The Salem City Council voted 3-2 Monday night to postpone a vote on a rezoning request from Roanoke College for a historic home on the corner of Market St. and Clay St. that the college plans to knock down for a new sign and green space.
That requires a change from a residential business district to a college and university district.
It is the latest move in what’s been a year since the college announced it was going to raze the structure — and attempts were started to save it by likely moving it somewhere else.
The home is very likely tied to J.C. Deyerle, a prominent builder in Salem’s history and probably the only brick maker in the city during the 19th century, Mike Pulice, Western Region architectural historian with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, said. He said only a handful of properties built by the Deyerle family stand today.
The Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation’s Spring 2026 newsletter includes the house at the corner of Clay and Market streets in its list of “endangered sites, and says the foundation “encourages” the college to explore other options and “continue its leadership in preserving our shared history.”
Whitney Leeson, professor of anthropology and history at Roanoke College, said she is concerned because the house is likely a product of slave labor — something the college formed a consortium to study and acknowledge in recent years.
Councilman Joe Foley, Vice Mayor Anne Marie Green and Councilman Hunter Holliday voted to delay the rezoning until the council’s first meeting in December after multiple residents urged the council to work with the college to save the house. Randy Foley and Renee Turk voted no on the motion.
The council acknowledged that despite this decision, the college can still tear down the house at any time. Mary Wines, the city’s planning and zoning administrator, said during the meeting that there are no protections on the building that would prevent Roanoke College from removing it.
During the meeting, Green asked Catherine Potter, the college’s advisor to the president and general counsel, if the school would be open to a partnership with the city if funding was made available.
“We have said for the past year that we are open, especially if there is funding. So if there is funding involved, where it could be taken care of, where the college doesn’t necessarily have to incur costs … then yes, I think we could do that, but it would have to be timely,” Potter said. “We have delayed a year.”
Last fall, Roanoke College drove an excavator onto the property, and citizens started to raise concerns about its demolition. Turk attended Monday’s meeting virtually because she is in France. Turk said after complaints started coming in, a few city officials met with Roanoke College to discuss options.
Turk said after complaints started, she, Green, Holliday and City Manager Chris Dorsey met with college representatives to discuss options.
Potter said Monday that when the college bought the house in 2023 for $463,000, it had intended to keep it standing and turn it into office space. Potter said the cost estimate for that would have been $800,000 — which the college deemed too expensive and from there decided to raze it. The property is assessed for tax purposes at $261,900, according to the city’s GIS records.
She said the college has delayed demolition for a year to give residents time to act and that the college opened a fund for residents to raise money to save the home. Turk said the fund, an idea born from the initial meeting with the college, had a stipulation that the college would hold off on demolition if residents could raise $25,000 in six months.
“Nobody came up with a single penny to put into that fund,” she said in a text to Cardinal News. “Not even the people that screamed the loudest.”
Turk texted that she would “love to see that house saved,” but feels that the college “did their due diligence” and has “given more than enough time for those interested to actually do something about it.”
During Monday’s rezoning hearing, Green clarified that shortly after the earlier meeting between members of council and Roanoke College, late councilman John Saunders died and that there have been no further discussions since.
Six residents spoke during the hearing, all in opposition to the building’s demolition.
Russell Deyerle, who said he is a distant relative of J.C. Deyerle, urged the college to find other uses besides office space that make the building worth keeping. He suggested painting a mural on the side of the home if Roanoke College wants a new sign.
“We’ve lost a lot of historic buildings, quite a few of them Deyerle builds,” he said. “But they’re gone, and they can’t be built back.”
Stella Reinhard, who lives near the college and the historic home — and multiple other residents — said Monday that they were not aware of any specifics regarding the fund in order to spread information and that a group will set up their own fund. A few residents also mentioned the potential for a dollar-for-dollar renovation partnership with the city to turn the building into a visitor’s or welcome center.
“I’ve never heard of this fund,” Donna Crotts said. “I don’t feel like the citizens have been given the opportunity to come up with the money. If you give us some time, we will do it.”
The history of the home and how slave labor likely contributed to its construction
Pulice said in a recent interview that his “educated guess” is that the home was built in 1855 by J.C. Deyerle. Pulice has published a book on the Deyerle family and their buildings.
There is an addition to the side of the house that was built by 1873 at the latest, Pulice said, citing an 1873 map that shows the addition on the building.
After being used as a residence, the home was converted to a lawyer’s office before being occupied by a sorority until 2023, when the college purchased the house. The condition of the house is good, Pulice said.
“It should be preserved,” Pulice said. “It’s definitely a historic building and we don’t have that many buildings left from that period.” The bricks were made and fired by hand, as was the three-coat plaster and other materials in the home, he said. He said after 1890, homemade bricks were “pretty much done.”
Leeson, the Roanoke College professor, said though J.C. Deyerle developed most of the historic buildings on campus, just a handful of them are left. She said the actual shape and form of the house is called a “two-thirds I-form” because two-thirds are built first, which is rare, too.
“That is a fantastic example of again, a town that is building a base of citizenry that is managing to sort of rebuild after the war,” Leeson said. “It speaks to a certain level of affluence, a certain level of progressiveness.”
There was initially a conversation to move the house off of the property, which Leeson said she is opposed to for its preservation.
Leeson said she believes the home was built by two Black brothers, but it’s unclear if they were enslaved at the time or bondsmen.
What Leeson said “baffles” her is that the college still plans to move forward with demolishing the house, even as the college founded the Center for Studying Structures of Race. The consortium started in 2020 to study and understand what the contribution of enslaved labor to the college and Salem is and to recognize the contribution of that labor, she said.
Pulice said the craftsmanship, rather than the racial history of the home, compelled him to say it’s important to preserve.
“Virtually every building before 1865 in the South was built by Black people. So how can I say that makes it any more important than any other Antebellum or war building in the South?” he said. “It’s important to appreciate the legacy of Black builders and laborers, certainly.”
