600 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1858ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Vernacular I-HouseThis vernacular farm house was built just before the Civil War as a summer residence. The Italianate renovations such as the roof brackets and the bay window were added in the 1870s as was the northern addition with a gable facing the street. Charlotte Stebbins was sole owner of the home when she and her husband Charles moved to Ashland permanently about 1861. They raised their nine children here on what was originally a seven-acre farm. Stebbins Street borders the property on the north.Their son Charles married Rebekah Macmurdo, one of C.W. Macmurdo’s daughters, in 1887. They lived in this home with their three sons. Stebbins established a hardware store at the corner of Thompson Street and Railroad Avenue. The store was known for its wide-ranging inventory and as a gathering spot for Ashland men to discuss the hot topics of the time. It wasn’t long before folks named the corner “Stebbins Corner.” When farmers came to town to shop, they tied their horses in Stebbins’ tie-lot, a fenced-in area outside the store.When telephone service came to Ashland in 1903, Julia Weisinger, one of Charlotte and Charles Stebbins’ granddaughters was the first manager. She retired in 1938, when C&P Telephone installed a new automatic dialing system.This home was nearly demolished in the 1970s when the Longmires purchased it. They spent nearly two years renovating it to suit modern-day living without destroying the historic integrity of its architecture.
604 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1850sARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Vernacular I-House; Italianate Renovations (1870s)John Perry purchased this house in 1860 at auction for his daughter Sarah and her husband William F. Pumphrey, a carpenter. The auction announcement indicates the lot was three acres and on it was “a comfortable house nearly new and necessary out-houses.” The two-story vernacular I-house has a one-story porch with Roman Doric columns. The Italianate bay window was added after the Civil War.When war was declared, William Pumphrey joined the first Virginia regiment, Company H, Kemper’s Brigade, part of the Richmond Blues, and went to war. Sarah Perry Pumphrey stayed in the house with their two young children.In September 1862, Sarah received word that her husband had been killed at the Battle of South Mountain near Frederick, Md. With her two toddler-age children, she went through enemy lines to retrieve his body. At a field hospital run by Catholic sisters near Frederick, she stopped to ask for help in finding William’s body and found that he was alive and in that hospital. Sarah stayed and nursed him back to health before returning to Ashland. Private Pumphrey was sent to Portsmouth, Va., as a prisoner of war.Oral family history tells that the house was occupied by Union troops. The formidable Sarah Perry Pumphrey “stood in front of her piano and said, ‘well, I can’t stop you from taking over the house, but I will brain the first one of you that lays a finger on my piano!’”After the war, Private Pumphrey began calling himself “Captain” Pumphrey. His war wounds were a point of pride, and he was never very well after he returned home. The family created a bench for him between two oaks in the front yard where “Old Cap. Pumphrey” spent many days watching the trains. Sarah and William raised seven children in the house. One child, William F. Pumphrey Jr., worked with the RF&P Railroad as a conductor.In 1872, John Perry sold the house to his daughter Sarah as “feme sole” but her husband was her trustee – married women did not own land without the help of a trustee. The Pumphreys lost the house in 1894 in a default, and the house and land were auctioned.
706 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1858ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: VernacularOriginally this home was probably a vernacular two-story farm house much like the red house next door at 704 S. Center Street. A part of Lot 36 on the RF&P town layout, the property was owned by John O. Sale from 1858 to 1859 and he built the house.From 1859 to 1870, Virginia and George Dick and then R.N. and Fanny Sledd owned the house as either a vacation home or a full-time residence. At the time, Ashland was both a residential village and a mineral well company resort where people vacationed.In 1870, Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton bought the home from the Sledds. She was the child of a well-to-do Richmond merchant who had business dealings with Ellis & Allan, the firm belonging to Edgar Allan Poe’s foster father John Allan. The families were Richmond neighbors in 1825 when Edgar was 17 and Sarah, known then as Elmira, was 15 or 16. The two young people became close and talked of the possibility of marriage after Poe had finished his education. Elmira’s parents were not pleased. When Poe left for the University of Virginia in 1826, her father intercepted all of the letters between the two. Each thought the other was no longer interested in the relationship.Elmira went on to marry Alexander Barrett Shelton, a wealthy businessman, in 1829. Shelton died in 1844 leaving Sarah, as she was now called, a wealthy widow with two children. After living in Richmond, Sarah Shelton, her daughter Ann Elizabeth and son-in-law John Henry Leftwich, a retail merchant, moved into this home.In 1871 or 1872, Shelton made substantial renovations to the house. When she bought it in 1870, the home was assessed at $600. In 1872, it was assessed at $1,500. She probably added the Mansard roof and the full front porch. Mansard roofs were not in style until after the Civil War in the 1870s, although they had been around in Europe much earlier. A Mansard roof was a four-sided hipped roof, flattened on top, with the pitch flaring out at the bottom.Sarah Shelton sold the home to Captain Luther Ellis and his wife Margaret Virginia Crew. Captain Ellis, like so many other Ashland residents at the time, worked for the RF&P railroad. Two generations of the Ellis family lived here before selling the house in 1947.Much has been written about Poe and his lost Lenore and about his love affair with Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton. In interviews with Poe biographers after his death, she said Poe told her that she was his lost Lenore character. True or not, it adds an interesting story to the story of this house.
708 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1897ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Dutch Colonial RevivalIn 1854, William Clopton surveyed Ashland and the property now at 708 S. Center Street was designated as part of Lot 36. From tax records, it is known that Lot 36 had a house on it dating back before the Civil War when it had been sold to Robert R. Sale. Sale died just after the war, and his family asked the court to divide all of his properties so they could be sold or distributed among family members. The court hired J. B. Pleasants to survey the properties. Pleasants divided the eastern portion of Lot 36 into Lot A and Lot B. Lot A had a house on it and Lot B was vacant.In late 1896, Lot B, the vacant portion of Lot 36, went to Fanny Miller Fox from the estate of her father, James Miller. Between 1896 and 1897, she and her husband Fleming M. Fox built their Dutch Colonial Revival house on her lot. By the time the assessor came around in 1897, their new house was worth $2,000.The architect was Fleming Fox’s brother, Richmond architect Julian Powers Fox. Colonial Revival and its variant Dutch Colonial were the new rage in the late 1890s as people tired of the spindlework ornamentation of Queen Anne homes. Round columns reminiscent of Greek and Roman architecture were the hallmark of the fashion, as were three-part Palladian windows. The gambrel roof is reminiscent of Dutch Colonial homes, but in the colonial times, the gambrel gable would never have faced front as this one does. 1897 is early for such a style to be built, especially in a small town in Virginia. Most examples of Dutch Colonial Revival were built after the turn of the century into the 1920s.Beginning in 1908, the Sanborn Insurance Company made maps of Ashland showing a bird’s eye view of all the homes and commercial buildings. The footprint of the buildings were shown with indications of materials, numbers of stories, porches and general shape. The 1908 maps do not show houses south of about Stebbins Street, but the next available maps in 1913 show 708 S. Center Street. Its footprint then was largely the same as it is today. The exception is the separate kitchen that was connected to the house by Graham and Jody Aston when they owned it in the 1980s and 1990s.
718 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1921ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Colonial RevivalThis two-story Colonial Revival home with Craftsman details was built in 1921 for Floyd W. Tucker Jr. and his wife Emma Lee Priddy Tucker. The Tuckers allowed two years for the plaster to season before papering and painting the walls. During that time, their two children, Floyd III and Mary Byrd, were allowed to draw on the walls. Renovations in 2001 uncovered some excellent examples of graffiti and Ashland art.In 1978, F. W. Tucker IV and Susan Tucker moved into the house his grandparents built. They are the third generation of the family to live here. It’s the only home on the railroad tracks still owned by the family who built it.
904 S. Center Street
BUILT: Late 1880sARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Queen AnneWhen Mary LeFebvre Isaacs died leaving her husband, William B. Isaacs, and two teenage daughters, her mother Lila Vance LeFebvre of Baltimore took over the welfare of the family. In 1887, she purchased for William and his daughters this fine home in Ashland that had just been built at 904 S. Center Street. Richmonder John Skelton Williams was quite taken with one of the girls, Lila. He would take the train from Richmond to Ashland to court her. In 1895, they married at the home and after the reception, they stepped out to the tracks where they boarded a train that stopped just for them for their honeymoon trip to Washington D.C. Williams went on to create the Seaboard Coast Line railroad company, was assistant Secretary of Treasury, and eventually he became Comptroller of the Currency for the Federal Reserve. Several families lived in the Queen Anne-style home after the Isaacs moved away in 1903. Mr. and Mrs. C. Willie Wright lived there with their daughters Agnes and Lillian, who taught dance lessons in what is now the dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Rutherford Fleet bought the house in 1929. Their son Clifford remembered a 10-stall barn, a detached kitchen, and a tin house in the back yard used to make acetylene gas to light the house. The tin house is still there, but it serves as a garden shed today. When the Smithsons owned the house in the 1940s, they had planned to remodel the exterior into the Colonial style by removing all traces of Queen Anne details, including the bell-cast roof tower, the fish-scale siding and the various porches. The R. Bruce Newells bought the house in 1947 and lived here with their children R. Bruce Jr., Nora and John. John, later a mayor of Ashland, remembers when the children were admonished to leave the keys in the car so they wouldn’t get lost in the house! John and Nancy Hugo purchased the house next and lived here with their children. Nancy is a nature and garden writer and developed a beautiful garden beside the house. Today, the Reihl family lives here and have built a tree house to adorn the garden.
807 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1870ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: VernacularSamuel Rice, a carpenter, worked for the RF&P in this area during the Civil War. By 1867, he had purchased seven acres that fronted on Railroad Avenue. With his eldest son Samuel B. Rice, also a carpenter, he began building this house described as a Vernacular Victorian. It’s a transition from Victorian fussiness to a simpler, more symmetrical layout. Still, there is a Queen Anne window in the center gable and spindlework on the turned porch posts. The roof is pressed tin. It is similar to the home across the tracks at 804 S. Center Street. Rice moved his wife Louisa and their other five children from Darkesville, W.Va., to Ashland into this new home in 1871. Rice, like many, had invested in Confederate money, which was worthless after the war. He saw in Ashland the opportunity for jobs with the railroad and a college education for his sons. Rice worked for the RF&P until his death in 1880. All of his sons attended Randolph-Macon College and each worked for the RF&P at some point in their careers. After Louisa moved next door with her daughter’s family, Samuel B. Rice and his wife Mattie lived here with their five children. About 1920, he moved into his daughter’s home by the college, and his niece Ruth Blakey Sydnor, her husband Walter and their young daughter moved into this house. Four generations of the Rice family lived in the house until it was sold in 1963. Renovations over the years include opening up the back of the house and converting the downstairs parlor into a bedroom and adding a bathroom.
805 S. Center Street
BUILT: 1890ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: EastlakeCharles G. Blakey and his wife Laura Virginia Rice built this house in 1890 beside her widowed mother, Louisa Rice. The house has Eastlake or Stick style elements including the beaded weatherboard siding, a horizontal strip of siding at the gable end, and a pressed tin roof. In addition, the one-story porch with jigsaw frieze and brackets supported by turned columns is painted to bring out the detail as it would have been when the house was built. There’s an asymmetrical bay window that some historians call “Folk Victorian.”Charles Blakey was the conductor on the Ashland Accommodation Train from 1885 until 1925. The Blakeys raised their two children, William and Ruth, here. After graduating from Randolph- Macon College in 1907, William’s career moved him around the country. Ruth remained in Ashland. In January 1918, she and Walter Sydnor Jr. were married in the house. Because of Captain Blakey’s long affiliation with the RF&P, the evening train stopped in front of the house to pick up the newly-weds for their honeymoon in Washington, DC. Following Walter’s return from service in World War I, the couple lived here briefly before moving into the Rice house next door.When Captain Blakey died in 1939, the house passed to his son-in-law and granddaughter. They rented out the house until selling it in 1953. About 1950, the house was converted into two apartments. In recent years, new owners have converted the house back to a single-family house. During the renovation, one of Blakey’s fare books from 1897-1898 was discovered nailed behind a wall.
713 S. Center Street (Macmurdo House)
BUILT: 1858ARCHITECTURAL STYLE: Greek RevivalRF&P treasurer and secretary C.W. Macmurdo and his son John, a RF&P freight agent, built this Greek Revival home on 10 acres. It was Lot 4 on the original RF&P layout for the town. Records indicate the Macmurdos contracted with Henry Wyatt Wingfield to build a house for the family and they took possession in 1858.Greek Revival architecture, popular in the first half of the 19th century, was characterized by a symmetrical layout, simple doric or squared columns, and roofs that were shallow gables like the pediments on a Greek temple that inspired the style, or flat with geometric friezes.This house has a number of features that classify it as a Greek Revival home. The roof has a shallow pitch and no dormers. The porch has simple, squared columns and a flat, temple-like roof instead of a pedimented one. The front door surround is what architectural historians call a “Greek Key” pattern. Inside, there is a center hall flanked by two rooms on both sides.In the years since the war, its most important architectural elements have been spared the destruction of remodeling and updating. Today it survives as a rare example of antebellum Greek Revival architecture.The Macmurdo household included C.W. and his wife, Ann Finley Dixon Macmurdo, their son John and his wife, a daughter and her husband, plus eight other children and a grandson. During the war, the Macmurdos frequently hosted soldiers in their house. In June 1862, Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson stayed with the Macmurdo family on his way to join other Confederate forces prior to the Seven Days Battles.Although the lot is smaller, the house looks much the same today as it did when built including the entry porch with prominent columns.
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