Blanche Ruble: Home and Children

All three of Blanche Nace Ruble's children—Howard Lawrence, Sulmana Alene, and William Raymond—went by their middle names. When the children were growing up, they lived in four different houses in the Rugby section of northwest Roanoke: 1105 Melrose Avenue (where Alene and Raymnd were born), 1005 Hanover Avenue, Staunton Avenue, and 1201 Watts Avenue. I don't know which was their first house—the one on Hanover or the one on Staunton.

I'm guessing the house in the first two pictures below was on Hanover.

Blanche with Lawrence, Alene, & baby Raymond

Blanche with toddler Raymond and Lawrence

Raymond on Hanover Avenue

Here's a photo of where they lived on Staunton Avenue. . .

. . . and here's the house on Watts Avenue that Grandaddy—Howard R. Ruble—had built sometime in the 1920s.

Below is the view from the back yard in 1931. I can remember looking out Grandma's kitchen window and seeing the Watts farm and Round Top (now called Round Hill) in the distance. The house pictured here belonged to a Mr. and Mrs. Bishop; trees blocked the view of the Bishop house by the time I looked out the window. When I was little, development hadn't yet started on Round Hill. Now it's covered with houses and I-581 runs thorough what used to be the Watts farm. Valley View Mall would now be visible, too.

I'm pretty sure the 1927 photo below was taken at the Watts Avenue home. (The fence was long gone by the time I was born.) My mother (Alene) would have been 14 and Lawrence would have been 17.

July 3, 1927

Grandma always had flowers at the side of the house on Watts Avenue. I remember seeing her water them with her leftover wash water in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

September 1930

She kept chickens below the house.

She also grew a large garden and did a lot of canning. This is her corn patch in 1932. She always wore a straw hat when she worked in her garden.

Grandma rode the bus to the city market a couple of times a week to buy meat and fresh produce (when it wasn't available from her large garden). In the 1948 photo below, she was on her way to the market. She always wore a hat and white gloves when she went to town.

Blanche Ruble: 1948 on Campbell Avenue, Roanoke

In the mid-1950s, my grandparents moved to a house on an acre lot in the Mount Pleasant section of Roanoke County. By the 1960s, they were back in Roanoke in a small house on Palm Avenue.

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