The home at 125 Sutherlin Avenue was built in 1907 after Mary Green Watson, wife of John T. Watson, Jr. purchased the land from J.A. Henderson. Mary Watson was born in 1868 in Danville and was the granddaughter of Nathaniel T. Green and Anne Colquehoun. Mr. Watson was born in Danville on the 29th of July 1861 to John T. Watson and Anne Green Read Watson of 125 Chestnut Street. By the age of 18, John Jr. was working as a clerk in a warehouse and eventually went into the hardware business. John and Mary were married in December of 1891. The couple had two children: Nancy, born in 1894, and James Green Watson born in 1908, both of whom were born subsequent to the family’s arrival at 125 Sutherlin Avenue.

For a brief time in his early career, John, Jr. and Mary were living in Richmond, but, with the decline of John’s father’s health, the family returned to take over the family’s brick yard.  In 1909, John T. Watson, Sr., fell from his front porch (presumably the Pine Street side) and broke his hip. He never quite recovered, and in 1910 he passed away.

Watson, who had assumed his father’s responsibilities with the brick business, oversaw the union of the Watson brick company with their greatest rival, that of the Fitzgeralds in 1927. The company was reformed as the Watson-Fitzgerald Brick Corporation with offices located at 115 Watson Street. Watson’s hardware enterprise continued to grow and evolve, eventually becoming Swain-Watson Company and then Link-Watson. We have written about the Watsons before. You can read more about the father and son (and their forbears) here.

By 1940, Mr. Watson and his wife were lodgers at the Belmont Hotel on Craghead Street. They shortly after moved to a home on Marshall Terrace, maintaining the Sutherlin Avenue property as a rental.

It was during this time that the Stoneham family took occupancy, renting one half of the home, while Ben A. Smith, a manager for Southern Dairies occupied the other half with his wife and their two young children. While the Smith’s residency here was short, the Stonehams occupied the premises for at least eight years.

John Newton Stoneham was born in 1907 in Front Royal, Virginia. He attended public schools in Virginia and West Virginia and received his B.S. in biology from the University of Virginia. He taught at George Washington High School for ten years before turning his attention toward a career in publishing. He joined Turner E. Smith Publishing Co. of Atlanta, though he retained a residence in Danville. He married Evelyn Truslow Mitchell on Christmas Eve 1936, and the couple had two children.

Like his father, John Jr. died subsequent to a fall, fracturing his hip after taking a tumble at their Marshall Terrace home in 1946.

In 1948, Mary sold the home to N. Lee Isenhour. Born in 1893 in Iredell, North Carolina, Mr. Isenhour came to Virginia in 1909. By 1912, he was employed in the insurance, banking, and real estate businesses. At the time of his death in 1989, he was the oldest licensed realtor in the state of Virginia. Mr. Isenhour lived in the Sutherlin Ave home for approximately six years, along with his wife Annie Gibbs Armes Isenhour, until it was sold in 1954 to Hortense Clayton Grubb and Vesta Clayton Yeatts, widowed sisters. The sisters owned the home for seven years before selling it in 1961 to Edwin C. Knight.

From 1968 until 1982,  the home was maintained by the trustees of the Congregation of Beth Sholom and was the residence, during part of that time, to Rabbi Benjamin Kelson and his wife Mrs. Anna Kolodny (whom the newspapers indicate died in 1972).

For the next twenty-two years it would be the property of Wyman R. Kirkland who owned the home privately and then under an LLC.

Since 2015 it has been the home of Jerry and Wanda Dunlap.

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