The Mill Mountain Star, A Neon Beacon Since Nineteen Forty-Nine
Near Roanoke, Virginia
On the night of November twenty-third, nineteen forty-nine, a star appeared on the face of Mill Mountain above downtown Roanoke and has been burning there ever since. The Roanoke Star is eighty-eight and a half feet tall, made of neon and incandescent tubing mounted on a steel frame, and it is visible from more than sixty miles away on a clear night. It is, by most measurements, the world's largest freestanding illuminated man-made star, a distinction that Roanoke has been content to claim for more than seventy years.
The star was built as a Christmas display for the nineteen forty-nine holiday season, a project organized by the Roanoke Merchants Association to attract shoppers to downtown in the years immediately after World War Two. The merchants expected to light it for a few weeks. What happened instead is that the star became so immediately and deeply attached to Roanoke's sense of itself that taking it down was never seriously discussed.
It was made permanent. The color of the star has civic meaning. White is the usual color.
Red once signaled a traffic fatality in the city, a practice that ran from nineteen fifty-seven to nineteen seventy-six, and red, white, and blue mark patriotic holidays. The color-coding system was added years after the star's installation and has been modified over time, but the practice of reading the star's color as a signal from the city to its residents has persisted as one of those small community rituals that resist explanation to outsiders but feel entirely natural from within. Mill Mountain itself, a ridge with a city park, hiking trails, and a small zoo, rises directly from the southern edge of downtown.
The drive to the summit on Mill Mountain Scenic Drive offers a panorama of the Roanoke Valley that has been a standard orientation stop for visitors since the park opened in the early twentieth century.
