East Main Street Historic District

On a hill northeast of Christiansburg's original town, this twenty-acre neighborhood follows the old road to Salem along East Main and Park Streets. It holds mostly late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century houses in Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Foursquare, Craftsman and bungalow styles, with a row of brick bungalows on Pepper Street. Two early log houses, a Gothic Revival Episcopal church, the former high school and an elementary school add variety. The oldest building is the Barnett-Montague House, a log and frame dwelling later owned by Rice D. Montague, who gave land for the railroad station. Test excavations in its yard found a deep midden of early to mid-nineteenth-century ceramics and other artifacts. After the Lee Highway bypassed the road in the early twentieth century, the area became a quiet residential backwater. Stone and concrete retaining walls along East Main Street tie the streetscape together. The district was listed for its architecture and archaeological potential.