In February of 1872, the Presbyterian Church sold a portion of its property to Robert C. White “with improvements thereon”. The Beers Map of 1873 identifies a house on the property. In 1884, Mr. White took out a loan of $1,000 for unspecified reasons. By 1899, the first of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps on which Jefferson Avenue was included, identifies a duplex. Census records of 1900 identify Mr. White as having moved into the home of his daughter who lived next door at 218 Jefferson Avenue.

Robert C. White was born in 1824 and married Eloise T. Butler on his 25th birthday, February 20th, 1949. The couple had one child. Mary Ellen White was born in 1850 and married Fred Clarke, Jr., of Buffalo, New York in December of 1877.

Mr. White, who worked as a tailor, passed away in 1908. His obituary describes him as “one of Danville’s most venerable and respected citizens” and “the oldest resident native of this city.” Mr. White was an elder of the First Presbyterian Church and a senior member of its session at the time of his death. In his will of 1888, Mr. White bequeathed all of his property to his daughter who maintained the property at 212-216 Jefferson Avenue as rental property, expanding the building sometime between 1910 and 1915.

When Mrs. Clarke passed away in 1930, she left the property to her three sons, John, Arthur, and Walter. John died in 1946, followed four years later by Arthur who left his portion of the property to the several colleges and theological seminaries he was affiliated with in, including Davis and Elkins College and Davis Stuart School in West Virginia, Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and Union Theological Seminary in New York City. In 1964, unable to keep up with the maintenance of the properties from Washington D.C. Walter sold the property, including the house at 218, the investment property at 226 Jefferson Avenue, and the apartments at 212-216, to Shields Realty for $22,000.

Over the years, the apartments, once known as Clarke Apartments and, more recently, as Monticello Terrace Apartments, have been home to many people. Among those who have lived here were Burgess Richard, a harness maker and Thomas Fultz a tobacconist who occupied apartments here in 1890. In 1900, rooms were occupied by Charles and Eugenia Bishop and their two children. Charles a machinist. Millard McKinney and his family had taken another set of rooms. He was a cashier in a shop, and three of his four children worked as salespersons, possibly in the same shop. In 1910, Mary Hadbarger, a widow, lived there with her two daughters. The three of them were all employed by the knitting mills.

The apartment building also housed several railway men, a proofreader for the newspaper, a stenographer for an insurance company, a bookkeeper for a piano store, a telephone operator, and a druggist. In 1930, two salesmen for Club Aluminum lived in the newer section. Club Aluminum was a chain store that sold a brand of waterless cookware.

Today the property is owned by Stephen Staats who has developed one of the apartments into an AirBnb.

Sources:
Census and Vital records found at Familysearch.org
Images and vital information, including biographical sketches found at FindaGrave.com
Death notices and other information found in the Danville Register, Danville Bee and other newspaper archives at Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank.com
Census, Directory, Newspaper, and other information compiled by Paul Liepe