Page 39 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

opened a third of his stock & has sold a good many things.”

As expected, saloon keepers also flocked to Roanoke. In 1880, the town had
only two taverns and no billiard parlors or “ten-pin alleys” By the start of 1883, there
were nineteen barrooms, seven pool halls, and four bowling alleys in Roanoke. Town
council approved 31 liquor licenses in 1881 and an astonishing 346 the following year,
and over the same period sales of distilled spirits rose by 731 percent. Many of the
new establishments responsible for the growth in liquor receipts opened downtown
along Railroad Avenue. The Morning Star Saloon, featuring “all kinds of mixed drinks
prepared by skillful bartenders,” started operations there in the fall of 1882, and the
following spring, the “Great Liquor Establishment of David Lawson” began dispensing
drinks a little further up the street. Lawson’s place claimed to have “the largest stock
of Bottled Liquors of any house south of Baltimore” along with an attached saloon
that “is justly regarded as the Fashionable Resort for gentlemen who take their
‘Smiles’ in Roanoke.”

Roanoke’s new railroad industries required hundreds of highly trained skilled-laborers,
most of whom had to be imported from the North since Virginia and the South lacked
such workers. The promise of high wages, company housing, and opportunity for
rapid advancement enticed scores of northern-born industrial workers to migrate to
Roanoke in 1882, and by the end of 1883, over a thousand newcomers had found
jobs in the town’s burgeoning manufacturing enterprises.

Crozer Furnace employed 125, the Machine Works hired 690, and the SVRR signed
on 262. Those employed were almost exclusively skilled laborers or clerical workers,
and since the shops and railroad went out of their way to find family men, slightly over
45 percent of them were married.

Overall, at least 2,120 new residents arrived in Roanoke between 1881 and 1883.
Almost all the newcomers were white and most were male. The town’s 338 “new”
black residents were mainly inhabitants of Gainsborough who had been absorbed
into the new municipality, and although Big Lick had been nearly evenly divided by
race, Roanoke now was nearly 76 percent white.

The largest group of black residents lived northwest of the tracks, in what had been
Gainsborough or “Old Lick” but was now a section of Roanoke known as “Bunker
Hill.” Most blacks living south of the tracks had homes along one of the town’s older
roads west of Commerce Street, and only approximately 8 percent lived in housing
developed by the RL&IC.

Nearly 41 percent of whites, by contrast, lived in homes built by that firm. The largest
concentrations of shop workers had houses on Gilmer or Patton Avenues in the
Northeast, or in the Southeast on lower Railroad Avenue, in a cheap row-style
housing project called “Brick Row.” The rest of the town’s white residents lived along
older streets or on extensions of Salem and Campbell Avenues. Along with
Commerce Street, these roads also tended to be home to those working in service or
retail related businesses. Occupational shifts from the changing economic focus of
the town benefited black residents the least. Indeed, the closure of local tobacco