- December 15th, 2010, 12:59 am
#333227
LUminary, when you pasted my earlier message, I noticed some typos. They are corrected below. Also, I wanted to add a little more trivia. LU owns a third island between Daniel's Island and Treasure Island. It is called Hog Island and was never used for anything. In 1965, at age 3, I walked out onto the basketball court in the gym on the island to watch Dad and others play a pick up game. Steve Hughes dribbled down the court in my direction and tried to jump over me. His knee gave me a major bloody nose - funny how you remember stuff like that. One of my former neighbors, BJ Woods, attended LU in the 1970s. He remembers walking across the river from Amherst County in the winter of '77 when it froze solid. Also, there was a second pool built on the island for women at some point because, apparently, LU had a rule against co-ed swimming. When we visited the island last year, that pool was in fairly good shape. Water skiers were a common sight on both sides of the island in the 60s and 70s. Unfortunately, the petting zoo on the island is where Brad Butler and I got the chickens that we released in the LU cafeteria in '82 - a rather notorious event in LU's history. There was even a drowning that I had forgotten. When Ed Dobson visited recently, he remember that the brother of Jim Sanders' wife, Randy (I can't recall his last name) drowned in the river. I remember McCauley Rivera fallng from the train trestle into the river nearby and a high school classmate of mine, Peter Nelson, meeting the same fate but I had forgotten about the drowning. Treasure Island was an early example of LU using local natural features to attract students. I don't think Snowflex is quite as dangerous as that river though.
I couldn't resist jumping in here. Guess this shows my age but I remember the first two floods of '69 and '72. My sister was at camp on the island when the flood hit in '72 and had to evacuate. Jim Soward, co-pastor of TRBC, lived in the main house. He hung from the bridge with a chain saw and cut logs in the water to keep them from piling up against the bridge and taking it out. He was gone in '85 and nobody was brave enough to do what he did so the bridge washed out. In the 70s, LU had a WWII military amphibian on the island that could be driven on land and became a boat when it was driven into the river. The main house on the island was built in the early 1900s as the headquarters for the YMCA Camp. The pool and tennis courts dated back to the original camp. I am told the island served as Lynchburg's first airport. One preacher (Lester Roloff) landed his plane there when coming to speak at TRBC in the 1960s. In the early 1900s, the island was only served by a pedestrian bridge from Rivermont. The vehicular bridge was added when the 9th Street bridge was moved from downtown Lynchburg to Treasure Island. In old pictures of downtown, you can see what later became the Treasure Island bridge. The island just downstream from Treasure Island is Daniel's Island. LU actually always owned more land on that island than on Treasure Island but never used it because there was no access. It was leased to somebody for pasture and I remember in one of the floods the cows only survived by climbing up on what used to be the Orange and Alexandria RR. The big stone piers that LUminary saw on both sides of that island are structurally sound and could even support a modern highway according to the engineers we once consulted. Enough random facts for one night, I guess. My kids are hungry.
--Fumble (1961-2009), RIP
- By olldflame
- By jmclaughlin
- By LUOrange