The following is extracted by permission from Victorian Danville – Fifty-Two Landmarks: Their Architecture and History © 1977 Mary Cahill and Gary Grant
It was said of the man who built this house that he exemplified in his life the real meaning of the term gentleman, but it was another quality, his tireless ingenuity, that provided our city an industry that today is one of the nation’s major tobacco dealers and exporters.
The man was Richard Louis Dibrell, who with his brother, Alfonso, founded Dibrell Brothers, a Fortune 500 company, now DIMON, Inc. He built this excellent Queen Anne mansion in 1885.
R.L. Dibrell was ten when Richmond was burned by the fleeing Confederates on April 3, 1865. His father’s tobacco warehouse went up with the flames. He was eighteen when in 1873 he and his elder brother left Richmond headed for the same small town on the banks of the Dan to which Jefferson Davis had fled. A history of the tobacco firm states, “unlike Davis, who was fleeing from defeat, the Dibrell brothers were pursuing success.” It was a journey that eventually carried R.L. Dibrell to travels in Canada, Europe, China and Japan, and the company he built to virtually every country in the free world.
In 1879 their tobacco firm was on the corner of Union and High streets. An 1881 Danville directory lists them on the corner of Lynn and Loyal streets. According to Dr. James I. Robertson, Danville native and Civil War historian, in his article “Houses of Horror”, on Danville’s federal prisons, this factory in which Dibrell Brothers was later located was Prison No 6, “a brick turreted structure as ominous in appearance as the Bastille”. Today the building with a new facade houses part of the Commonwealth Machine Co., across the street from the city’s Courts and Jail Building.
In 1884 R.L. Dibrell married Ida Nelson of Boonesville, Missouri, and in March 1885 he bought the lot on which this resident stands, a part of the Thomas B. Doe estate. Here Dibrell built his first home in Danville, completed, according to land books, in the same year. In all probability, because of its similarity in detail and design to other buildings built by him, the contractor was Thomas B. Fitzgerald.
Its architectural features include excellent brick craftsmanship, finely detailed gable, windows and entrances. It is one of four houses fronting on Broad Street included in the city’s Historic District.
According to George Dame’s History of Roman Eagle Lodge, R.L. Dibrell was of French Huguenot lineage in direct descent from Dr. Christopher DuBruill, who settled in Manakinstown, Virginia, about 1700 and founded the American branch of the family. Edwin, grandfather of Richard Louis, a tobacconist himself as were others of the family, anglicized the name to its present form, Dibrell.
Besides his vast tobacco interests, Dibrell put his heart in uplifting his adopted town. A pioneer in good roads long before the movement became popular, he frequently contributed from his own means for the improvement of public highways. He deeded land for Hilltop Sanatorium on the Yanceyville Road, and when the site was changed to North Main Street where Roman Eagle Nursing Home is today, the lot was sold and the proceeds applied to its building. He made a bequest in his will to Hilltop “if within one year there are reasonable prospects of its success”.
He was one of the original members of Mt. Vernon Methodist Church, serving on its Board of Stewards, and was president of the Danville Tobacco Association for five terms.
His brother, Alfonso, a bachelor, died in 1890. In 1896, Dibrell’s first wife died, and it was around the time of his second marriage to Mary E. Boyd of Reidsville, North Carolina, in 1903, that he purchased the imposing C.H. Conrad mansion on the corner of Main and Chambers streets, and he died there in 1920. This house on Main which appears in Ficklin’s Scrapbook of 1903 was demolished after the death of Mary B. Dibrell in 1955 to make way for the present doctors offices.
The house at 124 Broad became the property of Louis Nelson Dibrell, son of R.L. and his first wife. In 1914 he married Louise Glass of Caswell County, North Carolina. The younger Dibrell lived here until his death in 1956 and his wife until she died in 1963.
“Skid” Dibrell, as he was known, built up a reputation as a leader in promoting community projects and was awarded the 1941 Kiwanis Citizenship Award. Louis Nelson Dibrell, II and III, reside in Danville today.
It was during the occupancy by the L.N. Dibrell family that contractor C.M. Weber added three rooms to the rear, upstairs and down, and enlarged the front porch. The addition, inconspicuous from the side and front, was built of brick from Bassett & Riddle, brickmakers “down on the river” according to senior carpenter, Johnny A. Fitzgerald, who assisted in the construction work. The brick in the carriage house in the rear resembles his work on the house and was perhaps altered in some way by this time.
In 1969, after remaining in the Dibrell family for almost eight-five years, the house was sold to Mrs. Worth B. Griffith, the former Sudie Hasty of Rockingham, North Carolina, who came to Danville in 1907. Mrs. Griffith adopted the house as apartments and lived here until 1981 when she sold the property to Mr. and Mrs. Berthol J. Harbant of Baltimore. Thereafter, the house remained for sale for some years until 1988 when Mrs. Joyce LaPolla, longtime restaurateur from Long Island, New York, moved to Danville to be near her daughter and family, and became the new owner.
Since that time she has extensively renovated the house, reconstructing exterior details long damaged or missing, and revitalizing the interior to its original state. She further revitalized the house with a new identity, Broad Street Manor, combining her home with the operation of executive rental accommodations.
More recently, for a period of about twelve years in the early aughts and twenty-teens, the house was a bed and breakfast known as the II Georges Inn Bed & Breakfast.
Reproduced with permission from Victorian Danville – Fifty-Two Landmarks: Their Architecture and History © 1977 Mary Cahill and Gary Grant
