Page 47 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

distance “Roanoke blazes up ahead like an illumination; red-mouthed
furnace-chimneys lift like giant torches above the plain; the roar of machinery, the
whistle of engines, the ceaseless hum of labor and of life in the very heat of a quiet,
mountain-locked valley.”

The city, he explained, “is a town of lively business appearance” with a population of
“seven or eight thousand and more coming.” The presence of hundreds of northern
“executive officers and their families,” Ingersoll pointed out, gave the place a patina of
sophistication and “a society of more intelligence and social experience than is
usually observed in so new a town.”

At the Roanoke Machine Works, he went on, tourists could view “every part of the
locomotive or car, from the wheels to the last ornament . . . made and fitted,” and at
the Crozer Steel and Iron Company they could “witness the thrilling spectacle of
drawing the molten iron from the furnace into the molds.”

Other places that “catch the eye of the traveler, and surprise him,” Ingersoll explained,
were the new depot, railway offices, and “the splendid hotel (Hotel Roanoke)
crowning the hill,” which “has nothing to approach it between Philadelphia and
Florida.”

Other visitors, mainly from the northern press corps, focused on the ways that
outsiders were responsible for the city’s progress or on Roanoke’s similarities to raw
and rowdy “boom towns” of the West. The Philadelphia Press, for example,
suggested that the Yankee capitalists owned the town. E. W. Clark & Company, the
paper explained, had “quickened energies and stimulated enterprises which would
have lain dormant until the crack of doom.” The firm’s work, according to the Press,
had transformed a “rustic and rusty huddle of houses” in the wilderness of Southwest
Virginia into a “suburb of Philadelphia.”

Roanoke’s numerous similarities to western gold towns were noted quickly by a
reporter for the Philadelphia Ledger: “The town with its wooden side-walks stretching
over farm land and a mass of incomplete homes, with hammer, trowel and saw
hastily at work, rivals any mining settlement of mushroom growth the far West can
show.” Although his story acknowledged that “people are pouring in, many of them
the thrift class of iron workers from Great Britain,” he ridiculed the town’s natives who
“never dreamed of any enterprise beyond doing what their fathers did” and gave
credit to E. W. Clark & Company for the “creation” of Roanoke.

A correspondent for the Baltimore Sun went further, suggesting “Roanoke may be
considered the property of the Roanoke Land and Improvement Company, from the
overshadowing influence of that concern and its leadership in local enterprises, even
though the railroad company studiously preserves its control in this and all auxiliary
concerns.” At night, the Sun reported, “with the red-light beacons of the bar rooms all
ablaze over the plank sidewalks, and the music of the violin and banjo coming
through the open doors and windows, the town suggests a mining camp or a
mushroom city of Colorado.”