Page 15 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

hotel, depot, and machine shops. Residents expected them to pick spots in town and were
surprised when Kimball, dressed in his usual “dandy” attire of checkered suit and scarf with
jeweled stickpin, investigated only cow pastures and wheat fields to the east of the village.

When the company offered Henry Trout $20,000 for a portion of his farm about a half-mile to
the northeast of Big Lick, and shortly after they closed the deal, Trout learned that the
railroad planned to locate some of its facilities there. When local merchants found out, he
recalled, they sent him to “see Mr. Kimball and ask him not to put the hotel and depot down
there, as we were afraid it would draw trade off of Franklin Road.” The near-sighted and
self-serving attitude of Roanoke’s elite almost cost them the deal right away. Luckily they
took their message to Kimball, a reasonable man who wisely did not convey those wishes to
Philadelphia.

As to the deal to make Roanoke the choice as the railroad’s headquarters, nothing was
actually further from the ultimate plans of Clark and Company. While Big Lick’s “cash bonus”
and tax incentives had solidified the deal in the minds of the towns’ people . the N&W had a
different set of plans.

For starters, the town had some very serious infrastructure problems. The village’s dirt and
mud streets were haphazardly laid out, and beyond a few dry goods stores, tobacco
factories, and hotels, the place consisted of only a drugstore, blacksmith shop, and saloon
operated by “a colored man.”

The facts were that most of Big Lick existed amid bogs, cesspools, and polluted streams.
The facts had a serious consequence. There were widespread rumors that the town was rife
with typhoid, scarlet fever, smallpox, and a fictitious malady known as “Big Lick Fever.”
Symptoms of the Big Lick contagion, a University of Virginia physician claimed in the 1850s,
were the “sudden onset of considerable malaise, aching, chills, fever and prostration.” A
spate of recent hearsay, given credence in regional newspapers, led readers to believe that
the mythical fever had erupted again among those living near the licks.

Gossip about real ailments was worse. In January 1883, for example, newspapers
throughout the state reported erroneously that smallpox was devastating Roanoke. Hoping
to put an end to the story, newly appointed Mayor Lucian Cocke issued a press notice for
“the information of parties who are unacquainted with the facts and may be influenced by
rumors.” Doctors, he certified, had vaccinated all residents and there had been no smallpox
in town.

The Roanoke Saturday News, owned and edited by longtime resident Rush U. Derr, helped
foster localism by publishing inflammatory rumors and attacking natives he believed had
become pawns of the Clark company. In May 1882, for example, his paper reported that
“Upon unquestionable authority we are informed that employees of the Shenandoah Valley
Railway openly boast that the officials of that company and of the Roanoke Land and
Improvement company are abiding their time and holding their views in abeyance, as it were,
‘waiting until the works get in full operation and the Yankee boys will then run the town.’” This
scheme, Derr pointed out, was a matter of tremendous concern to “those who were born on