Until it became part of the Averett University campus in 2006, this charming Williamsburg Revival-style house was a “one-owner.” First occupied in 1935—the year Mr. and Mrs. A.C. Conway, Jr., were married—the newly-completed dwelling was built on a lot conveyed the preceeding year to Mr. Conway by his father. The couple shared this diminutive dwelling until Mr. Conway’s death in 1960; thereafter his widow, the former Helen Bouck, continued to reside here until she died five years ago.

With her deep attachment to the house she had called home her entire married life, Mrs. Conway made provision to bequeath the property upon her death to Averett University. As she had wished, the house retains its residential character, as a periodic guest house for Averett, complete with the Conways’ handsome antiques and other furnishings and appointments.

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Helen Bouck Conway was a daughter of James Barnes Bouck, Jr. and Nettie Moore of Canaan, Connecticut. She spent most of her life in Danville, where this address on Mt. View Avenue was home for nearly seven decades.

Her husband, Alexander Carson Conway, Jr., was a native Danvillian, the son of A. C. Conway, his namesake, and mother, the former Corinne Gray. He grew up at 218 West Main Street, his only other home in his native city. After attending Danville Military Institute, Woodberry Forest and the University of Virginia, he began a career as a real estate agent and as bookkeeper for his father in the Home Building and Loan and Investment Co.

Mr. Conway was the scion of a long line of Danville Baptists with an abiding interest in Averett. His father was chairman of the trustees of Roanoke Female College at the time just over a century ago when the school now known as Averett purchased the site on West Main Street where the school’s main campus continues to flourish. Among these trustees also was a second cousin, Powhatan Fitzhugh Conway. In her 1950 book Story of Danville, Jane Hagan recounts briefly the foresight of this committee in the history of Averett when they “secured the school's present site of more than 15 acres, then little more than an unsightly washed-out gully and held it for the college until it was ready to build.”