A Guide to Historic Salem -- Volume 1, Number 1 -- Summer 1995

• "Great Road West Gave Impetus to Salem's Settlement" by Norwood C. Middleton
• "Historical Society Invites Comments" An Editorial by Lon Savage

Norwood Middleton, author of the book Salem: A Virginia Chronicle, is a Salem resident, a former newspaper editor, and probably the foremost authority on Salem history. This article has been updated and revised slightly since its original publication in The Roanoke Times of Dec. 31, 1987.

Fewer than twenty-five families inhabited the bottomland along the roaring Roanoke River and the countryside sweeping northward toward Fort Lewis Mountain at the dawn of 1802 -- Salem's founding year.

A scattering of cabins and small houses lay along the Great Road, actually little more than a rutted path wide enough for a horse-drawn wagon. But even then, it was called Salem -- a name believed to have been bestowed by pioneer William Bryan, perhaps in nostalgic recollection of the New Jersey town by that name that he left before settling near the "Great Spring," known today as Lake Spring Park.

One of Bryan's neighbors was James Simpson, an unpretentious land speculator who had some vision and who made his living selling and sawing timber and making wagons even as he built up his holdings.

Since 1779, Simpson had watched the growing number of travelers moving along the Great Road from Pennsylvania toward Tennessee and Kentucky, giving him the idea of developing a tiny slice of the 3,854 acres he owned nearby and luring a few of them to become his neighbors.

And so it was that he hired a surveyor to lay out a few square and rectangular lots in a town "by the name of Salem" and sold the first of those lots June 2, 1802, to Susanna Cole for twenty dollars.

From that small town, only seven times larger than the turf of the present Salem Football Stadium, grew the City of Salem, with its 14.14 square miles and population of 23,800. In that growth process, the pendulum moved in erratic arcs between financial feast and famine, developmental boom and bust, emotional exhilaration and despair.

Hardly had the infant Salem been officially "established" by the Virginia legislature in 1806 than its state-appointed trustees arranged a modest expansion of its corporate limits in 1813.

About that time, James Simpson, for undetermined reasons but probably aging and ailing, moved with his wife, Eleanor, to be near her parents in Alabama, and soon disposed of all his Virginia holdings. He left behind a street and small stream bearing his name. Today, however, Salem doesn't have a vestige of recognition for its founder.

Also about the time of Simpson's departure, other entrepreneurs in Salem were caught up in a widespread canal-building fever. They enthusiastically joined in financing and promoting a Roanoke River navigation project to open up boat transportation between Salem and Weldon, N. C., just west of what is now Kerr Lake, for crops and goods that ultimately could be transshipped along the Atlantic seaboard and beyond.

A convoy of three batteaus made it through primitive channelization from near the North Carolina border to Salem in 1828. It was a momentous event that was coupled with construction of a handsome navigation company headquarters on Union Street at Main. Other speculative buildings were constructed between there and the river. Plagued by floods that damaged locks and washed out sluices, navigation faltered west of the Blue Ridge after a few years but operated eastward through the Piedmont until supplanted by the railroads.

Meanwhile, Salem took on new life after being chosen the seat of government for the new County of Roanoke, formed from Botetourt in 1838. A new red-brick courthouse went into service in 1841, and "court day" became the focus of the social and business lives of some 250 souls in about forty families who lived near Main Street. They were served by a few general stores, blacksmith and other mechanics' shops, and two or three churches. A post office dispatched and received mail by stage coaches, which also transported travelers who occasionally stayed overnight in the half dozen hotels and taverns for which the village was noted.

The town boundaries had been expanded in 1829 to attract new families. There also was a surge in agricultural pursuits on newly cleared lands and adjacent plantations, notably the one between Main Street and the river cultivated first by pioneering General Andrew Lewis before his death in 1781, and which had been acquired by Nathaniel Burwell in 1811.

Other visible signs of a new magnetism accompanying Salem 's transformation to a county seat followed. Virtually unnoticed, Virginia Collegiate Institute, which soon became Roanoke College, opened in 1847 in an abandoned church building on East Hill and a year later held classes on its present campus. Toll roads of modest dimensions and unreliable stability were built, opening up new transportation arteries east and west, north and south.

Nothing, however, compared in immediate impact with the arrival of the first Virginia and Tennessee Railroad train from Lynchburg in 1852 and the subsequent completion of the line to Bristol. At last, Salem had a reliable tramontane link for its people and wares.

Vital as the railroad was, it soon symbolized the forebodings and suffering of war. Off for Civil War battlefronts on the trains went young men in units mobilized on the courthouse lawn in 1861 under such leaders as Abraham Hupp and three Deyerley brothers -- Madison, Andrew and John. Later, on two occasions, Federal troops moved into Salem, severed the rails used for moving Confederate troops and supplies, destroyed quartermaster warehouses, and wrought minor pillaging.

Minimal unrest accompanied the emancipation of the fewer than two hundred slaves in the Salem area, most of whom found ready housing and a continuing friendly relationship among former masters and new neighbors. Leaders in education, religious and small business emerged in the black community.

When the fighting and the period of uneasy military rule by the victors were over, the 1,355 people of Salem turned to rebuilding their lives and their town, which had a microscopic treasury of $7.40. Within a few years, however, a water supply system was installed; coal oil lamps cast a dim light on a few blocks of Main Street; streets were improved and sidewalks built, police and fire protection provided; and public schools opened in 1872.

Things were looking up, but a major setback loomed. In a crucial tussle in 1881, Salem lost to neighboring Big Lick the junction of the new Shenandoah Valley Railroad with the Norfolk and Western (formerly the V&T and AM&O). It was a turning point that led to the ascendance of Big Lick, soon to be renamed Roanoke.

High hopes were soon rekindled by the sweep of land speculation in the late 1880s and early 1890s that opened up development of the major section of the former Lewis-Burwell plantation between Main Street and the river, as well as today's South Salem.

The town's festive celebration of its centennial year in 1902 found Salem with a population of 3,400; a street-car link with the "Magic City" of Roanoke and a telephone link with at least some of the rest of the world; well-grounded public schools and a growing Roanoke College; two highly competitive weekly newspapers; two regional orphan homes; an array of well-attended churches; a half-dozen substantial industries; enterprising retail merchants; and an active if struggling town government.

A new county courthouse replaced the old one on the square in 1910, a strong anchor for downtown, and the town began showing new vitality when it switched to a council-manager system of government in 1922. Spirits needed that lift, too, in the wake of World War I and its death toll of fifteen Salem sons in Europe; a ravaging flu epidemic that killed fourteen at home; and a 1921 fire that snuffed out a promising role in higher education for Elizabeth College in its twelfth year.

Then came the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. Salem weathered both better than many other towns its size. From the struggle and suffering arose new signs of growth and progress -- new Andrew Lewis High School provided an educational milestone; opening of the Veterans Administration facility, an economic bonanza; and development of Municipal Field and a golf course, a recreational uplift.

The World War II era, with its pall of heavy local casualties and absorbing claims on the home front, was marked by an underlying determination to keep life on as even a keel as possible. Business and industries expanded, and new ones began arriving. Some are still important to the economy: Graham-White Manufacturing, Rowe Furniture. Valleydale Foods, and the successor to Frigid Freeze Food, PYA-Monarch.

Overshadowed by spectacular economic gains at home, a fourth war with a claim on the people of Salem -- this one in far-away Korea in the early 1950s -- received only passing emotional attention from those not directly involved.

General Electric arrived in 1955 to become a continuing major employer; Mechanical Development Co., starting up in a home basement workshop, built its first manufacturing facility in 1954, leading later to a prosperous spin-off, Medeco Security Locks; and an old business, Ortho-Vent Shoe Co. began its transformation first to Start McGuire, in an expansive new physical plant, and eventually to Home Shopping Network.

Interstate highways eclipsed the direct importance of the railroad to Salem in the 1960s, when passenger service was discontinued and the NW station closed. By the 80s, three exits tied Salem to I-81, which roughly followed the historic corridor of the Great Road and its Wilderness Road extension westward.

Until 1870, the town geographically was confined to a small horizontal rectangle astride downtown Main Street. Substantive expansion began during the land boom in 1890, with southerly and northwesterly extensions. The pace was accelerated in 1953 by annexation of South Salem and in 1960 by addition of an eastern tract that established today's joint border with neighboring Roanoke.

After winning more than six square miles of territory and 4,369 new residents by annexation Jan. 1, 1967, Salem staunchly resisted several maneuvers for consolidation with Roanoke and Roanoke County and startled most everyone with its unheralded decision to become an independent city, a new status that became effective the first of 1968.

Relations have never been the same since between Roanoke County and the county seat. A muted estrangement has resulted in the county's relocating administrative headquarters and peripheral physical and service facilities outside the city. The county's legal and judicial home, however, remains enshrined in a spacious, modernistic courthouse a few feet from the Main Street site of the original, and in more recent years the old courthouse became the property of Roanoke College. .

Changes of widespread impact have occurred during twenty years as a city, including a high quality, independent school system and an array of modern municipal facilities such as the high school, stadium, the Moyer Sports Complex, courthouse, modern headquarters for police and fire departments and, most recently, the new Salem Baseball Stadium.

Just how far Salem has come can be measured by the fact that city officials are operating under a budget of 65 million dollars, compared to the $7.40 in the treasury in 1870.

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The Salem Historical Society, with this issue of Historic Salem, launches a new publishing enterprise that the Society hopes will add significantly to public interest in Salem's history and to the quality of life of the area.

Salem holds a unique historical position in the region. Established at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the nation was brand new and the region was part of the frontier, it is the oldest community in the Roanoke Valley. It was situated on the "Great Road West," a passage that had enormous influence on the development not only of the town but of the nation, as a steady stream of pioneers moved along it--along our Main Street--in covered wagons, on horses, and on foot heading for Kentucky, Tennessee and points beyond, to settle a new nation.

It is our plan that Historic Salem, like this first issue, will be an eight-page tabloid-size publication, to be published each summer, fall, winter and spring. Initially, we are distributing ten thousand copies of each issue free of charge to public buildings, businesses, hotels/motels, restaurants and other gathering places throughout the Salem area, where citizens and visitors may pick them up.

Each issue will feature articles, pictures and special reports about activities of historical interest in the Salem area. This first issue seeks to emphasize the history of Salem since its founding, with an article by Salem's most noted historian, Norwood Middleton, and the "Time-Line" of important dates in the community's history. The Historic Salem Walking Tour, with attendant map prepared by Salemite Jennifer Joiner, will be a feature of future issues, perhaps modified and improved according to experience. Each publication also will carry a seasonal listing of scheduled community activities in the Salem area, as well as special features and shorter items of historical and community interest. Our advertisers make the publication possible, and we hope readers will support them.

The Society invites readers' comments, suggestions for future articles, and criticisms of current ones. Letters to the editor are solicited. Above all, we will welcome your interest and support.

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