The Roanoke Star: A Christmas Decoration That Never Came Down
Near Roanoke, Virginia
The star sitting on top of Mill Mountain was never supposed to be permanent. That is the detail that makes it interesting.
In the fall of nineteen forty-nine the Roanoke Merchants Association wanted a holiday spectacle to draw shoppers downtown. They hired Roy Kinsey of the Kinsey Sign Company to build a giant illuminated star on the summit of Mill Mountain, the ridge that rises eleven hundred feet above the city's streets. Kinsey's crew constructed a frame of steel pipe and stretched two thousand feet of neon tubing across it in three interlocking star shapes. The whole structure stood eighty-eight and a half feet tall and weighed about sixty thousand pounds.
On the evening of November twenty-third, nineteen forty-nine, Mayor A.R. Minton and John Payne, a Roanoke-born Hollywood actor, appeared to throw the switch together at eight twenty-two p.m. The star blazed white over the valley, visible for sixty miles on a clear night.
The plan was to take it down after the holiday season. But Roanoke decided it liked its star. The Merchants Association left it up. Then they left it up again the next year. After a few seasons the question stopped being asked. The star became a fixed landmark, a beacon that orients the whole Roanoke Valley the way a church steeple orients a village.
The star has burned in red to mark moments of tragedy, police or fire deaths in the line of duty, and in green on Saint Patrick's Day. But the default is white, and white is what most people picture when they picture Roanoke. The city that was built on the Norfolk and Western Railway, that called itself the Magic City for how fast it materialized from a crossroads in eighteen eighty-two, eventually added a new nickname: the Star City of the South.
Mill Mountain itself carries older stories. The ridge was a landmark for Native travelers long before European settlement, and its slopes once held a small zoo and an amusement park. The parkway spur that climbs to the summit overlook is itself a Blue Ridge Parkway feature, winding up to a view that takes in the whole Roanoke Valley and the layered ridges of the Appalachians beyond.
