Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310085
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Local historians think former slaves from surrounding counties were attracted by jobs in tobacco and cigar factories. They worked, too, in foundries and machine shops; by 1890, black bricklayers, plasterers and other construction workers were building the fast-growing railroad town of Roanoke.
Many early black Roanokers settled in what we now call Gainsboro, just south of the paved-over site of Roanoke's first settlement in 1834, which stretched along what is now Orange Avenue.
Early this century and for most of it, Gainsboro's citizens were black teachers, ministers and lawyers, as well as laundresses, railroad porters and brakemen. Like Northeast, its neighbor to the east, Gainsboro was black people in all walks of life.
Like the people, Gainsboro's houses were a hodgepodge. There were brick houses, and there were narrow clapboard ones packed in so tight a house-painter could paint two houses with a slight shift of his ladder.
For the purposes of this story, Gainsboro is an area bounded by Williamson Road on the east, the railroad on the south, Fifth Street Northwest on the west and Orange Avenue on the north, because those are the boundaries designated for urban renewal 27 years ago.
But for most of this century, residents thought of themselves as living in "Northwest," not Gainsboro. When asked where they lived, they would normally just say the name of their street.
Henry Street, or First Street Northwest, was Gainsboro's primary commercial strip. The men who hung out there might have been in trouble for bootlegging and other crimes, but they were stern when a young person started to go astray.
"On up Henry Street, you'd find the biggest gamblers," said Walter Fizer, "but when my mother goes through Henry Street, they tip their hat - `How do you do, Mrs. Fizer?'''
"Little Fizer," he said they would warn him, "you better not do that or I'm going to tell your mama or your daddy."
Gainsboro's landmarks were many - Burrell Memorial Hospital, one of the best-known black hospitals in the South ... the Burrell Pharmacy, one of the first black drugstores in Southwest Virginia ... the Claytor home, a 22-room mansion and one of Virginia's largest black homes ... the Gainsboro library, organized in 1921 and one of the South's earliest black libraries ... First Baptist Church, organized in 1867 and in its brick building on North Jefferson Street in 1900 ... and Fifth Avenue Presbyterian's first 1898 church at 303 Patton Ave. N.W.
Famous Roanokers came out of Gainsboro, such as Edward R. Dudley, U.S. ambassador to Liberia under President Truman and later the president of the borough of Manhattan and a candidate for New York state attorney general. He was the son of a Gainsboro dentist.
"Right now, we don't have but one or two black dentists in Roanoke," said Charles Davis, a retired housing authority official who grew up in Gainsboro. "Back then, you might have had a dozen," and more black physicians and pharmacists than that.
by CNB