The Crews House – 806 Main Street
Reproduced with permission from Victorian Danville – Fifty-Two Landmarks: Their Architecture and History © 1977
The architecture of this Queen Anne mansion is complex and richly ornamental and rated high on the outstanding list of Danville’s Victorian houses. Built in 1890-91 for Beverly Sydnor Crews by architect-contractor, R. Bertrand Graham, it survives as one of the most interesting on Main Street.
One of its most striking features is the octagonal ended corner tower with its open third story gallery featuring panels of intricately scrolled ironwork. The tower is capped by a tall, handsomely wrought metal finial. Other notable decorative features include the terra cotta floral panels over the second-floor windows and the terra cotta belt courses, the patterned and colored slate roof, and the pierced-work and cast-iron front porch.
Its exuberance and fancy design are in stark contrast to its first owner. From an old Halifax family who practiced frugality as sound Baptist doctrine, he was a son of John Bullock Crews and Fannie Sydnor Crews who moved to Pittsylvania County and lived for many years at “Bellegrove” still standing near Chatham. He fought, as did his neighbor, James G. Penn, as a cadet from Virginia Military Institute in the Battle of New Market in the Civil War.
Afterwards Crews attended the University of Virginia. Some of his college letters to his father, now in possession of his grandson, C.B. Crews of Chatham, reflect the austerity of the times. In one he stated he was going to Missouri, and this he did in 1869. Here he acquired a wife, Georgie Woolfork, and considerable wealth from the railroad and stock raising business.
Ten years later he returned to Danville engaging in various enterprises and accumulating much real estate. When he started this house in 1890, he was a very successful man, but in May 1891, his wife, Georgie, died at the age of forty, and it is doubtful she ever lived here. He married a second time sometime prior to 1893 to Anna F. Cornick of Tennessee, and in December of that year he sold the house to John Dillard Spencer. Four years later, in 1897, Crews himself died at the age of fifty.
The second owner, Spencer, was a popular tobacconist and good looker from a prominent Martinsville family. He married Anne Carr Clark, daughter of a well-known Danville pioneer, Capt. Welch Clark. She was sister to Mrs. W.W. Williamson, who occupied the old Clark home now demolished for the First Federal Bank building. Spencer, like Crews, died early in life, in 1905, at the age of forty-nine, but his widow and four children continued to live here. Altogether the family resided in this home for almost thirty years, and it is most often referred to today as the “Spencer House.” Anderson Bros. Consolidated, Inc. bought it in 1920 and for approximately ten years it was rented out.
In 1931 when C. M. Weber bought the house for $7,500 it was in a bad state of repair. He put back much of the original cast iron removed from the front porch which he found in the basement. He also replaced the railings missing from the tower with pickets left over from the John Schoolfield house, now Leggett’s, in Forest Hills, which Weber built. Extensive renovations on the interior were done at this time.
Weber came to Danville in 1910 with a contracting firm to build the gates at the Schoolfield dam and returned in 1914 to stay. He became one of our city’s outstanding contractors, building many of Forest Hills’ most handsome homes.
Mrs. Elizabeth Pritchett Coleman followed Weber in ownership, and she is attributed with dismantling the six foot crystal chandelier placed by the Spencers in the dining room and selling the hundreds of teardrop prisms individually. But many of the original hand carved mantels are still here and the unique designs over the windows are outstanding.
Among the other owners were W. C. Yeatts, H. B. Yeatts and K. W. and Gladys B. Ramsey. The present owner and occupant is Mrs. J.E. Donahue, who with her husband bought it in 1947. MC
[ed: Since 1992, the home has been owned by Robin A. Dove Crews.]
