Page 27 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

New information about the history of Roanoke
Big Lick to Roanoke from 1874-Part Seven A

Roanoke and railroads Railroads and roanoke

By Richard Mundy
Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

ROANOKE AND THE RAILROAD(S)
A MARRIAGE MADE IN COMMERCE HEAVEN

Background…
Railroads and coal and Big Lick (later Roanoke VA)

Although now Roanoke VA is a prosperous, multi-faceted city with nearly 100,000
inhabitants and a myriad of industries and services, it was not always so. It was the
railroads that created the Roanoke we now enjoy, and the railroads that sustained
it through the difficult years. And in my opinion, it was Roanoke that created the
Railroad(s), or most certainly the ones that found Roanoke as its major hub for
many years.

Railroads and Roanoke are synonymous, and have been “striding the boards”
together now for many years. Together they reshaped the significance of rail
transportation, Roanoke, and the New South.

Throughout history, great strides forward have been accomplished with the
emergence of a few key discoveries, inventions and serendipitous creations.
These are my suggestions as to the most important such events. They include fire,
the wheel, language/writing, electricity, the steam engine, penicillin, computers
and the internet. Humankind is now at the cusp of additional such advances that
will shape the future in entirely new directions.

One of the abiding tenets of the human condition is travel. Made necessary as a
hunter-gatherer society in the never ending search for food, our ancestors roamed
our known territory in order to live. The thinning of the herds due to over hunting
made it necessary for us to develop other means to ensure our survival. Thus we
turned to agriculture and animal husbandry.

But we still traveled, exploring all the territory available to us, as evidenced in the
urge to discover new lands, expand our horizons, even venturing into outer space.
And as a by-product of the need to travel, that factor created the need for
transporting the goods we needed to survive. Primitive methods were developed
and used for millennium that culminated in the Conestoga Wagon - a behemoth of
a wagon that required multiple cartage animals to pull them, as they conveyed tons
of goods at a time.