Page 25 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

took off. Ferdinand Rorer, owner of a huge tract of farmland in the northwest section of town,
laid out streets on the property and began advertising “2,500 Town Lots For Sale!”

Peyton Terry also went into the real estate business, and by early fall had “Twelve newly
built, nicely furnished, and well arranged houses, with eight to ten rooms each” for sale
along with fifty “choice building lots” near the RL&IC’s newly completed Jefferson Street.
“Several of our best citizens have already located there,” he bragged, “and the
neighborhood promises to be most agreeable.”

What “improvements” did take place were largely the result of the RL&IC, and they did not
come easily. Transforming “a tract of farming land into a busy city,” company president J. B.
Austin reported, was made even more difficult “in a district remote from suitable supplies,
destitute of skilled labor, and with an aggregated pressure of demand altogether
unprecedented in this section of the county.” Nevertheless, in 1882 alone, Austin’s company
built one hundred and twenty-eight frame and brick dwellings in the Northeast and would
have erected sixty-two more had it been able to find enough construction workers.

These nearly identical, two-story homes were but the first allotment of rental houses needed
for the one thousand laborers that the machine shops would soon employ. The demand for
dwellings, Austin told investors, “is constant, even in advance of the incoming mechanics
soon to be employed by the Roanoke Machine Works.”

Anticipating at least a few African Americans to be included in that total, the firm hired local
builder Julius G. Holmes “to erect eight houses for colored people” at $350 a piece,
specifying that the homes be constructed all “in one row.”

In what had been Peyton Terry’s hilltop orchard – to the south of his former estate
Elmwood – the Improvement Company started construction on a number of massive Queen
Anne style homes for high-ranking railroad officials. These “villa residences,” one paper
argued, were proof that “our new residents have decided to stay, as they feel assured of the
future prosperity of Roanoke.”

Formerly known as “Orchard Hill” before the grand house constructioin began, in early 1884,
after a colony of executives moved in, locals renamed the spot “Officials’ Hill.” The company
also finished seventeen-thousand feet of streets, four-thousand feet of “plank side-walks,”
and, to eliminate “a possible cause of unhealthfulness,” it straightened and deepened the
channel of Lick Run meandering through its land.

J. B. Austin finalized plans to construct a road up Mill Mountain, and after installing pumps
and two miles of piping, the company began offering “its” side of town with water from the
spring at the base of that peak.

All in all, one local paper observed, the Improvement Company was responsible for “an
astonishing metamorphosis.” “The fields where husbandmen toiled and herds grazed,” it
explained, “are now broad-graded streets and rows of substantial pretty homes. Hills have