Page 6 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

New information about the History of Roanoke
Big Lick to Roanoke from 1874-part Two

By Richard Mundy

Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

Back tracking with some history of owners - taverns - The interruption of the Civil war
and its effect on the valley and the great wagon trails that passed through the valley.

To backtrack just a little will help put in perspective some of the key players, locations
and difficulties Roanoke had in converting itself from a small group of people in a
small community into a thriving, boom-town of a prosperous, industrial center and
city.

Many of the natives responsible for luring the railroad to town had moved to the area
that became Roanoke in the 1860s and 1870s, before Big Lick existed. Their
settlement began as a colony of Gainsborough, a village about a mile to the north.
Both communities developed as crossroads – Gainsborough along two wagon paths,
Big Lick at the junction of two railroads – and both emerged on the same lowland
plateau in a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from two ancient saline
marshes. Posts of the great Salt Licks in prehistoric Roanoke can be found in my
early multi-part series in PDF format named “A NARRATIVE OF THE HISTORY OF
ROANOKE”.

Before whites settled in the region in the mid-eighteenth century, herds of buffalo and
deer came to lick crystallized salt around the edges of these bogs. Known as “Long
Lick” and “Great Lick,” the two marshes were actually basins of slowly moving spring
water that eventually emptied into a creek that fed the Roanoke River. The first white
homesteaders near the licks arrived in the late 1750s and built “Spotts’s Mill” along
“Lick Run,” the creek flowing into the Long Lick bog. Located then in sprawling
Botetourt County near the junction of the “Great Road” (a north / south route from
Philadelphia to Yadkin) and the “Carolina Road” (an east / west route to the
Cumberland Gap), Spotts’s Mill went on to serve as a trading post for farmers
scattered about the valley floor as well as the location for a tavern serving waves of
settlers traveling along the nearby wagon paths.

Around 1800, the Spotts family sold its mill and the surrounding land to John
and Cornelius Pate, and thereafter the area near the licks was known as
“Pate’s” or “Pate’s Mill. (The “Great Road,” also known as “Indian Road” and
the “Great Wagon Road,” follows the roadbed of present day U. S. Route 460.
The “Carolina Road,” known variously as “Traders Path” or “Neeley’s Road,”
follows the roadbed of present day U. S. Route 220.)

Samuel G. Adams, a Richmond businessman, believed the crossroads could be
developed, and in 1801, he purchased five-hundred acres northeast of “Pate’s” and
laid out lots for the future town of “New Antwerp.” Although Adams eventually sold all