Photos by JUSTIN COOK The Roanoke Times

Visitors walk along a dirt access road in the Oscar Jennings and Evelyn Lilly Blake Preserve.

Evelyn Blake greets guests at the dedication of her land as the Oscar Jennings and Evelyn Lilly Blake Preserve.

| Katelyn Polantz

katelyn.polantz@roanoke.com, 381-1669

Evelyn Blake, 89, had dreamed of owning this property.

The lush Montgomery County forest -- with its bubbling Mill Creek, untouched trees, dense undergrowth and a few cabins about six miles north of Blacksburg -- drew her and a friend for an escape from undergraduate studies at Virginia Tech in the 1940s.

Blake said she fell in love with the place.

Over the years, Blake and her late husband, Oscar, acquired the 222 acres of forest, mowing the grass around the cabins and protecting it from development.

This year, the Daleville woman donated her property to the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental conservation group. Jason Boyle, who lives nearby with his wife and four children, bought 5 acres surrounding the property's largest cabin and granted an easement to the conservancy. The conservancy will manage the property with the state Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Renamed the Oscar Jennings and Evelyn Lilly Blake Preserve, the Nature Conservancy preserve becomes one of six in the Roanoke region.

"We bought it for peanuts," Blake said at the dedication ceremony Thursday. "We weren't expecting [to get] old. Now I'm working on it."

Before a piece of the property was sold to Boyle, the property was worth $226,200, according to the most-recent county assessment.

Blake will turn 90 next week, and the ceremony was part dedication, part celebration. The crowd of about 40 beneath a tent in the preserve's meadow sang "Happy Birthday" to Blake.

But the birthday of the rocks beneath the ground on which they stood thrilled them even more.

The rocks are almost 400 million years old, formed when a tectonic-plate collision mounded the land into the Appalachian Mountain range that sprawls down the East Coast.

The land is a preservationist's dream of rare soil types, creatures, trees and other plants.

Beneath the ground, limestone rocks that were once an ocean bed formed the foundation for the forest.

Its ancient soil over time has broken into rich soil that now anchors century-old trees and plants. An ice age, which ruined much of this soil north of the commonwealth, didn't strip Virginia's ground bare of nutrients.

"We've had such a long time of that soil-building process, we have a lot of diversity of soil, which leads to plant diversity," said Tim SanJule, a preserve steward with the Nature Conservancy. "But the soil that grows the biggest trees also grows the best corn."

Areas like this nature preserve -- called a calcareous forest because of the limestone -- have largely been destroyed with the rise of agriculture. Only 5 percent of original calcareous forests such as this still exist in Virginia, said Jon Schwedler, Nature Conservancy spokesman.

The rich soil and forest in this area now plays home to what Wil Orndorff, karst protection coordinator for the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, calls "special critters."

Acidic mountain streams running across the soft limestone rock have worn extensive caves into the mountainsides. Those "critters" love these caves.

Small crustacean cousins of freshwater shrimp, called isopods and amphipods, live in the rich muddy stream beds inside the caves.

They have evolved into species found nowhere but here, odd but useful invertebrates with no eyes and no pigment because of the constant darkness. Similarly blind cave beetles, named pseudanophthalmus pusio, also populate the preserve.

Even the Ellett Valley cave millipede, an insect protected by the state, might exist on the property, Orndorff said. He hasn't found the bug here yet, he added.

The biodiversity inside the caves helps keep clean the stream, and any drinking water that comes from it downriver, Orndorff said. The property's waters feed into the Roanoke River.

The property also is a playground for bears, snakes, turkeys and pheasants, Blake said.

The Blake Preserve has no hiking trails and one dirt access road for the cabins. The preserve is closed to the public, though visitors may call the Nature Conservancy at (434) 295-6106 for visiting permission.