The story below is from our March/April 2020 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!
Some 40 families lived in the cove before it became a reservoir in the mid-1940s.
The existence of the small community of Carvins Cove came to an official end on February 14, 1944. On that day, Roanoke city manager Williams P. Hunter authorized an auction of all remaining buildings in the village. Five structures were sold, including two homes, for a total of $629 with the understanding that the winning bidders would salvage what they could before the cove began filling as a reservoir.
The auction was the culmination of a multi-year process by which the city acquired properties through negotiation or condemnation to create what is today one of the main reservoirs and recreation areas in the Roanoke Valley.
Unknown by many who now enjoy the cove’s beauty is that before the reservoir there existed a once-thriving, rural village with farms, homes, a church, a school, a cannery and orchards.
Named for William Carvin who settled the area in 1746, the cove’s natural beauty and fertile land bisected by Carvins Creek provided an idyllic life for some 40 families who lived there before the reservoir.
Ernest Riley’s cannery began operating in 1915, using the “Carvins Cove Brand” label for the tomatoes and green beans. Riley’s cannery annually produced 3,000 to 5,000 cases of tomatoes and a couple thousand cases of green beans. One year the operation canned apples. Riley hired annually about a dozen teenagers from the cove who peeled tomatoes and stringed the beans often under the apple trees near his cannery.
Cove Alum Baptist Church, established in the 1890s, was the center of the community’s religious life. Served by Rev. George Braxton Taylor of Hollins College and Enon Baptist Church for over 30 years, the church held a mid-afternoon worship service the first Sunday of every month and twice a month during the summer. Baptisms were in Carvins Creek, and funds to support the church often came from ice cream suppers and bake sales.
The two-room schoolhouse, sided in white clap-board, accommodated students through the seventh grade. Like the Baptist church, the schoolhouse occupied a central place in the life of the cove.
The students would cut a cedar each Christmas, decorate it, and then perform the school’s annual Christmas play from a make-shift stage. After singing carols, the students and teachers would exchange gifts, with each student getting candy and an orange. On the school grounds were the cove’s annual Easter egg hunt and a costume party for Halloween. The teachers boarded with local families.
Among the homes in the cove was “Kerncliffe,” the summer residence of United States Senator John Kern of Indiana. Kern’s home was his and his family’s retreat from Washington, and many notable guests visited, including Vice-president Thomas Marshall and his wife. Marshall served with President Woodrow Wilson and on his visit to Kern in 1914, Kern taught the men’s Bible class at Cove Alum Church.
So enamored was Kern with the beauty of Carvins Cove that upon his death he was interred on Kerncliffe’s grounds. In 1929, his body was removed to his home state of Indiana, and Kerncliffe was later razed for the reservoir.
Beginning in the late 1920s and through the early 1940s, the city gradually acquired the farms, homes, school and church in preparation for transforming the cove into a basin for the reservoir. By the time of the auction in 1944, most of the families that had lived in the cove for generations had moved. The various buildings dotting the cove had been stripped and the materials used for residences and garages in the city.
The late Mary Louise Riley Harmon, who had grown up in the cove, recalled in 1986 her family’s moving day.
“December 1942 meant leaving Carvins Cove, the valley where I was born and spent my childhood years. Leaving the mountains that surround our valley, leaving my church…leaving the creek I was baptized in. I have memories of playing in the creek, wading, seeing those little sun perch and oftentimes just sitting and watching the little tadpoles. This meant leaving the school I attended, leaving the place where I had both sad and happy memories. But one thing in leaving this valley – I can still have those memories that I cherish.”
Harmon moved with her mother and sister to a house on Williamson Road.
During the latter part of World War II, German prisoners of war cleared the cove of trees and whatever else remained. In the summer of 1945 the gate for the reservoir dam was closed and 323 days later on May 17, 1946, water went over the dam’s spillway. Submerged forever was the small community of Carvins Cove.
Today, the reservoir at Carvins Cove (the city took out the apostrophe in 1947) provides 10 million gallons of water per day to the region and is located in a 12,600-acre natural preserve with an assortment of outdoor recreation amenities. Those who kayak, canoe or look across the lake today probably have no idea of what once lied beneath.
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