Page 8 - A Narrative of the History of Roanoke Virginia

hundred residents by 1870, when Callowhill Turner opened a general merchandise
store and tobacco warehouse in the village. The “great big swamp” east of the station,
he recalled, continued to menace locals with its mysterious miasmas and
mosquito-borne diseases, and although some men hunted around the bogs, most
residents considered them dangerous, since livestock that wandered into the
marshes occasionally sank into the mud and disappeared below the water.

By 1874, the community had grown large enough to petition the Legislature for
township status; State Delegate Henry S. Trout, son of John Trout, the owner of Trout
House, presented the bill, and in February, the General Assembly created the Town
of Big Lick. The new charter appointed Henry’s father acting mayor and created
boundaries a half-mile out from the depot, making Big Lick a half-mile square with the
train station at its center.

A spurt of development followed, and by 1876, the town had Lutheran,
Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopal churches, seven general merchandise
stores, five tobacco factories, three tobacco warehouses, a wagon and plow
factory, a harness factory, two blacksmith shops, a flour mill, two photography
shops, and three saloons.

In the late 1870s, the village purchased Ferdinand Rorer’s wooden storehouse on
the newly completed road to Salem and turned it into a town hall, courthouse, and
occasional theatre known as “Rorer Hall.” The first census of the place in 1880
counted 335 black and mulatto inhabitants along with 334 white residents and
reported that most locals had jobs in one of the town’s tobacco factories. Blacks
or mulattos employed elsewhere tended to earn a living as farm laborers or
domestic servants; whites tended to work as clerks, merchants, or tobacco
salesman.

The link to the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad that created Big Lick transformed the
town again in the 1880s, this time turning the village into Roanoke, a booming
industrial city. Before it did, however, the Virginia & Tennessee Railroad would
change ownership and another line, this one backed by northern capitalists looking to
exploit the region’s mineral wealth, would arrive. The process began in June 1870,
five months after “Redeemers” gained control of the state and Virginia rejoined the
Union, when the newly elected legislature authorized the consolidation of the Old
Dominion’s three major railways.

Joined together in November of that year, the Norfolk & Petersburg, Southside, and
Virginia & Tennessee became the Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad (AM&O)
under the direction of former Confederate General William Mahone. Although
Mahone won praise as a competent manager of the AM&O, the 1873 economic
recession caused the line to default on loans, and in 1875, courts placed the railroad
in reorganization receivership.

The recession also halted construction of a the Shenandoah Valley Railroad
(SVRR), a line being built along the Shenandoah River from Hagerstown, Maryland,
to central Virginia, and funded by a group of Philadelphia investors. While the