Claytor Memorial Clinic thrived in a historic Black neighborhood until urban renewal hit. The family still keeps its legacy alive.

Dr. Conrad Claytor was 7 when he started in the family profession.

The boy, like most of his siblings and cousins in Roanoke, came to the Claytor Memorial Clinic in the evenings to clean, restock shelves and generally make the family-owned medical facility ready for the next day of patients.

Soon, he would help schedule appointments and do other clerical tasks. By the time he was about 12, he was helping develop X-ray films in the clinic.

“It was kind of expected, in a way,” he said of his time there.

Claytor, who often rode with his father, Dr. Frank Claytor, on house calls, grew up to be a podiatrist. He returned to Roanoke by 1994 and asked his uncle, Dr. Walter Claytor, if he could establish a practice with him at the clinic. He had money to invest, and they could make improvements to keep the facility going for many years.

His uncle replied: “Take a ride through this neighborhood, and you’ll see that there’s not really a neighborhood anymore.”

The Gainsboro area, a Black neighborhood where the Black-owned clinic stood, had long ago fallen to a federally funded urban renewal program. And the clinic — dedicated in 1948 to the memory of family matriarch Roberta Claytor — was under the cloud of eminent domain. Roanoke officials could condemn it at any time, a possibility that dentist Walter Claytor fought for years. But the uncertainty would not do for a young doctor trying to establish himself.

“I’ll be quite honest with you, that was a very bitter pill to swallow,” Conrad Claytor said. “You want to work in a clinic that you grew up in, that your father, grandfather and uncles practiced in, you know, so that was a bitter pill, but understood.”

The clinic building stands today, though heavily damaged in a 1995 fire, shortly after Walter Claytor retired. Nearby, concrete steps that lead to a vacant lot mark the spot where the Claytor family patriarch, Dr. John B. Claytor Sr., had built a mansion for his family. It too burned down, as did a service station the family owned.

Walter Claytor died in January, nearly 20 years after he beat the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority in court over its decades-long attempt to condemn the clinic. A jury awarded the family more than $280,000 in compensation.

Conrad Claytor and a Roanoke historian, Jordan Bell, will team up Thursday evening to present a lecture and discussion of Roanoke’s Black medical history at the Gainsboro Branch Library. 

Bell said that the Claytor family belongs in the same sentence as such Roanokers as segregation-era lawyers Oliver Hill and Ruben Lawson, and pioneering U.S. Ambassador Edward Dudley.

“If you were born before 1970, [the Claytors] took care of your dental. You went there for the gas. You went there for your medical,” Bell said. “It’s just that they really took care of this entire community. And I believe they’re owed even more than what they’ve been given.”

A medical dynasty

John Claytor Sr., born in Floyd County in 1878, became one of Roanoke’s leading doctors. He co-founded Burrell Memorial Hospital, the only Roanoke-area hospital for Black patients during the segregation era. It was dedicated to Dr. Isaac Burrell, who was 49 when he died in 1914 of gallstones — because white-run hospitals in Roanoke would not allow him in for surgery. 

The Claytors had eight children, and several went into medicine or dentistry. Roberta Claytor wished that father and children could work together, so they built the clinic in the heart of Gainsboro, calling it the Roberta Morris Woodfin Claytor Memorial Clinic, or Claytor Memorial for short. She died in 1946, three years before it opened.

Internist Frank Claytor worked at the clinic, as did Dr. John Claytor Jr., an OB/GYN and surgeon, and Walter Claytor. Ralph Claytor, who had a business degree and was a master mechanic, was the clinic’s business manager and ran the service station.

The clinic was within sight of the 22-room mansion that John Sr. had built by 1923. Walter Claytor in 1995 told Roanoke Times reporter Mary Bishop that Roanoke’s white construction crews thought the house was too grand for a black man, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the property.

John Claytor’s father-in-law, Frank Woodfin, and a construction crew from Roberta’s native east Tennessee built the home.

The senior Claytor died in 1951, but his children kept the clinic a successful business for decades to come.

Conrad Claytor, now 68, remembered Gainsboro as “a true community.”

“At that time, you had barber shops, you had record stores, you had the Dumas Hotel,” he said. “You had just a whole smattering of businesses, insurance businesses, morticians, the whole thing. … The clinic would be open to 9 o’clock at night, because … that was just [the] need. … And there was no worry about walking around the Gainsboro community.”

Bell grew to understand the community later, after asking his grandmother to show him where she’d grown up. There was nothing there anymore, and he wanted to understand why. Through Bishop, the writer, and retired teacher, principal and counselor Richard Chubb, he met Walter Claytor and interviewed him frequently over the past decade. He picked up more information from reading a Claytor family history book, “Virginia Kaleidoscope: The Claytor Family of Roanoke, and Some of Its Kinships, from First Families of Virginia and Their Former Slaves.” Claytor sisters Dr. Margaret Woodbury and Ruth Marsh, both of whom had moved to Michigan, wrote it in 1994.

Woodbury, 86, and another sister, Roberta Palmer, are John Sr. and Roberta’s only surviving children. Palmer is 102, Conrad Claytor said. Marsh was married to a lawyer who became the first Black mayor of Saginaw, Michigan. Another sister, Bernice Claytor Boddie, who at one time was the clinic’s laboratory technician, lived to be 104 and was married to a pioneering Black doctor in Los Angeles.

Bell found in Walter Claytor a serious man who retained his sense of humor, as well as his fighting spirit.

“He remembered a little bit of everything,” Bell said. “He remembered everything that had happened to him and his family. He was about 90 or 91 when I first met him, and he passed away at 98. But even up until his dying day, he still remembered what happened to his family.”

A threat to sell

The federal urban renewal program, which began in the mid-20th century and lasted through the 1970s, ostensibly was intended to address urban deterioration during an era of suburban growth. In reality, federal money funded localities’ efforts to displace hundreds of thousands of families and businesses nationwide, according to multiple historic sources.

Between 1955 and 1980 in Roanoke’s Gainsboro and Northeast neighborhoods, city officials destroyed more than 1,600 homes, multiple schools, 24 churches and more than 200 other businesses, according to the Gainsboro History Project website. As of the late 1960s, all of those displaced were people of color, according to a University of Richmond study.

“Black residents and businesses were displaced and many properties acquired by eminent domain,” according to the Gainsboro History website. “Most families and businesses did not recover.”

Interstate 581 and the entertainment complex now called the Berglund Center were built there. Meanwhile, the promised new and affordable housing “almost always took the form of cheaply built public housing concentrated in Black communities,” according to the Encyclopedia Virginia.

Bishop, in her mid-1990s work for The Roanoke Times, wrote: “The national program was called urban renewal; black Roanokers came to call it ‘Negro removal.’” Walter Claytor told her that he “had drawn up a list of 144 businesses, churches and institutions that once stood in Gainsboro and Northeast, and of the 27 black doctors, dentists, pharmacists and lawyers who practiced in the neighborhoods. He found that only six of the businesses set up shop again after their buildings were torn down.”

The city came after the Claytor Memorial Clinic in 1976. The Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority notified Walter Claytor, who remained at work in the clinic even as the neighborhood disintegrated around his office, that it would use eminent domain to take the family’s city block of property. The authority nearly sold it to a church two years later, and continued to keep the property under a cloud until 1998.

During that time, Walter Claytor testified that the family could not find tenants for the old mansion, which had been converted to an apartment house, much less for the clinic, service station and other stores they owned, according to a Roanoke Times story on the civil trial against the housing authority. Frank Claytor died in 1972, and John Jr. left the clinic soon after to be a manager at the Roanoke City Health Department. That left lots of room at the family clinic.

Among the lost potential clinic tenants was Walter’s nephew, Conrad Claytor, who took him up on the suggestion he drive around the neighborhood.

“It was kind of a reality check,” Conrad Claytor said. “Because you saw areas that you used to play in as a kid and you used to feel safe walking down the streets, all of a sudden, you just said, what is this? This is like, almost like a war zone? Yeah, yeah. And you certainly wouldn’t feel safe walking down the street at night, because you didn’t know what you might encounter.”

That Roanoke jury in 2005 picked a number between what the Claytors had asked, $536,000, and the housing authority’s market analysis, $146,000.

“This is the first time, in Virginia, someone went after [a government agency] for messing with someone’s property — not taking it, just messing with it,” the Claytor family’s lawyer, Joe Waldo, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch after the hearing. “I consider it a great victory for Dr. Claytor. When we started, they were going to pay Dr. Claytor no money and said he didn’t even have the right to sue them.”

Claytor, however, would say in the ensuing years that his family could never be made whole. Bell said that he and Bishop went to see Claytor in early December and were the last people outside the family to visit him before he died.

“And the conversation — he never talked about sports, he never talked about music,” Bell said. “The conversation was always … what’s going on in Gainsboro, even when his memory had wavered. … And it was just amazing to me that he never, even at the age of 98, he never gave up on that fight.”

And it wasn’t simply about his own losses, Bell said. He mourned the community’s losses as deeply.

“It was the transferring of the ghetto, that’s all it was,” Claytor told The Roanoke Times’ Bishop in 1995. “They tore us up. They raped us.”

Conrad Claytor, after heeding his uncle’s “reality check,” opened a practice on Grandin Road and eventually moved it to Salem, near LewisGale Medical Center, where he had privileges. He retired four years ago.

Burrell Memorial Hospital, which John Claytor Sr. had co-founded and where several siblings and their wives worked and led over the years, moved in 1921 from 311 Henry St. to 611 McDowell Ave. A new building replaced it in 1955, and the hospital closed in 1978. After several other incarnations, it is now Blue Ridge Behavioral Health Burrell Center.

“Those involved with Burrell Memorial’s operations remember that doctors always treated patients regardless of their financial means, and the majority of patients were not able to pay their hospital bills in full,” according to the Gainsboro History Project website. “This in turn, often caused the hospital to suffer financial hardship. However, the hospital continued to offer a high standard of care for its patients.”

More than a year before Walter Claytor died, the city, flush with pandemic relief funds, negotiated with him to sell the clinic property. The city offered $420,000, according to the Roanoke Rambler. But other family members, who are also part owners of the property, had not been told about the deal, Conrad Claytor said.

“And when we found out about it, we were like, well, wait, slow down, wait a minute, you know, what is this going on?” he said. “Because he didn’t have any legal representation. He’s 96 years old.”

The family is interested in selling the property, but it would like some assurances that a buyer would respect its history. Conrad Claytor said he would even be willing to talk with city officials about it. The family made a second proposal to city officials in 2023, but the city rejected it, according to the Rambler.

“I’m definitely a person that feels like the only way you can get to a solution is to be willing to sit at the table and talk,” he said. “You can’t talk if you go to separate ends and don’t communicate with each other. So I can always put those feelings aside. And particularly for the community, you know, because I just think that there is such an opportunity.”

Carrying on tradition

There is still a working version of the Claytor Memorial Clinic in Roanoke. One of the partners, a child, adolescent and young adult psychiatrist, is a Claytor. He didn’t grow up here. But his father did.

Richard Claytor Jr. is John Sr. and Roberta Claytor’s great-grandson and Frank Claytor’s grandson, which makes him Conrad’s nephew. His father was a career Air Force officer who went to work at Hampton University, then as an administrative pastor. 

Richard Claytor Jr., who was born in England and grew up in multiple Air Force stops, never lived in the Roanoke area until the late 1990s. 

“I always kind of had this idea in my head of going back to where my grandfather, my great-grandfather and my great-uncles practiced medicine or dentistry and kind of quote-unquote doing my own thing,” he said.

After years of working for others, including LewisGale and Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, he and a partner, physician assistant Monica Wiltjer, hung out their own shingle in 2016. They called it Claytor Memorial Clinic, with the family’s blessing, in Rocky Mount, then moved it to Second Street Southwest in Roanoke the next year, he said. They opened another office in 2020 in Newport News.

During earlier years working in Roanoke, Claytor Jr. would occasionally encounter people who remembered his kin.

“Someone would come in or bring their child in and they would exclaim that they thought it was my grandfather” they were coming to see, he remembered. “And this is somebody in their 60s, who my great-uncle, J.B. Claytor [Jr.], had delivered. It was interesting to see some of that connection coming back from oh so many years ago, in the family and in the field of medicine. It was kind of neat.”