With another blessed Thanksgiving gathering receding into fond recollection, a reminder arrived that one of the first instances of a Roanoke County residence festooned with Christmas decorations this year was
Reporting from the unsolved mysteries desk, there are no new developments in the case of the missing Buchanan train depot.
Despair not. More details have emerged about its history between closing and its removal from its hometown to an undisclosed location.
The inquiry began when Jessie Burton, citizen of that splendid small town, came here seeking help to trace the whereabouts of the remains of the historic structure after they were hastened away by those who had handled the demolition in the mid-1980s.
The story as the questioner related it was that the depot had been meticulously disassembled and catalogued in order for it to be moved to what was then the developing Explore Park in Roanoke County.
The columnist gets to ask the question today.
Q: Who or what was Bob Kinseyâs aunt and her fellow nurse looking at?
A: The temptation is to speculate those two distracted staffers on the back row of a vintage black and white group photograph of the early nursing staff at Catawba Sanatorium were trying to catch sight of an incoming helicopter to take them home.
Alas, given that the circa mid-1910s snapshot of Kate Lavinder and colleagues, shot outside with the hospital in the background, no chopper was en route.
The rotary wonders did not come into production until 1939. Seeing as how the road over the mountain from the Roanoke Valley to the hospital in those days was frightful, helicopter travel would have been infinitely quicker and more comfortable.
By Ray Cox
Special to The Roanoke Times
Roanoke Red Sulphur Springs and its successor Catawba Sanatorium as historic havens for treatment of tuberculosis having been discussed here not long ago, that sparked additional inquiry.
Q: Edward A. Turpin, my husband, was a tuberculosis patient at Catawba Sanatorium in 1956 when he was 6 years old. Is there a list of doctors or other information about the hospital during that era?
Marsha Turpin
Wytheville
A: Hospital records from 1910-1972, when it operated as a state-run facility to treat TB (since then, it has been a state mental health hospital), are hard to come by. Tisha Parrott of the current hospitalâs administrative staff said finding such information, if such were even available, would take time.