A history of real estate in Blacksburg.

The college that opened in 1872 needed places for students to live. Lybrook’s Row, built about 1870, housed early students and was known as “Hell’s Row.” In the early 1920s downtown was rebuilt with brick commercial buildings two and three stories tall, with apartments upstairs.

New Town grew lot by lot. In 1874 Gilbert Vaughn, who had been enslaved, bought a half-acre plot and became the neighborhood’s first Black landowner. An 1884 deed conveyed another half-acre “near the town of Blacksburg” in “what is known as ‘New or Clapboard town.’”

After 1900 new residential areas grew north of campus along the Peppers Ferry Road, on Bitter Hill at the northeast edge of the old town, and along Progress Street south of campus.

The biggest venture of the period came south of downtown, on a farm known as Fiddlers Green. John Black had given it to his son Alexander in the 1820s. In 1913 the Southside Land Company, made up of A. W. Miller, F. W. Ehart, J. L. Eakin, M. F. Slusser and J. G. Price, bought the land along the south side of South Main Street and laid out an addition. Its side streets were named for the developers: Miller, Ehart, Eakin, Price and Slusser.

In 1919 A. Warren Miller and his sister, Juanita Miller Rucker, laid out the Miller Addition to the west, served by an extension of Water Street (now Draper Road) and Preston Avenue. J. L. Eakin laid out lots along the south side of what is now Airport Road the same year. Together the additions held about 125 lots, each 50 feet wide, and many buyers bought two lots and combined them.

The houses that followed were Foursquares, bungalows, and Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival homes in brick, frame and stone, many with garages built to match. One early Foursquare on South Main Street was bought from Sears, Roebuck around 1915. Its National Register nomination counts 138 houses and calls it Montgomery County’s largest and most complete suburb of 1909 to 1941. Today it is the Miller Southside neighborhood.

Blacksburg has long been a town of more renters than owners. In 1990, 31.6% of occupied homes in town were owner-occupied. The Census estimates 35.8% for 2020 to 2024: 4,955 of 13,840 occupied homes. The town counted 16,208 homes in the 2020 Census, up from 11,857 in 1990.

The rules took their current shape in these years. The Blacksburg and Miller-Southside historic districts were listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1989 and the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. The Town’s current zoning ordinance, Ordinance 1137, and its official zoning map date to 1997.

Some of the newest homes fill in rather than spread out. Midtown brought townhomes to the old Blacksburg Middle School site; its builder was announced in 2019. In 2024 the Town proposed a small-lot option for its R-4 residential district that would allow 3,000-square-foot lots, where the minimum had been 10,000 square feet, about a quarter acre.

See what's coming to Blacksburg: new development and projects in the works, and follow what Town Council is deciding.