Little Jerusalem updated January 14, 2024
We were driving down Maryland Avenue in Shenandoah on January 13, 2024 and saw that Little Jerusalem had a train coming out of its wall and was decorated with Christmas lights!
This same day we were looking through some old newspaper articles in the History room of the Shenandoah Welcome Center and Museum when we found an article about Little Jerusalem that we had not seen before. We have attached photos of this article and below is the text that is included in the photos.
Landmark In Shenandoah Succumbs to Progress
A landmark and “mysterious” looking structure on Shenandoah’s Maryland Avenue fell victim to the times this week when a crew cleaned out and leveled most of “Little Jerusalem.” The old concrete and steel structure was begun in 1905 and was influenced by the visit of its builder, David F. Roudabush, to Mexico. David, a 19-year-old mill hand, moved to the community of Shenandoah in 1885. With money he had saved, along with a small inheritance, he bought and operated a dry goods store on Main Street. After getting settled he returned to Staunton, where he last worked and married his 16-year-old love. The couple moved into an apartment above his store, and in these quarters, Ruth the first of four Roudabush children was born. Ruth is now Mrs. Ruth Mills who resides at 415 Fifth Street.
Business went well for the new shopkeeper, and he soon began to dream of better things. About 1894 the small family moved into a large double house on Third Street. In 1900 he risked everything he owned and built a large six story mill in the north part of Shenandoah. His business prospered the first year, but in the fall of 1902 disaster struck. A rainy season dampened the wheat crop that year and the grain was brought to the Roudabush mill. It was purchased and stored in the mill’s bins-where it rotted. The mill went bankrupt.
Following the suggestions of a brother, David Roudabush left his family and went West for a year and worked as a mill hand in Oklahoma, Arizona, Oregon and Colorado. He then returned to his family in the Shenandoah Valley and once again opened up a smaller mill. At the same time he decided to put some of the land he had accumulated in Shenandoah to use and planted fields of strawberries and peach trees. He like the land and in 1905 he gave up the mill and turned his full attention to his farm. It was then that that he built a cottage and, perhaps inspired by a trip to Mexico, his cottage grew into arches and concrete buildings. He died in 1955, still short of this goal.
“I never saw as much concrete as he put into his works, recalls Mrs. Mills. “He used almost pure concrete to get everything white like marble. People burned over the place so many times now that you couldn’t see it. Everything had iron in it. Several cars ran into the arches and never even marked them.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the property was the small two story house which overlooked the rest of the land. A small balcony jutted from the building. “He used to sit there to watch his strawberries across the road,” said Mrs. Mills. “He used to have a lot of trouble with thieves. People always seemed to think he was rich. He had some bad luck buy didn’t mind. He put all his money for years in the hands of a lawyer to be deposited in a Harrisonburg bank. Before he died he checked and every last cent was gone.”
Bedside the ruins of the two-story house are the foundations of a large house which was to be the main structure. The rest was just decoration. A tremendous amount of brick had to be gathered for the house but was taken by thieves, and the house was never built.
So today, after the bulldozers are through, all that remains standing is the ornate concrete wall fronting on Maryland Avenue. Joseph Mills, who overlooked the removal and leveling work, isn’t sure about the future of the remaining wall, but it seems possible that it might stay. Maybe as a monument to a man’s dream.
This article was published in the Valley Banner Newspaper, Elkton Virginia on May 16, 1974.
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We all have driven past Little Jerusalem, and wondered who built this unique cement structure.
It’s located on Maryland Avenue (Rt. 602) between 10th & 11th Street, a short distance from the
former Letter Perfect building at corner of Maryland Avenue and 10th Street.
From the article in the book SHENANDOAH A History of Our Town And Its People we learned
that David Fenton Roudabush designed and built what we now refer to as "Little Jerusalem".
The larger structure that was torn down was to have been a stable and storage area with an
apartment in the second story.
If you have more information on the history of this structure, please let us know.
From Find a Grave website we found the following:
1891 - married Clara Virginia Strole, in Page County, Virginia.
June, 1898 - Secretary of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, Shenandoah, Va. when it filed, on the first Sunday in June, 1898, to sever connection with the Tennessee Synod.
July 29, 1900 - Elected superintendent of St. Paul Lutheran Church's newly established Sunday School.
Oct., 1905 - traveled to Philadelphia to purchase equipment for his wooden Shenandoah Milling Company. Originally built as a water-powered grist mill, it only produced 30 barrels per day. The mill burned in 1925.
Remembered also for his building of the place known as "Little Jerusalem", in Shenandoah, where he later resided.
"This imaginative architectural folly was a project of David F. "Fent" Roudabush, one of the Shenandoah area's more colorful figures in the early twentieth century. About 1910, Roudabush began construction of the county's most unusual architectural creation. Named Jerusalem by neighbors, the structure consists of a series of reinforced-concrete arches and aedicules forming a wall along Maryland Avenue. Jerusalem's influences are unidentifiable, perhaps Mayan, Moorish, or early Hollywood movie set. When not engaged in his construction projects, Roudabush operated a profitable nursery and strawberry truck farm on the property."
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31538922/david-fenton-roudabush
Obituary found in Harrisonburg Daily News Record Apr 15, 1955.
