Fendall Avenue home now on Virginia Landmark Register

A 20th century architect who restored Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg also built homes in the Charlottesville in which he lived. One of Milton Grigg’s residential structures has now been added to the Virginia Landmarks Register.

The two-story Colonial Revival home at 1817 Fendall Avenue is known as the James Minor House for the lawyer for whom it was built around 1937.

“The house retains its integrity of Milton Grigg’s design as it appears as originally constructed with the exception of a rear sunroom added in 1981,” reads the registration form for the structure to be on the National Register of Historic Places. That same document is used by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

Grigg died in 1982 and his firm had overseen creation of that sunroom. He was born in 1905 in Alexandria and attended the University of Virginia but never completed his degree and left in 1929 to work for Colonial Williamsburg where he worked for four years on restoration before returning to Charlottesville where he won a first prize medal in a Better Homes in America contest sponsored by President Franklin Roosevelt based on a design of another house in Charlottesville known as the Everard Meade house.

The James Minor house was built in the early days of the neighborhood and in the early days of Grigg’s career.

“As an architect with significant experience restoring Colonial-era structures, Milton Grigg went to great lengths to replicate historic woodwork details, including molding, fireplace mantels, doors and surrounds, and built-in cupboards and shelving.” the form continues. “As the Minor House retains many, if not all, of these elements, the integrity of the original workmanship is intact.”

Minor was an attorney who had helped draft the Virginia State Constitution of 1902 and was also the founder of an insurance firm in Charlottesville.

The Virginia Board of Historic Resources voted to designate the house on its list at their meeting on December 12. Hat-tip to CBS19 for writing the first story about this locally.

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