Page 36 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

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

By Richard Mundy

Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

In this installment, the grandest building of the New South and Roanoke begins to
come together. Progress is made on a number of levels, and many new businesses
come to town which creates the atmosphere to make Roanoke worthy of its new title
as “Magic City Of The South”.

In the fall of 1882, workers completed the RL&IC’s sixty-nine room “Hotel Roanoke”
on a hill overlooking the town. Philadelphia architect George Pearson designed the
structure in Queen Anne style with thirty rooms, but before it was completed,
company officials added a primitive looking annex that doubled capacity.

The Queen Anne design that Pearson used was wildly popular in the late Victorian
era, a period when elaborate ornamentation meshed with the gaudy ethos of the
“Gilded Age.” Paneled in heavily decorated wood with multiple gables and dozens of
gigantic pressed-brick chimneys, the hotel featured hot and cold running water, glass
doors opening onto verandas, interior paneling in oiled oak, ash, and cherry, a “large
finely furnished bar room,” a “Grand Dining Saloon,” and toilets that emptied into Lick
Run. The new “Union Depot” went up below the hotel, between the tracks of the
SVRR and N&W. Built in the same style, the station included a one-hundred seat
restaurant “finished in oiled woods and heated by hot air pipes” along with gender
specific ticket offices and waiting rooms. A “one thousand light gas machine”
illuminated both new buildings and immediately made east Roanoke the most
conspicuous part of town at night.

The following summer, workers finished the Clark firm’s office building next to the
Hotel Roanoke, in lots formerly occupied by Big Lick’s tobacco industries. Built of
pressed brick but in the same Queen Anne design, the structure housed the
bureaucracies of the SVRR and N&W in forty-two rooms on its upper floors and had a
direct telegraph link to Frederick Kimball’s office in Philadelphia. The Improvement
Company put its headquarters on the ground floor and rented out other space there
to various retail establishments.

On a huge tract to the east of the Hotel Roanoke and railroad offices, contractors also
finished the Roanoke Machine Works complex. The project consumed over a million
bricks, and included a twenty-stall engine house, blacksmith shop, machine shop, car
erecting shop, foundry, freight car shop, planing mill, and storehouse. Pennsylvanian
Samuel A. Crozer put his “Crozer Steel & Iron Company” next to the shops, and once
in blast its furnaces supplied the works with the ten tons of metal per day it needed to
build locomotives and freight cars.

The importance of this complex must not go unheralded. It is one of, if not the largest