ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, December 14, 1995            TAG: 9512150008
SECTION: NEIGHBORS                PAGE: N-10 EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CHARLES STEBBINS

PAINTING NETS $1,000 FOR PARK CENTER

The sale of prints of a watercolor painting of the "Big House," the recreation center in Jackson Park, has made about $1,000 to benefit the center.

Seventy-eight prints of the building, officially known as the Buena Vista Recreation Center, have been sold at $35 each, said Mary Ann Sherman, a secretary for Lumsden Associates. Many of the people who bought them have told stories about their association with the recreation center, she said.

"Most of them were people who grew up in Southeast Roanoke, and several said they had met their husbands or wives at the center," she said.

She is handling the orders for Buford Lumsden, the painter and the firm's retired founder. Lumsden, who took up painting after he retired, is donating proceeds from the prints to the center.

The Big House, at Ninth Street and Penmar Avenue Southeast, was once a major meeting place for people of all ages. It offered recreation and food for children and adults. It adjoins Jackson Park and attracts many of the children from nearby Jackson Middle School. It is still being used as a recreation center.

The Buena Vista Center originally was a plantation house. It got the unofficial name ``Big House'' when most of its land was subdivided for small houses in the 1920s. It stopped being a private home in the mid-1930s and was given to the city of Roanoke. It became a recreation center about 1939.

The prints are on display at Lumsden's office, at the Big House and at the Roanoke Department of Parks and Recreation, 210 Reserve Ave. S.W., but they are being sold only at Lumsden's office, 4664 Brambleton Ave. SW.

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