The Dougherty Double House, 114-116 Holbrook Ave

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On the 7th of June 1889, Berryman Green (son of Nathaniel T. Green) sold a large lot on Holbrook Avenue to Ella F. Dougherty. It was likely very soon after that that the grand brick Queen Anne double house was constructed.

Mrs. Dougherty was born Ella Frances Millner on the 15th of October in 1853 to William Banks Millner and Mary Humphries Keen. Born in Danville, she was the first cousin of Nancy Ann Witcher Keen, the mother of Nancy Langhorne Astor. Ella married Dr. Charles Edwin Dougherty on her 25th birthday in 1878.

Dr. Charles E. Dougherty, a dentist, was a native of New Jersey where he was born in 1839. He arrived in the south prior to the Civil War and fought for the cause of the Confederacy throughout the conflict, having served from its opening battle until the surrender by Lee at Appomattox. His marriage to Ella was his second. His first wife, Ella’s cousin Nancy Keen (not to be confused with Nancy Langhorne’s mother of the same name) passed away just six years after their marriage.

Dr. Dougherty came to his marriage with the much younger Ella (there was a fourteen year age difference) having suffered a great deal of loss. All three children from his first marriage died in childhood. A pair of twins died shortly after they were born, and his eldest daughter, Bettie, died of diphtheria just a month after his wife’s death of tuberculosis.

Married in 1878, Charles and Ella had a child who, like his elder siblings, did not survive childhood but died just hours after his birth.

The couple lived in at least one side of the double house for the first thirty-two years of their marriage, but by 1915, Ella’s health was deteriorating and she struggled to care for her much older husband. In 1920, the couple sold the property and Dr. Dougherty moved into his niece’s home where he lived with her, Mrs. Margaret Payne Hughes, and her husband, Dr. Samuel Edwin Hughes of Main Street.

The property’s sale is somewhat complex. Perhaps, in the separation of the couple, there was some disagreement as to how to divide it, but the property was entered into a chancery suit, the result being that the house was divided and sold.

114, or “or the northern half of the double residence” was sold to William H. Booth in exchange for Mr. Booth’s home at 426 Chestnut Street and $3,000. Number 116 was purchased by Mattie M. Wilkerson.

From here the properties lived very different lives until they were once again united under one owner in 1987.

114 Holbrook Avenue

From 1920, when Mr. Booth purchased 114 Holbrook Avenue, he resided here with his wife, Florence Haines Booth and three of their four children (one having died in infancy).

William Henry Booth was born in 1874 in Pittsylvania County to Christopher Silas Booth and Susan Elizabeth Wooding Booth and was the younger brother of Peter Louis Booth and Charles Louis Booth.

Mr. Booth was a pharmacist and owned and operated a drug store in one of the street level store fronts of the Morgan Hotel. In 1925, William decided to move his practice to Florida where he hoped to open a drug store with his son, Donald, as partner. He sold the home to his brothers Charles and Peter. Not long after arriving in Florida, in October of 1925, Donald Booth died after mistakenly ingesting mercury.

For the majority of the Booth brothers’ ownership of the home, their primary tenant was Johnny Westbrook who was employed as a traveling salesman. He lived here with his wife and three children. Mr. Westbrook at one time was a well known character in Danville and occupied his free time as a naturalist, and he maintained an exhibit for the education of the public which, for a time, was located in the basement of 944 Main Street. You can read more about him here. 

In 1937, the home was sold to Mary Puryear and her husband Miles. The couple, who lived here with their daughter, also Mary, shared their side of the double house with John W. Caldwell, a local radio announcer.

Mr. Puryear was born on the 18th of May 1888 in Durham. He married Mary Elizabeth Arnett in 1918. Mary was the daughter of Eugene Samuel Arnett whose home was also on Holbrook Avenue and who built the Arnett Apartment building on Green Street. Her brother, Eugene W. Arnett inherited the house and apartment building but eventually sold them when the law caught up with him for crimes that included sexual assault and drug dealing. Be sure to check out the previous links for more details on him.

Nine years after the Puryears purchased the Western portion of the double house, they sold it, in 1946, to Lupton Hall and Clara M. Spivey who would occupy the home for the next almost forty years.

Clara Morehad Spivey was born about on the 31st of August 1905 in Tupelo, Mississippi. She was a widow at the time she bought the Holbrook Avenue property. In November of 1977, while in Richmond, she fell ill and passed away, leaving the house to Virginia.

Virginia was born on the 21st of June 1901 in Hyde, North Carolina. She married William Lynwood Hall in 1928, and the couple had one son. William died in 1982, but the couple were separated before her purchasing of the Holbrook Avenue home. Virginia, who was a successful Interior Designer, retired after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. She eventually relocated to Roman Eagle Memorial Home, and it was there she died on the fourth of December 1986.

With the death of Virginia, the home passed to her son William Hall, Jr. who sold it in January of 1987 to Wyman R. Kirkland.

116 Holbrook Avenue

The family of Mattie Wilkinson, including her husband William and four children, were listed as renters in the first years they occupied the home and are recorded as such on the 1920 census.

“Mattie” was born Martha May Meadows in 1964 in Henderson, North Carolina. She married William Ira Wilkinson in November of 1882.

Mr. Wilkinson was born in 1854 in Mecklenberg county, Virginia to Alexander Wilkinson and Lucy T. Gordon. Mr. Wilkinson was a tobacconist. As a young man he moved to North Carolina where he began his career in tobacco, and spent some time in Atlanta before moving to Danville in 1918. In the years just prior to his death, he was employed as a buyer for the Export Leaf Tobacco Company. Beginning about 1923, Mr. Wilkinson began to experience a failure in his healthy and began to experience weakness in his muscles which eventually developed into partial paralysis. In the week prior to his death he contracted pneumonia and passed away on the 14th of November 1930.

William and Mattie had seven children, four of whom shared the house with them. Kate, the eldest, worked as a stenographer for a tobacco company. Matsie was also a stenographer, but for an elevator company. William Jr. was also a tobacconist, and John was a bank clerk.

Mattie died in 1941, and the house was sold by her children to the nine surviving children of Dr. Lewis Edwin Harvie of 954 Main Street. From roughly 1950 until 1971, 114 Holbrook Avenue was home to S. Rutherford Harvie.

Mr. Harvie was born in the family home on Main Street on the 5th of April 1886 to Dr. Lewis Edwin Harvie and Martha Winston Rutherford. He attended Roanoke College and graduated in 1909. He then spent two years on the staff of the Danville Register before moving to Birmingham, Alabama where he worked for the Age-Herald there and later for the financial ratings bureaus of Bradstreet and R.G. Dunn & Co.

In 1923, Mr. Harvie returned to Danville. He served on the school board for thirty years and then, upon retiring, he volunteered for the Red Cross at Memorial Hospital and by 1966 had accrued 10,000 hours of volunteer service.

Mr. Harvie outlived all his siblings, and so, upon his death in 1971, the house was sold by Rutherford’s nephew, Greenhow Maury, Jr. and purchased by Wyman Kirkland who, in 1987, would buy 114 and bring the double house once again into sole ownership.

Mr. Kirkland owned the home until 2003 when he sold it to its present owner Brenda Jackson General.

 

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