Page 54 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

They had already adjusted the state’s pre-Civil War debt, eliminated poll taxes, funded public
schools, abolished the whipping post, and increased corporate taxes.

Although Roanoke was politically fractured over state and national politics, its municipal political
campaigns eventually served as a means to unite much of the white community around the
common cause of modernizing their home. Roanoke shed its status as a town in January 1884,
but became a city only after misleading the Virginia Legislature with a wildly inaccurate
population report. The town’s internal census, conducted in December 1883 explicitly to prove
that Roanoke had the 5,000 residents required by the state for city designation, listed a
population of only 2,789 inhabitants. Local officials, anxious for city status, passed on a figure of
just over 5,000 residents to the General Assembly anyway. That had been the contingency plan
all along, according to local printer Edward Stone, who remembered that “it was rumored that it
might be necessary to ‘stuff the ballot box’ to secure the required population.”

A new “city” charter, approved by residents and delivered to the legislature by delegate Henry S.
Trout, left in place the fifteen-year tax exemption for manufacturers as well as the existing
governmental system of a mayor and council of twelve members elected every two years from
three wards.

In a most important move, however, the charter expanded the ability of officials to unilaterally
deal with persistent financial, structural, and sanitary problems. Most important, it legalized an
extremely large bonded debt, more than doubled property taxes, and specified that municipal
income and bond monies be used to rectify street and drainage problems as well as to build
new schools, a market house, and a new jail to replace the log shack that had served entirely
inadequately as a prison since 1882.

The city’s current mayor and council, whose terms did not expire until July 1884, had already
spent $30,000 from previous bond allotments along with $6,000 in municipal income on
macadamizing several streets and channeling Lick Run creek. They had depleted the city
treasury in the process, but drainage problems in the western part of town remained. Lick Run,
though now walled, served as an open sewer.

In the spring of 1884, the municipal government approved a bond initiative specifically to
address infrastructure problems and called on property owners – the only residents eligible to
vote on funding initiatives – to endorse it. Local papers, concerned that the city’s current
government was incompetent, advised voters to turn down the appropriation, and in April, 72
percent of them rejected the bond. S. S. Brooke, editor of The Roanoke Leader, had
campaigned against the appropriation and heralded the decision. The current government, he
complained, was incapable of “remedying our present filthy condition – a condition that has
come upon us by almost criminal neglect of our authorities to enforce plain, needful and most
apparent sanitary regulations.”

In the spring 1884 municipal elections that followed, John H. Dunstan, a mining engineer and
co-owner of The Leader, ran for mayor against incumbent Lucian H. Cocke, a longtime local
lawyer and son of the president of Hollins College. Dunstan, who had moved to town two years
earlier from Fredericksburg, claimed in campaign advertisements that his newspaper had