Lanier Farm
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Forest Park and Druid Hills (Lanier Farm)
1938, Earle S. Draper and Associates. Mulberry Rd. and adjacent streets from Circle Ct. to Smith River
Much of the southeast quadrant of today's Martinsville is a parklike residential area that centers on wide and leafy Mulberry Road. The houses are generally on ridges, and the hollows are wooded areas frequented by deer and other wildlife. Encompassing almost two thousand acres, the area was laid out on the former Lanier Farm for developer Rives S. Brown by the landscape and city planning firm of Draper. A Lanier Farm brochure of c. 1960 proudly states that they “maintained the flower and charm of the real old South.” The development includes an unusually generous amount of reserved forested areas, numerous playgrounds, schools, churches, a country club and golf course, and the scenic Lake Lanier. In c. 1960 the Colonial Revival Druid Hills Shopping Center was constructed. The area's gently winding roads connect in what amounts to a curvilinear grid but without the bottlenecks common to many developments with dead-end streets. Aesthetically successful because of good planning, the project was equally fruitful financially, in no small part because in 1941 a large DuPont factory (now closed) opened in Martinsville.
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Location: Martinsville, VirginiaRegional Overviews:Architect:Types:Styles:Materials:no metadata available
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Citation
Anne Carter Lee, "Forest Park and Druid Hills (Lanier Farm)", [Martinsville, Virginia], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VA-02-HR21.
Print Source
Buildings of Virginia: Valley, Piedmont, Southside, and Southwest, Anne Carter Lee and contributors. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, 233-234.
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