The house at 138 Sutherlin Avenue was one of three built by real estate developer and recently appointed president of Anderson Lumber Company, Powhattan Fitzhugh Conway. The enterprise Conway oversaw was a product of the consolidation of Bass, Brown & Lee Manufacturing and F.L. Walker.
A year after Conway built his own home at 134 Sutherlin Avenue, he oversaw the construction of 138 on behalf of his wife’s sister and her husband, J. Turner Hamlin. The two sisters married their husbands on the same day – Valentine’s Day 1894.
Hamlin married Mary Newell Brown, one of thirteen children born in 1870 to John Thompson Brown and Elizabeth Harrison of Richmond. Conway married Maggie Brown. Growing up in a house full of boys, the sisters were very close.
James Turner Hamlin was born March 17, 1869, to Frank M. and Sarah Arnett Hamlin of Leaksville (now Eden), North Carolina. The family relocated to Danville when James was twelve. He started his career in business with his family operating a grocery store on Main Street before entering the tobacco business where he was associated with the American Tobacco Company from 1908 until 1919. It was in that year he organized his own firm of Hamlin and Hamlin which dealt in wholesale confections, cigars, and other items. He maintained that business until ill health demanded he retire in 1942.
The Hamlins were not long to occupy the house next door to their sister and brother-in-law. As they grew more affluent, they followed Mr. Conway’s example and purchased a large house on Main Street (749, where a commercial building now stands). The house remained in the family (sort of) when Willard and Elizabeth Conway Holland purchased the Sutherlin Avenue property. Mrs. Holland was the sister of P.F. Conway.
Willard Wilburn Holland was the son of Charles Gilmore Holland and Mary Catherin Walters Holland. He was born in 1859 in Richmond and arrived in Danville along with a great many of his family, including those who lived on Main and Pine Streets and who eventually built impressive houses on West Main (the home of cousins Asa Thomas and Charles Edward Holland still stand at 474 and 490 W. Main, respectively). Unlike his wealthy tobacconist relatives, Mr. Holland was employed as a furniture merchant. He and Mrs. Holland shared the large home with their unmarried daughters Elizabeth and Catherine and their widowed daughter Mary and her four children, as well as Mr. Holland’s sister Millie. Mary remarried in 1912, and when Mr. Holland passed away of pneumonia during the influenza epidemic of 1919, the home was transferred to her.
Mary Holland was born in Danville on September 5, 1883. She was first married to Thomas Benton Woolley, and the couple had four children before he passed away in 1909, just eight years after they married. Mary’s second husband, Philip Holt Lyon, was bookkeeper in a bank and later became the City Sergeant. The couple maintained the home until Mary’s death in 1956. The property, being Mrs. Lyon’s, the house passed to her son, Thomas Benton Woolley and his wife Josephine. Mr. Lyon relocated to a home on West Main Street. In 1962 he remarried, just three years before his own death in 1965 of a recurring cerebral embolism. He had also been struggling with cancer.
The Woolleys held onto the home until 1982 when Mrs. Woolley, having retired as a librarian at the Danville Public Library, sold the home and moved to Richmond. The house experienced a brief period of revitalization until it sold again in 1987. In 2006 it went into foreclosure and was purchased by the present owners who are in the process of restoring the home.
