Page 70 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

New information about the history of Roanoke
Big Lick to Roanoke from 1874-Part Sixteen

By Richard Mundy
Sources:refer to New Research Sources-previously posted

This installment: Roanoke offers many entertainment venues, like the ‘Original’ Opera House.
The Farmer’s Market is expanded. And a celebration unlike any other captivated the city as well
as the national press as Roanoke declared a ‘Decennial’. Roanoke was now 10 years.

Economics, infrastructure and quality of life in Roanoke was like an elevator…up and down. As
the city council through bond issues attacked the sewage and other health concerns, the police
began cleaning up the ‘dens of sin’ in the city and the businesses started turning a profit and
becoming more viable, the citizenry had more discretionary time and money to look for avenues
of entertainment.

By 1892, there were fifty-six bars open for business in Roanoke; the vast majority were little
more than shotgun shacks with two-story false fronts located on or near Railroad Avenue. Most,
like the White Elephant Saloon on Nelson Street, catered to laboring men by providing “beer
from wood” at “five cents a schooner” along with complimentary food.

Other barrooms offered recreation or attractions. The Rustic, for example, provided pool or
billiard tables, while Poteet’s & Company on First Avenue had a bowling alley, and the Arcadia
Saloon on Railroad Avenue had a cage with two large owls hanging from its entrance.

Clandestine gambling dens in the back rooms of some of the bars or on the second floors of
downtown businesses did brisk business as well. Access to the establishments, according to a
reporter given a tour of two of the city’s most popular poker establishments, required an
elaborate “countersign” by patrons (like “Jimmy sent me”). The operators protected those two
houses so well, he explained, that “any effort on the part of the police to dislodge them has so
far proven futile.”

Although most of the community tolerated orderly gaming houses, a visit by revivalist Sam
Jones in the spring of 1892 prompted a temporary crusade against the establishments.
Roanoke was “infested with gamblers,” one opponent observed, noting that churchgoers “would
be surprised at the number of dens in operation here.” With Sam Jones’s backing, he went on,
the time had finally come to stamp out “these gambling hells.”

Workers and their families had a variety of inexpensive forms of entertainment available as well.
Before it sold Woodland Park, the Roanoke Land & Improvement Company built a pavilion on
one of its hills and organized popular Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday night dances. The
Roanoke Machine Works Band, organized in 1883 by Canadians employed by the railroad
shops, provided the melodies.