They opened the first one with $250.

The year was 1954. The place: a former restaurant on Franklin Road. The money paid for rent and renovations.

It was called the Roanoke Fine Arts Center then, not the Taubman Museum of Art. And it was used mainly for art classes and studio space.

But for the first time, the museum-to-be, incorporated three years earlier in October 1951, had a home.

In half a century the museum has grown — often on a shoestring — from a kind of club for local art lovers to a regional museum collecting significant American art.

In recent years the museum’s collection has benefited greatly from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust, which has underwritten dozens of canvases by artists such as John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer. It received a major bequest of paintings and artifacts from a descendant of famed American painter Thomas Eakins in 2001.

Now it is opening a new $66 million building in the heart of downtown Roanoke.

A colorful history

It was Junius Blair Fishburn, board chairman of the First National Exchange Bank and the Times-World Corp., then-owners of The Roanoke Times and the Roanoke World-News, who got the ball rolling back in 1950.

Roanoke was ready. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond had moved part of its collection here for a one-week show at the Hotel Roanoke in 1948. A reported 5,000 people turned out. Thousands more came for a look at the museum’s collection of Faberge eggs two years later.

For a while there was talk of opening a branch of the Richmond museum in Roanoke. In the end, city leaders opted for an art center of their own.

The art center mounted occasional shows in the basement of the downtown library in the early days. Favorite sons Walter Biggs and Allen Ingles Palmer were two of the first artists featured. Board members and library staffers would pitch in to hang paintings, while the Junior League paid for a part-time hostess to welcome visitors.

In 1954, the fledgling art museum took another, perhaps more significant step: It opened its headquarters on Franklin Road. Dot Piedmont was secretary; Jim Yeatts was soon made director.

"It was just a beginning for us. It was not large," Piedmont recalled. By the end of the year, however, the center had received a gift; feed and grain dealer J. Meade Harris and his wife, Marleine, a painter, writer and teacher of Latin, donated a small building in South Roanoke. The building had once been the South Roanoke Baptist Church. It became the Roanoke Fine Arts Center in March 1955.

"One of the most significant events in the city’s cultural history," a newspaper account said. The church basement was used for art classes and studios, the upstairs for exhibitions.

The museum stayed there a decade, then moved to posher quarters at nearby Cherry Hill. Donated by Anne Funkhouser Francis to the Junior League and the Fine Arts Center and reopened in 1966, the 1925 mansion in South Roanoke had teak floors and a swirling staircase.

In 1983, seeking more room and a more central location, the museum moved again — this time to Center in the Square.

Growing pains

In the early days the museum made few purchases, choosing to stress temporary exhibitions and working studios over a permanent collection.

Its first major gift of artwork, a collection of Thomas Hart Benton prints, came in 1967, said the museum’s collections manager, Mary LaGue said. Three years later it received a donation of Mediterranean art.

"At a certain point, you have to say to yourself, ‘to collect or not collect,’ " LaGue said. "A museum has a permanent collection."

By the early 1980s, the museum was at a crossroads. It had begun to move away from its beginnings as a center for local artists and toward becoming a more professional museum. Some felt the museum was tied too closely to upscale South Roanoke and needed to be opened to the larger community.

David Goode, a former museum board president and ex-chairman of Norfolk Southern, recalled in 2001 that Cherry Hill was short on exhibition space and lacked climate control — important for the preservation of artworks.

"I think we all loved Cherry Hill," said Goode. But at Center in the Square, "it was clear there would be a lot more space available, and a downtown location offered the opportunity to grow the audience. We could bring in major shows and certainly up the whole status of the museum."

For Betty Carr Muse, a board member at the time, the moment of truth came at a Christmas party at which a black church choir had been invited to perform. The choir arrived late. They had been unable to find Cherry Hill.

"That was for me, and for others, a wake-up call," she said. "We really weren’t a museum for everyone."

"I wanted it to serve more than South Roanoke," recalled Peter Rippe, museum director through most of the 1980s. In 1983, the new downtown cultural complex, Center in the Square, seemed to offer a solution with its promise of rent-free space. Rippe wondered if the art center should build its own new building instead.

"I believed the museum possibly could have done better on its own," Rippe said. "In time I came to the conclusion, along with Warner Dalhouse and the godfathers of Center in the Square, that the future of the museum lay with Roanoke itself. I think the right move was made."

The deluge

Moving to Center in the Square wasn’t the only challenge Peter Rippe faced as director. On Nov. 4, 1985, flood waters rose so fast in Roanoke that some people were trapped on their roofs or swept from their vehicles. Ten people died.

"I can remember people floating by on bales of hay," Rippe said. "One lady floated by on a door."

The first of the museum’s two floors flooded. Though staffers were able to remove most of the artwork in time, a Shinto altar came to pieces and floated around, Rippe recalled. Several staffers, including Rippe, were trapped inside the building and spent the night there, cobbling together an evening meal from odds and ends in the museum’s tea shop and sleeping on packing blankets in the museum office.

The museum was closed several weeks while the downstairs carpet was replaced and other flood damage was repaired. The museum sustained about $30,000 in damage — most of which was paid by Center in the Square, Rippe said.

Rippe, who stayed nine years, is credited with helping to make the museum more professional and accessible. Rippe "brought the museum out of the dark ages," Christiansburg artist Ray Kass said bluntly in 1988, shortly after Rippe was asked to resign. Board members said at the time that Rippe had failed to propose a long-term vision for the museum. "Things weren’t happening," one said.

"I wanted the finest small regional collection in the country," is how Rippe recalled it in 2001. "The board wanted something more."

Rippe went on to direct the P. Buckley Moss Museum in Waynesboro, a job he said he enjoyed, and from which he is now retired.

"At the time, I was probably pretty bitter," he said of leaving Roanoke. "I don’t give it too much thought anymore."

Rippe was followed by Ruth Appelhof, who ran the museum from 1989-94 and went on to become the director of Guild Hall museum and theater on Long Island. In a 2001 interview, Appelhof said she tried to make the Roanoke museum serve the entire western part of the state on her watch. It was during Appelhof’s tenure that the museum adopted the name "Art Museum of Western Virginia." The museum also sharpened its focus on 19th- and 20th-century American art, with an emphasis on outsider or folk art, while wrestling with state budget cuts under the administration of Gov. Doug Wilder.

Appelhof’s departure, originally to run a museum in Minnesota, began a long period of instability in which three more directors and interim directors preceded Judy Larson, who became museum executive director in 1998.

Larson, who left four years later to direct the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., was a dynamo with a vision to put the museum on the art world map, though her abrupt management style contributed to a high staff turnover.

In June 2000, the museum announced plans to build a new museum. Most of the progress over the next several years took place behind the scenes.

"If it happens, and I hope it does," said a one-time museum curator, Ann Masters, in 2001, "it will be spectacular."