
They spent two years renovating the building, hovering on the peak of Bent Mountain, known as the "Lookout House" or "Bent Mountain Lodge."
Terry Lester said it served as an inn to honeymooners and Blue Ridge Parkway travelers more than 30 years ago, when the parkway ended at Bent Mountain Road (221).
Lester, who now paints homes for a living with his wife, hopes to turn one section of the house into a bed-and-breakfast after Charlotte Lester's 13-year-old daughter leaves for college.
Since they refurbished the house, the Lesters have been encouraged to sell. They finally set the price at $7 million to discourage offers and let people know they're here to stay.
The Lesters link past to present on Bent Mountain, holding onto a history that threatens to slip away with all of the old families. Many have died. Others have sold their land.
In their place arrive new families or couples who commute into the valley, their development homes scattered across once-fertile farm land.
"More new people are moving in all the time," said Sue Tinsley Angle, 77, who still lives in the house she grew up in. "It used to be that you knew everybody up here."
Angle said her family, too, was once new to the area - in the late 1800s.
Her parents - a schoolteacher and country doctor - migrated from Franklin County. But she remembers all the founding families as if they were her own.
There were the Coles - all gone now. And the Terrys, who still own land. And of course there was a Bent family, who may have built the first house and given the mountain its name.
Others, said Angle, believe the mountain was named for its shape.
Were it named for what it is known best for, the mountain would have an entirely different name. It would be called Cabbage Mountain.
Sweet Cabbage Mountain.
Carson King grows "a fair amount" of that cabbage on his 138-acre farm, just up the road from the Lesters. His parents were raised on the mountain. His grandfather, too.
Once, his family was one of the largest apple producers in the area, exporting the fruit to England. Now, he runs a seasonal produce market which sells potatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash.
And, of course, cabbage.
King and his wife, Sylvia, like the mountain because of the peace and quiet, the neighborliness and perhaps more importantly, the Bent Mountain Elementary School.
One of the smallest schools in the state, Bent Mountain serves roughly 70 students from kindergarten through grade five. The school has been there as long as anybody can remember, including Sue Angle, one of the oldest residents on the mountain.
Angle remembers riding her pony to school and giving the other children rides along the creek at lunchtime. She started leaving the pony at home "after we got the school bus," she said.
Angle also remembers the building of U.S. 221, and the muddy road in which horse-drawn wagons would get stuck before its construction.
She doesn't use the new road much.
"Too much traffic," she said.
Indeed, a growing commuter caravan snakes its way down Bent Mountain each morning, dumping its cargo of employees into the Roanoke Valley.
Some days, it passes Jimmy King on his climb the mountain, on his way to work at the Pantry Restaurant.
"I commute opposite," said King, a Bent Mountain native whose family moved to Roanoke sometime before his 12th birthday.
King loves the Pantry, a place largely unknown to the crowd that rolls past him on its way into town. The commuters don't eat there - the restaurant closes before they return from work each day.
The Pantry serves only breakfast and lunch, meals that cater to the few farmers left in this tiny, once-isolated community perched near the crest of the Blue Ridge.
The regulars plant themselves at the same table each day, up in the front right-hand corner. King knows them by name.
"I can tell you what time they're going to come in and what they're going to eat," he said. "The community table, I call it."
by CNB