Page 29 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

attainable with animal-powered conveyances.

As to the early rail lines that chose Roanoke as its home, they included one of the
earliest commercially viable railroads, the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad (V&T).
They ran tracks between Lynchburg and Bristol. And by the 1850s, Big Lick
became a stop on this line. The reasoning for raile lines choosing “Big Lick”, as
Roanoke sas than known, ws that it had for years been a point through which
travelers came down from the north heading south. Several Great Wagon Trails,
as they were called, traveled through Big Lick. So it was a natural point through
which subsequent rail lines would pass.

After the American Civil War (1861–1865), William Mahone, a civil engineer and
hero of the Battle of the Crater, was the driving force in the linkage of 3 additional
railroads, including the V&T, across the southern tier of Virginia to form the Atlantic,
Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O), a new line extending from Norfolk to Bristol,
Virginia in 1870. However, the Financial Panic of 1873 wrecked the AM&O's
finances. After several years of operating under receivership, Mahone's role as a
railroad builder ended in 1881 when northern financial interests took control of his
line.

This is the point in this narrative that fate steps in and creates the atmosphere and
synergistic opportunities that started the ball rolling toward the formation of the
partnership that was Roanoke and Railroads. Other rail lines and most of all the
N&W jumped on the band-wagon and chose to go with what was an almost
automatic choice in picking the already hub of travelers that was The Big Lick..

At the foreclosure auction, the AM&O was purchased by E.W. Clark & Co., a
private banking firm in Philadelphia (with deep financial resources) which
controlled the Shenandoah Valley Railroad then under construction up the valley
from Hagerstown, Maryland. The AM&O was renamed Norfolk and Western
Railway (N&W).

Frederick J. Kimball (chronicled in earlier posts), a civil engineer and partner in the
Clark firm, headed the new line as well as the new Shenandoah Valley Railroad.
For the junction for the Shenandoah Valley and the Norfolk and Western roads,
Kimball and his board of directors selected the small Virginia village called Big Lick,
on the Roanoke River.

Kimball's interest in geology (mentioned in detail in an earlier post) was
instrumental in the development of the Pocahontas coalfields in
western Virginia and West Virginia. He pushed N&W lines through the wilds of
West Virginia, north to Columbus, Ohio and Cincinnati, Ohio, and south to Durham,
North Carolina and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. This gave the railroad the
route structure it was to use for more than 60 years.

The Virginian Railway (VGN), an engineering marvel of its day, was conceived