Page 74 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

All eleven hundred Roanoke Machine Works employees, “their uniforms being a buff cap and
blouse, black belt and pantaloons,” followed the floats, as did three hundred bicyclists and
representatives from all fifty of the city’s lodges and secret societies. A “sham battle” between
cadets from the Virginia Military Institute and Virginia Polytechnic Institute followed the parade,
as did two professional baseball games. That night, spectators packed downtown streets to
watch several thousand pounds of fireworks explode overhead.

Although the crowd numbered close to fifteen thousand, according to The Times, there had
been “little, if any drunkenness or disorderly conduct.” Overall, the paper went on, the decennial
had been “the greatest affair of its kind ever seen in Virginia.” Members of the Commercial
Association were thrilled with the turnout by potential investors. Furniture store owner E. H.
Stewart, for example, believed the event had distinguished the city from other “so-called boom
towns in Southwest Virginia” that had collapsed. “That Roanoke is on solid, substantial footing
no one who saw our trades display can doubt,” he told a reporter, “and the effect of the
celebration will be to take it out of the list of towns whose future is doubtful and place it in the
front rank of the solid, substantial, progressive cities of the South.”

Stewart and other members the association voted to use funds left over from the celebration to
publish a commemorative pamphlet to further publicize the city’s tremendous potential for
investors. Beyond a superficial description of the decennial and reprinted accounts of the event
published in out of town papers, the brochure mirrored other Roanoke booster guides in its
effort to illustrate the fantastic growth of the town with a detailed listing of business statistics.

Indeed, it even included the increase in Western Union telegraphs per year –which rose from
two hundred in 1882 to thirty thousand in 1892 – as evidence of progress. It also bragged about
the entrepreneurial spirit of residents, notifying those unfamiliar with the “Magic City” that it had
“been developed by the magic of hard work, untiring energy, business shrewdness, and
determination, and that is the only sort of magic that amounts to anything in these latter days.”
Roanoke’s prosperity, the guide explained, had “been laid on solid foundation, and there need
be no fear that it will share the fate of some of the boom towns in the South which have sprung
up in a night only to disappear as quickly as they arose.”

The next installment is a wrap up of the huge celebration of Roanoke’s tenth anniversary and a
discussion of how Roanoke divided itself into classes, some of which were racial. And Roanoke
discovers REFORM, both local and state-wide.