Maxey receives Kegley Preservation Award for stewardship of historic resources

Roanoke College President Michael C. Maxey was one of eight individuals and organizations honored recently with a George A. Kegley Preservation Award from the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation. George Kegley ‘49, for whom the award is named, also received one of the Kegley awards. The awards were presented by Dr. Whitney Leeson, professor of history at Roanoke College and the president of the foundation.

Maxey received the Kegley Preservation Award for Heritage Education & Stewardship for spearheading the renovation and restoration of multiple historic properties on the Roanoke College campus. The nomination noted preservation projects such as the College’s Bank Building, the former Farmers National Bank on Main Street in downtown Salem that now houses the College’s history department and public history program.

Other preservation projects conducted under President Maxey’s leadership include the Clay Street House, a mid-19th century, two-room structure known as one of the oldest homes in Salem, and Lucas Hall, an older academic building that was renovated in 2009 to become the College’s first LEED-certified building.

The restoration of Monterey was a significant restoration and renovation effort. Purchased by the College in 2002, Monterey is a large, Greek Revival-style house built in 1853, now used as a meeting space and College guest house. The former slave quarters behind Monterey were also restored and now house the College’s Center for Studying Structures of Race, founded in 2020.

Maxey’s nomination for the award described the Center, which serves as a venue for teaching, research, and community engagement about issues of race and forms of institutional racism, “as an outgrowth of Maxey’s forward-thinking commitment to investigating the historical relationship between institutions of higher learning and slavery.”

Maxey has led the College’s effort to closely examine its history, preserve its historic structures and address historic issues that have been unaddressed for decades. In 2014, Roanoke College partnered with other colleges and universities to found the Universities Studying Slavery (USS) consortium. This year, Roanoke College installed two bronze plaques on the Administration Building to honor the lives of the enslaved skilled laborers who directly built the College, or who generated wealth invested in the College.

As a result of these endeavors, The Council of Independent Colleges named Roanoke College as an Institutional Affiliate in a multiyear project called “Legacies of American Slavery: Reckoning with the Past,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In November of this year, Maxey announced Roanoke College’s community-centered plan to construct a campus monument to honor enslaved persons. It will be the sixth in the nation erected on a college campus.

Kegley received the Kegley Preservation Award for Preservation for a project to save the historic Monterey Smokehouse and a smaller attached structure. Kegley’s historic Roanoke City home is also named Monterey. The home is a two-story, banked, Greek Revival style brick dwelling. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Over many decades, the historic Monterey Smokehouse had fallen into disrepair. Roof problems led to rotting which led to structural problems. The restoration project was to preserve the smokehouse and a smaller structure believed to have been a chicken coop, with a façade that dated back to the 1880s. Care was taken to disassemble the structures to save as much of the original material as possible. New appropriate footers were created and the foundation was rebuilt using the original stone. The timber frame voids were filled by similarly distressed timbers, as well as poplar roof sheathing and cedar siding. Boards from a disassembled storage building of a similar age on a nearby farm were used to match lost cladding on the coop. Many historic details remain, such as the original meat hooks installed on the joists and the original door that now hangs on the coop.