Page 46 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

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

By Richard Mundy

Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

Finally, the road to success from the brink, both in word and deed, appears as a
possibility. The town begins a coming together as a unified Roanoke, and the promise
of the New South embodied in Roanoke marches towards its fulfillment. Could
Roanoke finally reach its newly believed potential as a peaceful, progressive and
citizen-friendly town? And could the new-found ‘parent’ industry become a good
corporate citizen and become less autocratic and more democratic? These questions
and others begged the future for answers.

About this time, the national at large, primarily the due to the reporting of out-of-town
newspapers, were beginning to take notice of Roanoke. The phenomenal growth, the
prosperity rising, the industrial transformation and the location (in the New South)
became fodder for the national news hawks looking for new and interesting copy.

The New York Times claimed that Roanoke’s industries were perfectly positioned to
exploit the state’s coal deposits and return Virginia “to something like its old position
in the Union.” The town, its correspondent reported, “has been built up by the
Shenandoah Valley Road as a kind of Altoona or machine shop village. It has also
attracted other manufacturers and mining companies until the town lots have risen in
the last few years in the proportion of ten to one.”

In dispatches to the Hartford Courant (Connecticut), local-color writer Charles Dudley
Warner described the city as “a vast real estate, railway, and mineral speculation.”
From the summit of Mill Mountain, he told readers back in New England, the town
appeared to be rising from nowhere: “The noise of hammer and hauling filled the air;
streets of temporary wooden shops and dwellings, drinking shops and ‘hotels’ with
false board fronts hiding the upper half stories, and big letter signs, after the manner
of the West, isolated dwellings on every hill and knoll, everywhere the debris of
building and ditching and road-making.”

Travel writer Thomas J. Clayton followed Warner, arrived in town as the guest of the
superintendent of the Crozer Iron and Steel plant a few months later. Clayton came to
hunt quail in the mountains nearby but took time for a tour, afterwards reporting that
the Iron Works, which he believed resembled a plant in Chester, Pennsylvania, was
the town’s “greatest industrial establishment.” The place was altogether a “thriving
town” of roughly six-thousand residents. “I prophesy for Roanoke,” he concluded, “a
successful future.”

Earnest Ingersoll came to Roanoke while researching a guide about railroad
excursions in the Shenandoah Valley. The town seemed out of place amid the
pastoral landscape around it, he informed would-be visitors, noting that from a