The recent, visible renaissance on Jefferson Avenue continues unabated, driven by the influx of folks who have adopted Danville as their home and their restoration avocation. Prime examples are Rod Tomlinson and Maria Mejias who moved last year from Long Island, New York to purchase and refurbish Danville’s historic H. Lee Boatwright House at 904 Main Street.
In addition to attention the couple is lavishing on their columned Main Street mansion, they have made the reclamation of this property at 131 Jefferson Avenue, as well as its neighbor at 125 Jefferson, a priority. When complete, this work-in-progress—txvo stories of solid brick over a raised basement—will include a trio of handsome apartments, one of which already is occupied by Mr. Tomlinson’s son, Rodney, himself an integral part of the ongoing rehab.
The house of simple Italianate design was built for Mrs. James B. Harrington, apparently ii 1879, on a 150-foot lot at Jefferson’s corner with Patton, adjoining land where that same year the present Episcopal Church was being constructed. Going up at that time diagonally across the street, was another masonry building, the Presbyterian Church (later First Christian) at 200 Jefferson, also featured on the 2004 Tour.
Isabella Harrington died in 1894, and her husband, and other members of the family continued to reside here through most of the 1890s. Legal records early in the period reflect their real estate holdings not only on Jefferson Avenue, but also in Mr. Harrington’s bakery and confectioner’s shop in the heart of downtown. The sale of that business and the parcel where the house at 125 Jefferson was built in the mid 1880s may have been forced by financial reverses.
About the turn of the 20th century, the Harringtons house was conveyed to the family of A.W. Douthat, a principal in the Douthat Riddle Coal Company, whose fuel supplied many local households early in the 20th century. The Douthats, who had come to Danville from Charles City County in the early 1890s, lived in the Jefferson Avenue house for about a decade before moving to Holbrook Avenue. Among their children were several daughters who distinguished themselves as educators, remembered well by an older generation of Danvillians.
Local folks today, however, most closely associate the house— which sheltered apartment dwellers for many decades—with Dr. Kenneth Weakley. A well-regarded podiatrist, Dr. Weakley purchased the structure for his office just after the World War II, establishing here a practice which he maintained for nearly 40 years.