Longtime city planner kept history alive

When Annette Chenault graduated from Buckingham County High School four decades ago, she looked around and saw a landscape barren of immediate opportunity.

“I asked my mother what I should do,” she recalled recently, “and she told me, ‘Well, I went to Phillips Business School in Lynchburg. You can, too.”

The result, you might say, is history. And now, so is Chenault — she retired from the City of Lynchburg last week after 38 years.

That retirement, as might be expected from the person who helped enforce the codes for the city’s historic districts, was strictly by the book.

“They said I had to do it on the last day of the month,” she said, “so I did.”

Chenault did graduate from Phillips, then was hired by the city as a low-level secretary. But her natural curiousity and people skills quickly made her stand out, and she was given the job of studying the Campbell and Bedford subdivision plats in the areas that were annexed by Lynchburg in 1976.

“That made me a Planner 1,” she said, “and then they made me a Planner 2 when I started to get into historic preservation. I basically created that department myself, becasuse no one else wanted to to it.”

At that point, Lynchburg’s leaders weren’t all that excited about saving old buildings and houses.

“Then I went to a conference where people from Fairfax and Fredericksburg and Richmond came to speak,” Chenault said, “and I thought, ‘Oh, my God — there are people who actually think this is important.’”

So she returned to Lynchburg and embraced the budding concept of historic districts, starting with Diamond Hill and then spreading to Garland Hill, Federal Hill and Daniel’s Hill.

This sharpened Chernault’s diplomatic skills as well as her knowledge of what made a structure true to a certain period. She learned to reassure some residents of those districts and gently prod others to make improvements. For years, she sat on the Board of Historic Review.

“I always wanted a house in a historic neighborhood myself,” she said, “but when I decided to move into the city from Appomattox, everything in Diamond Hill was out of my price range. I told a realtor that I wanted an old house, a two-story house, with a front porch and a view of trees from the bedroom. She showed me a bungalow on Inglewood Street on Fort Hill that fit all those criteria, and I’ve been there ever since.

“Who knows? Maybe that will be a historic district someday.”

Over the years, she has put together a list of her other favorite houses, including 822 Federal St. (in the photograph on the front page). Most recently, she has been heavily involved in the Daniel’s Hill renaissance.

One of her regrets at retiring is that her job is frozen, which will place more of a burden on a co-worker.

“We’ll continue to go down the road of historic preservation, though,” she said, “and word is spreading about what Lynchburg has to offer. Not too long ago, a man in California bought a house on Diamond Hill sight unseen.

“Things are slowing down right now, but they’ll pick up again.”

Meanwhile, Chenault will spend a lot more time at her second love, painting. Creating beauty out of nothing — which is pretty much what she did before.