Almost unseen, hidden behind trees and dwarfed by the Hancock Welcome Center nearby, sits what is now known as Montview Mansion.  Once owned by Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, the mansion was the most prominent building sitting on the land of what is now the campus property of Liberty University before it was acquired by the Rev. Jerry Falwell.  The history of the property before it was a part of Liberty University (formerly Lynchburg Baptist College) is mostly the history of Montview.  Today, Montview simply refers to the mansion itself, as it is the only original building still standing.  But almost fifty years ago, Montview was the well-known name for the farm property that it sat on.  

Acquired by Carter Glass in the early 1900s, Montview was a dairy farm located in Campbell County, VA.  It consisted of the mansion, several outhouses, barns, sheds, an inground swimming pool (installed at the insistence of Senator Glass) and a couple hundred acres of rolling fields for cattle grazing.  Even though he still held a Congressional office, he spent the last few years of his life at Montview because of chronic illness and died in 1946.  In his will, he named his four children as the executors of his estate. 

In 1947, his two children, Carter Glass, Jr. and Mary Archer (Glass) Boatright, sold the Montview farm to A. N. Campbell.  No personal information was found on Mr. Campbell, except that he bought the property in 1947, died in 1950, and named the Peoples' National Bank and Trust Co. of Lynchburg as the executor of the estate.  In the county records at the Campbell County courthouse, no deed was found in which Montview was sold to a new owner by the Bank and Trust Co., only a plat of the property which matches an earlier plat drawn in accordance with the deed that transferred ownership of the property to A. N. Campbell.  

After A.N. Campbell, the ownership of the property becomes difficult to trace.  In preliminary searches, it seems that the Bank and Trust Co. divided the property into eight separate parcels and sold the parcels to different parties.  This would have been very difficult to trace, and so no further research was conducted into the Montview property.  

If we bridge the gap between 1950 when A. N. Campbell died, we come to 1971, the year in which we know some or all of the Montview property was purchased for the start of Jerry Falwell's school, Lynchburg Baptist College. 

What should be mentioned is that the land that Montview was located on was part of Campbell County when it was acquired by the school. Before 1976, most of the land that is now University property was in Campbell County, but in 1976, there was a large annexation to the City of Lynchburg, which included Montview and the surrounding land that the school owned.  Today, the majority of the main campus property is in the City of Lynchburg, but part of Candler's Mountain, including parts that Liberty owns, is still in Campbell County.