Blandome is a historic hilltop home built circa 1830 and located overlooking the downtown area and within the city limits of Lexington, Virginia.

Preston's service in the Confederate States Army (including under fellow faculty member promoted to Gen. Stonewall Jackson, who died in 1863) and emancipation of his plantations' slaves (he owned property in several counties as well as Kentucky, and the non-slave states of Illinois and Indiana) caused financial troubles, Preston returned to teach at VMI.

[5] The Fullers appear to have lived in Blandome in the 1850s, and by 1850 operated a classical college preparatory school in Lexington, although contemporary advertisements contain no address.

[5] John Randolph and Laura Tucker acquired Blandome, gave it its name, as well as renovated it as the surrounding area developed.

Although sometimes given the honorific "Judge," Tucker, was like Preston a lawyer and Virginia's Attorney General during the American Civil War and active in support of the Confederate cause.

Immediately after the war, he practiced in Loudoun County as well as defended Confederate President Jefferson Davis, taught law at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and in 1869 became counsel for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

Tucker also continued his private legal practice (building a surviving outbuilding for use as his law office) and even served as president of the American Bar Association before his death in 1897.

[8] After several intervening owners (and a year after Laura Tucker's death), African American business leader Harry Lee Walker (1875-1941) acquired Blandome.

[9][10] Born in a cabin at the foot of the hill and with an initial trade as a butcher, Walker built a thriving business purveying meat to VMI, W&L, and various fraternities, and later expanded into seafood and groceries and also increased his wealth through real estate investments.

Their only son Harry Thomas (1897-1914) died young; their daughter Nannie Elizabeth (1900-1993) would marry Clarence M. Wood Sr. (1899-1957) who would become his father-in-law's business partner and successor.