Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2003 "Magic City" class, community, and reform in Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912 Paul R. Dotson, Jr. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Dotson, Jr., Paul R., ""Magic City" class, community, and reform in Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912" (2003). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 68. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/68 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “MAGIC CITY” CLASS, COMMUNITY, AND REFORM IN ROANOKE, VIRGINIA, 1882-1912 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Paul R. Dotson, Jr. B. A. Roanoke College, 1990 M. A. Virginia Tech, 1997 December 2003 For Herman, Kathleen, Jack, and Florence ii Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men” (1925) iii Acknowledgements Gaines Foster shepherded this dissertation from the idea to the reality with the sort of patience, encouragement, and guidance that every graduate student should be so lucky to receive. A thanks here cannot do justice to his efforts, but I offer it anyway with the hope that one day I will find a better method of acknowledging my appreciation. The rest of my committee – Charles Royster, John Rodrigue, Charles Shindo, and Mark Zucker – did what they could to make me see a bigger picture. Whatever shortcomings remain (and I am sure there are plenty), are here despite the efforts of these five scholars. The goodwill of archivists, institutions, and historians contributed enormously to this project. Elaine Powers, librarian of the Virginia Room in the downtown branch of the Roanoke City Public Library, and Kent Chrisman, chairman of the History Museum and Historical Society of Western Virginia, offered advice and did all they could to make their respective collections accessible. The Virginia Historical Society provided an Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship that permitted a two-week sweep through its abundant resources. The Graduate School at Louisiana State University provided a Dissertation Fellowship that permitted a year devoted solely to writing. Crandall Shifflett at Virginia Tech and John Selby at Roanoke College were examples of the kind of historian I would someday like to be, as were Sarah Cotton and Chris Curtis, my colleagues at Virginia Tech. Although three of my grandparents – Herman and Kathleen Dotson and John Wyatt – did not hang around long enough to see this, I wrote it with them in mind. Herman and Kathleen, who arrived in the “Magic City” not long after my story here ends, made me want to get that story right. Jack, who covered more ground in one lifetime than most could hope for in ten, made me realize I could tell it. My parents, Paul and Carol Dotson, encouraged me along on this journey and inspired me to do something that would hopefully make them proud. This dissertation, while required for the PhD, perhaps also partially fulfills at least a few of the requirements of being a iv good son. The rest of my family – Brett and Kathy Dotson, Neil, Liza and Hayden Conner, and Florence Wyatt – put up with my endless stories about Roanoke and even acted interested. Luckily for me, the shadow fell on an assortment of comrades and co-conspirators. Giving them credit here is futile, but at least they will know that I tried. Jim Burtch in Roanoke and Court Carney in Baton Rouge could not be or have been better friends. The members of the history department poker club – Court, Ben Cloyd, Matt Reonas, and John Sacher (emeritus) – always knew who the sucker at the table was but never let on. Although I am much poorer as a result, I know I am a little wiser too. (Ben also beat me at tennis and golf more times than should be legally permissible.) Heather Morrison was smart enough to know that there was more to graduate school than academics. Chris Leahy kept the nights interesting in the early years. More than anyone else, Leslie Lightfoot made me want to finish this dissertation. Other good friends – Sabrene Blevins, Christine Hastings, and Steve Sellers – helped me out along the way. The debts I have incurred will be repaid in full. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………….….……………...iv Abstract…….……………………………………………………...……..………...…….vii Introduction…………………………………………..…………………..………………..1 Chapter One: From Big Lick to Boomtown, 1874-1883……………….…………..…….12 Two: Municipal and Civic Reform, 1882-1893…………………..……………..62 Three: Business and Boosterism, 1882-1892………………………………….101 Four: Life, Work, and Culture in the Magic City, 1882-1892………………....138 Five: Class, Race, and Reform in the Magic City, 1892-1904………...………191 Six: Business and Boosterism, 1893-1912………...…………………………..251 Seven: Municipal and Civic Reform, 1900-1912…………………………...…309 Conclusions………………………………………..……………..……………………..377 Bibliography…………………………………………………….……..……………….385 Vita……………………………………………………………...…….…….…………..399 vi Abstract The “Magic City” of Roanoke, Virginia, the fastest growing urban area in the South from 1880 to 1890, exemplified everything that New South boosters claimed to have wanted. The prototypical New South city, Roanoke emerged as an extreme version of all that was supposed to remedy the South’s post-Civil War economic stagnation. The city’s promise, however, revealed the empty promise of the New South. Despite intensive demographic and industrial growth, by the early twentieth century, Roanoke failed to evolve into the dynamic and modern city prophesied by New South visionaries. Its abysmal conditions, racial turmoil, class conflicts, and superficial “reforms” made it much more village than city, far more dystopia than utopia . “Magic City” examines that history from 1882 to 1912 using the lenses of class, community, and reform as points of departure. It analyzes Roanoke’s rapid growth in the 1880s and traces the consequences of that intensive development through 1912, the year local “reform” reached its climax. Roanoke’s emergence in 1882 as the headquarters for two northern-owned railroads was largely the result of native businessmen who adhered blindly to the New South creed. They cultivated a business-friendly ethos that put economic development ahead of all other causes, envisioned industrial expansion as a panacea for social ills and infrastructure troubles, and channeled municipal capital into investment schemes instead of solutions to the rapidly growing city’s numerous other needs. The consequences were widespread societal and institutional malfunctioning that climaxed in a cataclysmic lynch riot. When that revolt and the city’s decrepit appearance threatened to stall additional development, local elites “reformed” Roanoke in ways that made investors less anxious. Those modifications, however, were largely superficial and failed to resolve the municipality’s systematic and deeply embedded problems. Roanoke’s early history is primarily the story of sorting out the myriad tensions and ambiguities inherent in attempting to create a modern industrialized city on the one hand, and fomenting municipal and vii civic order on the other. Examining that story hopefully offers a more complete understanding of how urban development in the New South actually operated. viii Introduction From 1880 to 1890, no city in the South grew faster than Roanoke, Virginia. Only a tiny village known as Big Lick in 1882, Roanoke rose in eight years to become Virginia’s fifth largest city as well as the fourth fastest growing urban area in the nation.1 By 1900, it was the state’s third biggest city, behind only Richmond and Norfolk, and home to the largest locomotive manufacturing plant in the South. Located in a valley of the Appalachian Mountains in the southwestern portion of the state, Roanoke owed its phenomenal growth to a small cadre of local merchants and businessmen who convinced Philadelphia capitalists to choose the hamlet of Big Lick as the corporate headquarters and shops of their Shenandoah Valley and Norfolk & Western railroads. Shortly thereafter, thousands of skilled workers from the North moved to Roanoke to labor in its new railroad shops and iron furnaces. Scores of rural migrants from Southwest and Central Virginia, enticed by the prospect of urban employment and pushed by dwindling opportunities in the surrounding mountains and countryside, arrived as well. Later in the 1880s, New South boosters proclaimed Roanoke the “Magic City” and described it as “teeming with wealth, culture, industry, energy, and vim.” Its destiny, they promised, was “to be that of one of the largest manufacturing and industrial centers of the South.”2 In 1890, a correspondent sent south by the New York Herald confirmed their assessments. In Roanoke, he reported, “dazzling bewildered excitement is everywhere.”3 The rapid urbanization and industrialization of Roanoke is but a small chapter of the story of modernization in the late nineteenth-century South. Elsewhere in the region older towns experienced