Page 19 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

In the meantime, financial support came solely from residential and commercial
property taxes of fifty cents per hundred dollars of assessed value. Council did what it
could, spending the little revenue it collected on far more basic and inexpensive
improvements. Unable to afford gas lighting or proper drainage, it approved funding
for additional lampposts and kerosene lanterns along with plank sidewalks and stone
curbing. The new lamps, one resident reported, even made Church Avenue look
“quite citified.” Crossing the street, however, was a different matter – residents
continued to use stepping-stones to avoid losing their shoes in the sucking mud.

The New York Times claimed that Roanoke’s industries were perfectly positioned to
exploit the state’s coal deposits and return Virginia “to something like its old position
in the Union.” The town, its correspondent reported, “has been built up by the
Shenandoah Valley Road as a kind of Altoona or machine shop village. It has also
attracted other manufacturers and mining companies until the town lots have risen in
the last few years in the proportion of ten to one.”

In dispatches to the Hartford Courant, local-color writer Charles Dudley Warner
described the city as “a vast real estate, railway, and mineral speculation.” From the
summit of Mill Mountain, he told readers back in New England, the town appeared to
be rising from nowhere: “The noise of hammer and hauling filled the air; streets of
temporary wooden shops and dwellings, drinking shops and ‘hotels’ with false board
fronts hiding the upper half stories, and big letter signs, after the manner of the West,
isolated dwellings on every hill and knoll, everywhere the debris of building and
ditching and road-making.”

Travel writer Thomas J. Clayton followed Warner, arriving in town as the guest of the
superintendent of the Crozer Iron and Steel plant a few months later. Clayton came to
hunt quail in the mountains nearby but took time for a tour, afterwards reporting that
the Iron Works, which he believed resembled a plant in Chester, Pennsylvania, was
the town’s “greatest industrial establishment.” The place was altogether a “thriving
town” of roughly six-thousand residents. “I prophesy for Roanoke,” he concluded, “a
successful future.”

A writer from the Pennsylvania-based American Volunteer also found the place “a
true type western town, grown up almost in a night, you might say.” Salem Avenue,
with its dozens of “irregularly built” businesses, was the town’s main street, the
correspondent reported, adding that the entire road had “a good-sized stream of
water” running across it. What was more appalling, the place had taxes enough to
support only one school while “the saloons, which exist at every step, are well
patronized.”

Even an anonymous “Old Virginian” depicted Roanoke as “a queer place” that “might
be likened to a great gypsy camp, with roughly constructed homes for tents.” If this
was progress, he went on, then the Old Dominion was in trouble: “The people looked
like they had just got there and did not know whether to stay or not. The ungraded
and treeless streets looked like a settlement of sappers and miners upset by an
earthquake.”