Photos by Angelica Ramos
Angelica Ramos
Contributing Writer
BLACKSBURG- Life-long Blacksburg resident, Barbara Surface, 92, recently shared her family’s connection to Montgomery County History in Price’s Fork.
Surface’s grandparents lived in Michael Price’s historic home when she was a young girl. On a map published in the Roanoke Times in 1970, Surface marked where the house was on Michael Price’s land close to Walls Branch Road. The land, Surface explained, was given to Michael Price and his siblings by King George. Price Mountain was included in the land given to them.
Surface remembers, in the original part of the house, there was an opening to go down underground into the original kitchen space and her grandparents explaining that that was where captured British soldiers were held. She remembers a big heavy door under the brick portion of the house with a slot where it was believed they’d pass food to the captured soldiers. In front of that large opening, Surface said, was where William Preston, original owner of Historic Smithfield, died, in front of Michael Price’s home, where she grew up.
Through pictures from her grandparents and ancestors, Surface has documentation stating that entrance under the original portion of the house is where William Preston died. The photo she has reads, “WM Preston died in yard” with the number 795. William Preston did die near Price’s Fork due to what is suspected to either have been heat stroke or a heart attack in 1783.
Surface explained that the Price home that her paternal grandparents lived in, was a farm where they milled grain, and raised hogs for meat. She reminisced about playing with her siblings in the old granary by climbing up one side and sliding down the other. When the home was owned by her family, Surface explained that local community members would come to her grandfather, John Will Shepherd, for cornmeal and flour that they milled as well as meat from the pigs they farmed, to last them through the hard times. Surface explained that the brick portion of the home was built by the enslaved people and the walls were about a foot thick. The brick portion did not have rooms downstairs, but two large rooms upstairs as it was an addition to the original part of the Price home.
“You had to go down in the ground,” Surface explained, “to get to the old kitchen part. It had a little window, from about two-by-two-foot wide, under it was a slot that my dad said his dad told him that that’s where they could shoot out at ‘Indians’.”
Surface remembers when they plowed, they’d turn up arrowheads and flint stones. She remembers her siblings playing with flint stones and creating sparks as children. One of the porches, Surface explained, was not enclosed and the children of her family were not allowed on that porch growing up.
Surface’s family has since stayed in the area, but Surface does not live on the property her grandparents once owned. She lives in a home that she and her husband built for ‘eighty dollars worth of materials’ in 1962.
