Cabell Street part 2: Coming full circle

Time and circumstance have taken Cabell Street almost full circle.

The street was trendy in the last quarter of the 1800s, a real estate frontier for the rich. This mini-boom began to ebb by the end of World War I, culminating in widespread blight by the middle of the 20th century.

Now, though, the once-proud houses that had been carved up into apartments (and then, in some cases, abandoned) are being made whole again.

A walk down the mile-long street today shows house after house in various states of renovation and repair. Property values are on the rise as more urban pioneers are drawn to the once-graceful thoroughfare and its place in Lynchburg’s history.

Cabell Street is home to one of the city’s most historic structures, Point of Honor. Built by George Cabell — the street’s namesake and the personal physician to Patrick Henry — it has stood in Federal-style splendor since 1815, the neighborhood’s castle.

Map: A Walk Down Cabell Street

Photos and audio slideshows tell the stories of the people and places of Cabell Street

Renovation warriors warm to Cabell Street’s potential

Opposites attract on Cabell, one of city’s most historic streets

Yet Daniel’s Hill initially became the site not of a neighborhood, but of scattered grand homes. Industrialist Albert Gallatin Dabney built a Greek revival mansion at what eventually became 405 Cabell in 1852-53, although the financial strain of erecting the house bankrupted him within a year. Rivermont (currently under the process of restoration on F Street) came along in 1875, and the curiously Y-shaped Robert C. Burkholder House around the same time.

It wasn’t until the Rivermont Bridge connected the area directly to downtown in 1890 that the migration of well-to-do Lynchburgers in that direction began in earnest.

Meanwhile, at the head of the street and along most of the grid-patterned cross streets, a separate but parallel neighborhood was evolving, peopled by the factory and domestic workers who depended upon the lords of lower Cabell for their living.

This symbiotic relationship lasted only a few decades before the trendsetters moved west along Rivermont Avenue and eventually out to Bedford County, leaving their Cabell Street mansions behind in favor of country houses with ever-larger swaths of surrounding land. For a while, a second wave of status seekers moved onto Daniel’s Hill behind them, only to eventually follow their own rainbows.

“The Flippen family, who lived in our house, was a classic example,” said Ted Delaney, historian at the Old City Cemetery, who helped bring 301 Cabell Street back to life. “They lived here for a while, had a family, fixed the place up, and then moved up to Rivermont to reflect their improved status.”

By the middle of the 20th century, many of those once-handsome houses had become the scene of overcrowding, neglect and domestic dramas.

Things were actually more stable near the top of the street, where the factory houses remained neat and well kept. In a sense, the balance of power (or, at least, bragging rights) had shifted to the upper blocks.

Even when the Daniel’s Hill neighborhood was welcomed onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the nomination document had little good to say about what the area had become:

“The neighborhood is currently almost completely a working class one; most of the mansions are deteriorated and are either vacant or divided into rental units. Efforts towards the rehabilitation of the neighborhood are underway through both the city and the local redevelopment and housing authority….”

This rather bleak description would no doubt have pained Henry McWane, president of Glamorgan Pipe Works and a man so proud of the home he built at 214 Cabell that he kept a day-by-day diary of the construction process.

It was even said that McWane, one of the founders of Lynchburg College, had a tunnel built that would take him from his basement to his office at Glamorgan. Olenik and partner James Cole believe it. Ted Delaney isn’t so sure.

“I think it’s an urban myth,” Delaney said. “Why would he go to all that trouble?”

That basement wall is now sealed off, maintaining the mystery.

Just as it took Cabell Street decades to decay, so its revival has come in measured increments.

In the early 1980s, the Lynchburg Redevelopment & Housing Authority made Daniel’s Hill a priority. The centerpiece of the reclamation effort was six row houses that had been inexplicably plunked down in the 600 block like refugees from Baltimore. The owners of other endangered structures were given HUD grants to fix them up. Houses with no identifiable owners and too much decay were demolished. Absentee landlords, of which there were more than a few, tended to ignore the whole process.

The result was that parts of Cabell Street, especially the middle blocks, began to look like a lip-glossed mouth with missing teeth. The vacant lots, owned in some cases by no one, became overgrown.

Nor did it help when the city closed off the bottom of the street when the old Williams Viaduct was taken down in the late 1980s. Cabell used to be a convenient shortcut from upper Rivermont to Madison Heights, and residents had become accustomed to a steady flow of through traffic. Suddenly, they were back to pre-1890 access to downtown.

“We thought that would be good for the neighborhood,” former Lynchburg Museum administrator Tom Ledford told The News & Advance in 2004, “but it actually hurt access and isolated it.”

Eventually, Cabell Street was revived by the power of capitalism — real estate on the street became so cheap that a lot of entrepreneurs couldn’t resist.

Henry McWane’s beloved 214, which was built for just under $4,000 in 1892, sold for $85,000 in 2001. Investors snapped up the Dabney-Scott-Adams and Burkholder mansions — the street’s signature structures outside of Point of Honor.

And in 2003, a year before asphalt was ripped up to expose the original brick on lower Cabell, Mike and Kathy Bedsworth drove from Springfield and fell in love with the Italianate mansion at 404, turning it into the Carriage House Bed & Breakfast.

“When we walked in the front door, Kathy said, ‘I don’t even need to go upstairs,’” Mike Bedsworth said.

Which may have been just as well, because the couple later found more than 40 buckets in the attic, strategically placed to catch roof leaks. But the house, built in 1876 by merchant Robert Watts, was basically sound. Bedsworth is now the president of the newly formed Daniel’s Hill Historical Association, of which Ted Delaney is also a member.

“We’re new at this,” Delaney said, “so we’re still kind of figuring out what it is we’re supposed to do. It’s kind of a new frontier.”

Just like the old Cabell Street.