A history of real estate in Christiansburg.

Every deed in Montgomery County is recorded in Christiansburg, the county seat. The county’s clerk’s office of 1812 stood on the square; it was later absorbed into the Phlegar Building, which the county took down in 2020 to make room for a magistrates’ building.

The deed books carry the town’s real estate history in their own words. Deed Book 5, page 81, records the land given for the railroad depot north of town. A 1916 deed in Deed Book 65, page 563, calls a cottage on Zion Hill “our residence property.” The 1947 deed that turned Christiansburg Institute’s campus over to three public school divisions is in Deed Book 151, page 54.

The same chain of deeds is what a title search follows when a home changes hands today. The county’s online parcel map and real estate records are the place to start; the deeds themselves are recorded with the Clerk of the Circuit Court.

Between 1900 and 1910 the town’s population grew from 659 to 1,568, probably on the strength of industry near the railroad, and much of the new building went up between the town and Cambria. East Main Street, the old road to Salem on the hill northeast of the square, filled with houses on large lots with deep front yards: Queen Anne houses, one with a turret, Shingle Style and Colonial Revival houses, and simpler center-passage and T-plan houses on Park Street.

One East Main lot shows how the land was divided. The Oaks, a Queen Anne house built in 1893, sat on 4.58 acres in 1894. By 1903 the lot was 3.128 acres, and by 1920, 2.68. As the land shrank, its assessed value fell from $1,500 to $300 by 1941. By 1994, when the house was listed on the National Register, it stood on 1.2 acres and served as an inn; the rest of the land had been sold and developed.

The streets were rebuilt for the new houses. Retaining walls of stone and concrete along East Main appear to date from a street grading of the early 1900s, and in the 1920s a row of brick bungalows went up high above Pepper Street. On South Franklin Street the land beyond the mid-1800s Miller House was subdivided and built on gradually from the late 1800s into the mid-1900s; one house there, The Huts of 1919, is built of round rooms. In Cambria two matching bungalows were very likely ordered from a mail-order catalog in the 1910s, one of the ways the railroad brought precut houses within reach.

Utilities followed. The fire insurance maps of 1885 called the town’s water supply not good. By May 1921 the town owned a gravity water system, installed in March 1912 and fed by springs, which also served Cambria; its main streets were macadamized and its public lights were electric.

Then the road moved. When a new route of the Lee Highway bypassed East Main Street, the National Register nomination records, the street became a quiet backwater.

Between 1940 and 1960 the town’s population grew from 2,299 to 3,653. Then the town grew outward. In the 1960s it annexed parts of the surrounding Riner and Shawsville districts and consolidated with the Town of Cambria, and by 1970 more than half of its 7,857 people lived in areas added since 1960. In 1975 it annexed another 3.03 square miles, adding 1,072 people.

The town also had a say over land it did not yet govern. From 1961 its subdivision rules applied within two miles of its limits: no private streets, connection to town water and sewer where they were available, fire hydrants where water lines ran, and town street standards. By 1986 those rules covered all of the land the town next proposed to annex.

Sewer drew the next line. In 1986 the town asked to annex 7.96 more square miles, land that held about 13 subdivisions, a shopping mall under construction, an idle glass plant and a good deal of farmland. In one part of Belmont Estates, a county study had found in 1980 that 22 of 23 lots platted in 1977 had soils that would not take a septic system, and the county’s wastewater study named Belmont Estates and Belmont Farms among the six areas in Montgomery County most in need of sewer lines. The state’s Commission on Local Government recommended a somewhat smaller annexation in 1987, and the Town planned to extend sewer to those subdivisions within three years.

Much of today’s town was farmland within living memory, and the names say so. Belmont Farms came into the town limits in 1988, Spradlin Farms began to be developed for shopping in 2000, and the former Harkrader Farm came in with a boundary adjustment in 2009, all by the Town’s account; in 2013 the town bought the 63 acres of farmland that became Huckleberry Park.

The records show the order in which the town filled in. Grouped by the decade in which most of their homes on record went up:

• 1940s: Lee Hy Court and Victory Heights.
• 1950s: Roseland Heights, Lynwood Terrace, Highview Terrace, Beverly Hills and Sullivan Heights.
• 1960s: Suburban Hills, Oakwood, Huff Acres and Belmont Farms.
• 1970s: Rolling Hills, Viewland, Lester Place, Cumberland Forest, Echo Hills and Blue Ridge Court.
• 1980s: Franklin Parke, Falling Branch Townhouses, Hans Meadow, Harman Forest, Country Meadow Estates, Atkinson Acres, Henley Place and Sleepy Hollow and 3 more.
• 1990s: Pepper Street Townhomes, Ridinger Acres, Wheatland Hills, Kamran Drive, Grand View Estates, Arrowhead Estates, Ridgeway Farms Estates and Warren Heights and 6 more.
• 2000s: Diamond Hill South, Stafford Farm, Cornerstone Townhomes, Charleston Place, Huff Heritage, New River Village, Hunters Ridge and Overlook Court and 14 more.
• 2010s: Robin Hood Estates, Senneca Springs, Sturgill Estates, Kensington and Cambria Crossing.
• 2020s: The Meadows, Clifton and Reagan's Pointe.

These groups count only homes that have been listed or sold since 2005, and a neighborhood appears only where one decade holds most of its homes. Each neighborhood page has the full count, decade by decade, under How it was built.

The homes standing today tell the same story. Of about 11,271 homes in town, the Census estimates 1,803 were built in the 1990s and 1,793 in the 2000s, more than any other decades.

Most of Christiansburg’s homes are lived in by their owners, though a smaller share than a generation ago. In 1990, 67.5% of occupied homes in town were owner-occupied; the Census estimates 59.8% for 2020 to 2024, 6,131 of 10,253. The town counted 10,715 homes in the 2020 Census, up from 6,267 in 1990.

Four historic districts carry the town’s oldest buildings. The East Main Street, South Franklin Street and Cambria districts were listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register in 1989 and the National Register of Historic Places in 1991; the Downtown Historic District followed in 2013. Listing brings recognition, not local rules: the Town has no historic review board and no added design regulations for its districts.

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