The Street That Almost Wasn’t Saved
Beverley St is now one of the best-preserved Victorian main streets in America. In 1965, the city knocked down 32 historic buildings a block away, and the fight that followed made downtown what it is
Stand at the corner of Beverley and Augusta streets and turn slowly in a circle. The Beaux-Arts limestone of National Valley Bank, modeled on a Roman triumphal arch. The Masonic Temple’s medieval tower. The Marquis Building’s stone columns wrapping a corner entrance. Nearly everything in view went up between 1870 and 1920, the boom years that followed the railroad, and nearly all of it is still standing, still occupied, still earning its keep.
None of that was inevitable. Within living memory, Staunton’s official position was that these buildings were the problem.
A Victorian Main Street, Built on an 18th-Century Grid
The street takes its name from William Beverley, the wealthy planter whose 1736 land grant covered the ground that became Staunton. But the street you recognize today is a later creation. The Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike, pushed through in the 1840s, made Beverley Street the town’s gateway to the western frontier. Then the Virginia Central Railroad arrived in 1854 and turned a courthouse village into a shipping hub, and money followed.
The result is what the state’s Department of Historic Resources calls a classic Victorian main street, roughly 150 buildings across eleven downtown blocks, spanning nearly every architectural style the 19th century produced. Federal-period shops sit within sight of Italianate storefronts with lion’s-head details, Romanesque arches, and the Beaux-Arts bank. A trolley line once ran the full length of the street, from the school for the deaf and blind on the east end to Thornrose Cemetery on the west. The skyline still belongs to the Augusta County Courthouse dome, the old YMCA clocktower, and the Masonic building’s observation tower, because almost nothing modern has been allowed to crowd them out.
Much of the credit for the street’s architectural coherence goes to one firm. T.J. Collins, who moved to Staunton from Washington in 1891, designed or renovated more than 200 buildings in the city over the next two decades, including National Valley Bank and the Marquis Building, where he kept his own offices. His son and grandson carried the firm into the 1990s.
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The Wrecking Ball Comes to Central Avenue
Then came the 20th century’s second half, and with it the era of urban renewal, when American cities gutted their own downtowns in the name of progress. Staunton was no exception. As the local economy sagged, historic buildings came to be seen as part of the problem, not the solution. In 1962 the city approved a plan to rebuild the Central Avenue business district. The project was contested all the way to the Virginia Supreme Court, which upheld it. In 1965, 32 historic properties near West Beverley Street came down.
Here is the bitter footnote: the Central Avenue project was never completed, because it failed to meet federal aid requirements. The buildings were gone anyway. And another proposal soon surfaced, this one to run an inner-city highway through the path of still more historic blocks.
That was the breaking point. In 1971, residents who wanted the demolitions stopped formed the Historic Staunton Foundation. The organization inventoried the city’s Victorian architecture, launched a facade improvement program, and made the argument, radical for its moment, that the old buildings were an economic asset. The city came around. In 1981 the council approved a $600,000 streetscape project that brought historic lighting and brick sidewalks, and later buried the power lines. The Beverley Historic District joined the National Register of Historic Places in the early 1980s.
The Numbers Behind the Postcard
Preservation in Staunton stopped being a sentiment and became an economic development strategy, and the returns are documented. The facade program has helped rehabilitate more than 250 buildings. Since 1996, over $60 million in private investment has flowed into the district’s rehabilitation, and average property values climbed 279 percent between 1983 and the early 2010s. The American Planning Association named West Beverley Street one of its Great Streets in America in 2013. In one detail that says everything about how the street’s fortunes turned, an anonymous resident donated $9,000 in 2002 just to keep the hanging flower baskets going.
The businesses have turned over, as businesses do. The 1912 New Theatre building at 125 East Beverley, once a silent film house, lost its interior to fire in 1936. The building at 113 East Beverley, where the city manager form of government originated in 1908, now houses the General District Court. The Dixie’s Art Moderne facade fronts a four-screen cinema. Storefronts that sold harnesses and dry goods now sell gelato, antiques, and rare books.
What has not changed is the street itself. The next time someone from out of town asks why downtown Staunton looks the way it does, the honest answer is that it nearly didn’t. The postcard view was not preserved by luck. It was preserved by people who watched a block disappear and decided that was enough.
Local history is a new section of The Stauntonian. If there is a story, a building, a person, or an era you want us to look into, write to Brad at brad@stauntonian.com.