Page 66 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

where “she began to sink lower in the scale of humanity” and ended up in a Roanoke brothel.

Mothers banned together to keep the town from ruining their sons. The women kept up their
campaign; and when authorities failed to meet their demands, they continued to act on their
own. In July 1892, for instance, a rock and brick-throwing mob staged a “midnight attack” on a
bordello being run by Nora Heath. “Respectable families,” the attackers reported in a letter to
the paper, had been subjected almost daily to “disgraceful scenes” in their neighborhood; even
mothers and children returning from Sunday school had seen “lewd women and their lovers”
frolicking in Nora Heath’s front yard. Responsible citizens had finally chosen to act, they
explained, “for the protection of God, home, respectable women and helpless children.”

The day after the attack, over a hundred Southeast residents gathered in a mass meeting and
signed a petition asking newly elected Mayor Henry S. Trout to evict Heath and her “prostitute
companions” along with the “inmates” of several other houses on Holiday Street, Edgewood
Street, and Fifth Avenue. All the residences mentioned, the petitioners claimed, were “houses
of ill-fame and as such are contaminating and prostituting not only our present generation, but
the generation to come.”

Trout immediately ordered inhabitants of the homes to move and instigated an investigation of
their landlords. The mayor, The Roanoke Times surmised, “has commenced a war against the
disorderly houses situated in the southeastern portion of the city.”

The evictions continued and Trout eventually even began jailing those who refused to relocate.
Although local clergy railed against the city’s “social evil,” the prostitution “problem,” as officials
interpreted it, existed only because bordellos were operating in a white neighborhood. To
remedy this, they simply evicted brothel operators in the Southeast and left similar houses near
Gainsborough unmolested. Bordello managers and prostitutes got the message, and by 1893,
city authorities had confined most local brothels to black sections of town. In the process, they
created an unofficial “red light district” in the Northwest.

During the remainder of the decade, arrests for “keeping houses of ill repute” declined
significantly, and it was not until the early 1900s, after ministers began a crusade against the
Northwest’s unofficial brothel district, that politicians again had to confront the issue.

Roanoke looked more like a city than an evanescent “boomtown” by the early 1890s. The
municipal government had finally solved chronic sewer, street, and drainage problems, and the
board of health had curbed some of the sanitary troubles that had plagued the town in its early
years. A real city hall had replaced Ferdinand Rorer’s storehouse, a market building had gone
up downtown, and residents had instigated the town’s first civic reforms to fill voids in municipal
services. They had established militias, organized fire brigades, and done what they could to
fund a hospital. Over thirteen-thousand newcomers arrived during the 1880s, and by the end of
the decade, Roanoke was Virginia’s fifth largest city. The common adjuncts of urbanization
arrived as well, with assault, robbery, murder, and vice becoming commonplace by the middle
of the decade. By then, the concept of Roanoke being divided into “old town” and “new town”
had been replaced by resentment between whites and blacks or between the forces of
“morality” and those deemed “immoral.”