Big Lick to Magic City, The Railroad Makes Roanoke
Near Roanoke, Virginia
In the spring of eighteen eighty-two, a Virginia farm village called Big Lick had fewer than six hundred residents, a handful of tobacco warehouses, and a creek that flooded every other season. By the end of that same year it had a new name, a new charter, and the beginnings of what promoters would call the Magic City. The transformation took roughly nine months, and it was engineered not by visionaries from the town itself but by railroad executives sitting in boardrooms in Philadelphia and Norfolk.
The Shenandoah Valley Railroad and the Norfolk and Western Railway were converging on the same geography at the same moment, each looking for a junction point in the Virginia Blue Ridge. The Roanoke Valley offered what both lines needed: a natural gap in the mountains, a relatively flat basin floor, and proximity to the coalfields of southwestern Virginia and West Virginia. Negotiations moved quickly.
Land speculators, anticipating the outcome, began buying up Big Lick farmland at a frenzied pace through eighteen eighty-one and into eighteen eighty-two. Some farmers sold acres for prices they had never imagined possible. Others held on, hoping to extract more, and sometimes won.
The town was reincorporated as Roanoke on February third, eighteen eighty-two, named for the Algonquian word the Tutelo and neighboring peoples had used for the shell-bead currency that circulated through the region. Within months, the population began doubling and doubling again. Workers arrived by wagon and on foot from across Virginia, the Carolinas, and beyond.
By eighteen eighty-four, Roanoke had just over five thousand residents. By eighteen ninety, it had over sixteen thousand, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in the entire United States in that decade. Contemporary journalists reached for superlatives and could not quite find enough of them.
The Norfolk and Western established its general machine shops here, which meant Roanoke would not merely be a place where trains passed through. It would be a place where locomotives were built and repaired and sent back out into the mountains. That distinction shaped everything that followed: the neighborhoods that grew up around the shops, the labor culture, the sound of hammers and steam that defined daily life for three generations.
The Magic City nickname was never quite ironic. For a great many people arriving with nothing, it was simply true.
