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Family Legacy Lives On
Text by Joanne M. Anderson Photos by Christy Wallace The Armentrout homestead in the New River Valley is a testament to the past, a model for present and ideal for the future. Preserving the legacy of his father and both of his grandfathers has been a driving force for Mark Armentrout and his wife, Karen, since moving in three years ago.
The Past Mark’s grandfather, Mark Kirby, after whom he is named, owned this land with his wife, Ruth, and owned the local pharmacy, Radford Drug. An avid horseman, Kirby had the white barn constructed in the 1940s for his beloved Tennessee Walker Horse named
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Naughty Anne. His daughter, Shirley, married Mark’s dad, Bill Armentrout, and they decided to build a house and raise their family here. Mark grew up in this place, the youngest of three boys, and attended Radford High School. In the pre-cell phone age of the 1980s, teens met one another cruising around Radford and Fairlawn and hanging out in the McDonald’s parking lot. It was on this incredibly unromantic chunk of asphalt that Mark met Karen, a Pulaski native who went to Pulaski High School. They married in 1993, and Mark moved out of his family’s house. When the couple purchased the property and moved back in with their
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three children in 2017, it had been 24 years since the one and only renovation. Back then, his parents installed two recessed skylights in a newly expanded living room and added an office area, pantry, new kitchen floor, a basement entrance, vinyl and aluminum soffits, leaf guard gutters and new roof. “The basic floor plan of the kitchen and dining area remained unchanged,” Karen relates. “As the most commonly used spaces, we decided to open it up and make some changes.”
The Renovation Calling in Interior Designer Edith-Anne Duncan was brilliant, as she
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