Page 68 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

Orders declined in the fall of 1884, however, and the company reduced wages by 10 percent,
cut hours from ten to nine per day, and ended Saturday work. The firm managed to continue full
employment until winter, when the ongoing recession forced it to lay off hundreds of workers.

Other Clark Company subsidiaries had problems as well. In early 1885, the Shenandoah Valley
Railroad defaulted on its loan interest, taxes, payrolls, and bills. A local judge put the line in a
receivership, but in December, the mortgage company holding its notes filed suit for liquidation
of the road’s assets. The Norfolk & Western Railroad, the majority owner of the Shenandoah
Valley Railroad, fought a legal battle for the next four years to regain control, and in 1890, it
purchased the company for $4,500,000.

Roanokers, one resident commented, were not accustomed to the “marvelous prosperity” they
had witnessed before the recession, and as a result, most of them “had thought doubtless that
the boom had come to stay.” The depression hit the city’s initial land speculators especially hard.
“The bottom dropped out of everything in Roanoke,” Reverend William Campbell recalled, “and
there were neither rents nor sale of property.”

Even some of the earliest and wealthiest residents did not escape. Ferdinand Rorer, like most
developers, lost everything. He closed his offices and left town, as did Roanoke’s first mayor,
Marshall Waid, who left in 1885, broke, disgusted, and in search of opportunity elsewhere.
Many of the laid-off shop workers packed up their families and left town amid widespread
rumors that the Machine Works would eventually close for good.

Hanging on had its reward however, for In late 1885, the plant signed a contract with the New
York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad for five-hundred freight cars, albeit at a price far below
what the Machine Works normally charged. Iron for the carriages and wheels came from the
Crozer furnaces next-door; wood for the flooring came from thousands of White Oak trees
harvested on the surrounding mountains. Not long afterwards, the Norfolk & Western Railroad
(N&W) put in an order for twelve heavy locomotives, and in the weeks that followed, most shop
employees returned to work. Newspapers in the region suggested the rehabilitation of the
Machine Works was a clear sign that “the Magic City of the Southwest . . . has again recovered
its usual business vim and enterprise.”

By the time Shenandoah Valley Railroad lawyer William Travers visited in the fall of 1886,
business in Roanoke had recovered from the recession. Its industries paid over $100,000 a
month to employees, and most of the money, Travers explained, “is of course distributed in
Roanoke.” As a result, he reported, the town’s stores were “bright and their owners cheery.”

The Machine Works continued its recovery, and by the end of the decade, its workers had
constructed forty-seven locomotives along with hundreds of freight cars and coal hoppers.
Monthly pay at the Works surpassed $65,000 in 1890, and a couple years later, E. W. Clark &
Company more than doubled the size of the plant and its workforce. The Clark firm also put an
addition on its Shenandoah Avenue railroad office that more than doubled its size and it added
a thirty-six room wing to the Hotel Roanoke. “We intend,” N&W President Frederick Kimball
explained, “to make the hotel one of the finest in every way in the South.”