Guide to Historical Salem

A Guide to Historic Salem -- Volume 6, Number 2 -- Summer 2000

Civil War History Text Triggered National Uproar
Ten U.S. Presidents Visited Salem
An Erroneous Poem
1797 Visit
Radio Was First Information Superhighway
Local Boy Scouts Celebrate 85th Year

Civil War History Text Triggered National Uproar
Judge condemned Book's 'Lies and Slander'

By Sara Murphy

The Civil War, some say, has never ended. Long standing and often bitter debates over the Confederate flag or portraits of Robert E. Lee still make national headlines nearly 140 years after the guns fell silent. But some may not realize that this is far from a new development. Salem was the scene of just such a battle over how to preserve and present the facts of the past as far back as 1911.

Roanoke College was the center of the storm; specifically one Professor Herman J. Thorstenberg. He was assigned to teach a new freshman course in American History, and as usual, Thorstenberg was given the customary freedom to choose a text for his class. The book he adopted was Henry W. Elson's History of the United States. Although Thorstenberg would later assert that he did not agree with all the points Elson made, he felt that he was capable of teaching around any controversial statements from the text by simply presenting the other side of issues and having students discuss them. So far, nothing was out of the ordinary. Professors at Roanoke College were not (and are not today) required to obtain approval from the administration in choosing texts.

The story took a sudden turn when Judge William Walter Moffett was one day confined to his home due to illness. Moffett had presided over the 20th Virginia Circuit Court since 1906, and had been a member of Roanoke College's Board of Trustees since 1902. At home that fateful day, sick and suffering from a fit of boredom, he picked up the Elson history text belonging to his daughter, Sarah Moffett. Sarah was a "special student," the term used for the occasional woman who was allowed to enroll at Roanoke.

The judge's choice of reading material did not help him feel better. To put it mildly, Moffett found Elson's interpretation of Civil War history less than flattering to the southern cause. Some of the incriminating passages claimed that "a slave woman was a prostitute to her master, that her children bare the stamp of his countenance; and yet according to the inflexible rule of the slave states, they shared the condition of the mother, and were sold by their own father." Other objectionable passages asserted that the defining cause of the Civil War was slavery and not states rights, that Virginia had to be reluctantly persuaded to join the Confederacy, and that John Brown's prewar actions were defensible.

Moffett found these and other assertions to be slanderous and intolerable "because they seemed to cast ignoble reflections upon southern manhood and womanhood, and upon the South in general," according to William Eisenberg's 1942 centennial history of the school. Inflamed with passion, Moffett would listen to no defense of Elson's arguments; that in fact some slave owners did father children by their slaves and kept their own children in bondage, that slavery was an undeniable issue leading to the War Between the States, and that Virginia was among the last states to join the Confederacy. Rather than agree to disagree," Moffett set out on crusade in defense of the Lost Cause.

Judge Moffett immediately went to the president of the college, Dr. John Alfred Morehead, with his complaint. Dr. Morehead addressed the issue without delay to Dr. Thorstenberg.

The instructor replied that he used "the book as one of several means of instruction, in such fashion that nothing unfavorable to the South would actually be taught in the classroom." Dr. Morehead relayed the information back to Judge Moffett and informed him to let the matter be, that any professor is the authority in his own classroom, not the text, and Dr. Thorstenberg was within his rights in selecting any text for his course.

This was not enough for the judge and his growing band of supporters. To Judge Moffett, the "lies and the slanders of the text rendered it totally unfit for study purposes, while any author who dared write such things was wholly unreliable as an historian; any professor who deliberately chose to have southern boys and girl contaminated by the study of such 'vile' and 'obnoxious' materials, was absolutely unfit for his position, as the very nature of his choice was all revealing of the very nature of his character." Moffett was determined to stop the use of Elson's text, if not to have Dr. Thorstenberg removed from his position.

Battle lines were thus drawn: for Moffett and his supporters it was a matter of southern pride; for the school it was a question of academic freedom.

News of the Elson History Controversy did not long remain between the College officials and Judge Moffett. The story spread throughout the community, throughout the state and up and down the East Coast. Dr. Morehead was out of town on business when he heard news from the press concerning the controversy. Several letters between the judge, the president and the professor ensued.

Moffett objected to the text as a concerned father and restated his objections. He concluded his letter, "Virginians -- I might say the best people of this entire nation, north and south, east and west -- have long ago refused to inhale the stench which arises from books less vile than this." In replying to a letter from Dr. Thorstenberg, Judge Moffett demanded that the Elson text no longer be used in the classroom: "Elson has attempted to create the impression that cruelty, barbarity, and immorality generally prevailed throughout the South . . . this unwarranted charge by which Elson undertakes to show this unholy and corrupt relationship existed generally between the master and his slave women, of all his outrageous, abominable, and hellish lies caps the climax".

Feeling fully infuriated with the whole affair, and not yet receiving the clear, concise answer he demanded, Judge Moffett then went to the Roanoke Times to tell his story. The Times carried a front page article on 28 February 1911: "Roanoke College Center of Storm; United States History in Use Describes War as Slaveholder's Rebellion; Veterans are Warm; People Stirred Up; Judge Moffett, Trustee and Patron has Correspondence with Professor Thorstenberg; Students May Be Withdrawn and Confederate Camps Protest."

As passions flared on both sides, a meeting of the Board of Trustees was called for March 7, 1911. Faced with the growing fervor and threats of riots, the Board decided to ban the use of Elson's History of the United States at Roanoke College. In a Roanoke Times on 8 March 1911 in The Editorial the comment, "The Trustees and Professor Thorstenberg acted wisely in deciding to use the Elson History text no more," and the matter should have been considered closed.

However, Moffett was still not satisfied. According to Eisenberg, the judge inexplicably considered the board's decision "a personal vindication for Professor Thorstenberg, rather than for himself, and that the Elson text, while officially dropped, had not been officially anathematized." Having already withdrawn his daughter from the school, Moffett now resigned from the Board of Trustees. However, he continued to appeal for further sympathy and support from Confederate veterans, from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and from Chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Newspapers from New York to New Orleans continued to run editorials on the subject. As a result, sales of Elson's book skyrocketed around the nation.

The college, however, chose to react by not reacting, feeling the whole matter should have ended long ago.

But when the controversy failed to abate, President Morehead was forced to issue a statement. On May 11, he released an impassioned defense of academic freedom. "There can be no loyalty to the truth in scholarly work without the freedom to investigate, to think, to review all phases of a subject&emdash;the truths, the half-truths, and the untruths about it&emdash;and to form and to express independent judgments." While this did little to assuage his opponents, the fact that school was soon out for the summer allowed Roanoke College's "Civil War II" to slowly die out.

The controversy was not without effect. Although President Morehead was ultimately vindicated in his defense of academic freedom, he had lost immense support in the region. Fundraising for the college from the south was virtually at an end. Professor Thorstenberg, for his part, left Salem in 1912, no doubt with a distinct sense of relief.

There is an interesting side note to the story, recorded by Dr. Eisenberg in his centennial history. It seems that prior to Dr. Thorstenberg's being hired, Dr. Morehead had offered the position of history professor to none other than Henry Elson himself. Imagine what Moffett would have done if Elson had accepted!

top

Ten U.S. Presidents Visited Salem
'Old Hickory' Was Frequent Visitor

In this presidential election year, it seems appropriate to recall that at least ten presidents of the United States have come to Salem throughout its history..

Because of its location on a major road, it is probable that most American presidents have passed through what is now Salem at one time or another &endash; by foot, horse, automobile and train -- before, during or after their presidencies.

But the historical record seems to show some details of visits by these ten &endash; ranging from George Washington to George Bush. They came before, during and after their terms as president, and, reflecting improved transportation, they seem to have come with increasing frequency in recent years.

The ten: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George Bush. There probably are others.

Washington paid his visit long before Salem even existed as a town or city, even before Andrew Lewis built his famous home here. Washington was a colonel in the colonial militia when he traveled through what is now Salem, enroute to Fort Vause (or Fort Voss) at Shawsville during an inspection of tour of frontier forts. Despite the fact that Washington wrote a rather extensive report of the trip, published in Kegley's Virginia Frontier, he unfortunately does not tell where he may have stopped along the way as he passed through. So we know little to nothing of how he fared, except that the trip generally went well.

After Washington, Andrew Jackson seems to be the earliest, as well as most frequent and most reported, presidential visitor. Old Hickory made a habit of stopping in Salem (which was chartered in 1802) early in the19th century on trips back and forth along the Great Road (also called the Wilderness Road) between his home -- The Hermitage near Nashville -- and Washington. Several of his visits are reported in Norwood Middleton's Salem, A Virginia Chronicle.

In July, 1807, on one of his earlier visits, Jackson stopped at the Mermaid Tavern, Salem's most popular inn at the time, located on the town's west end, about where Burwell and Chestnut Streets intersect today. At 40, Jackson already had served as congressman and senator from the new state of Tennessee but was then a private citizen and land speculator. He may have stopped because the Mermaid's owner, Griffin Lamkin (son-in-law of Salem's founder James Simpson) was a promoter of horse racing and at one point operated a three-quarter mile track near the tavern; Jackson was a racing enthusiast, owning a prize race horse which earned him considerable money. Jackson wrote a letter from the Mermaid -- (never excessively literate, he spelled it "Mair Maid," just as he often spelled the town's name "Salum") &endash; to a Fincastle lawyer who was a state legislator in Richmond. He dated the letter July 2, but the dispatch date was July 7, which probably says much about Salem's mail and stage service at the time.

Some 27 years later, Jackson made a most unpleasant trip through Salem, in July, 1834, when he was 67 years old and in his second term as President. Jackson wrote a letter about the trip, reporting he had suffered "great detention on the road owing to heavy falls of rain & intolerable bad roads and lastly by a severe attack of billious collick that detained me three days at Doctor Johnsons near Salem."

Two years later, in his last year as President, Jackson had even more misfortune on Salem's roads. Staying again with Dr. John Johnston (who lived at the Great Spring &endash; now Lake Spring in Salem), he wrote his son, "I am thus far on my way to the Hermitage, but from the State of the roads, there can be no calculation made when we may reach there &endash; it took us seven hours to day to travel 10 miles, and in the Streets of Salum broke a swingle tree and the fore axes of the Carriage &endash; in many places it takes ten horses to pull through the bog one waggon &endash; in this section of country it has been raining for 14 to 16 days and the earth is perfectly full of water, we shall proceed on as early as tomorrow as we canÉwe are determined to leave the old road and take a new one by way of Peppers ferryÉI shall write you again from Abingdon."

Chronologically, our next two presidents-to-be to visit Salem both came in the Union Army when it was attacked in the Battle of Hanging Rock. They were Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley who were to become the nation's 19th and 25th presidents, respectively.

It was June 21, 1864. Hayes, who already had had been wounded several times and had several horses shot out from under him, was a colonel in the 23rd Ohio Infantry under Union Major General David Hunter when it retreated through Salem. McKinley was a fast rising young captain in the same unit. Their retreating army was overtaken and attacked at Hanging Rock by Brigadier General John McCausland's cavalry of Jubal Early's command but managed to escape with the loss of a handful of men and several artillery pieces.

The experience obviously made a lasting impression on Hayes. Some 21 years later, when he was President, Hayes returned to Salem, by train, winding up a 19-day goodwill tour of Kentucky, Tennessee Georgia and Virginia. "I recollect passing through here once before, but under less favorable circumstances," he told a Roanoke College reporter for the Roanoke Collegian at the Salem depot. A Fincastle reporter quoted Hayes as saying he had been at Salem during the war "and was as glad the war was over as any other man."

That was on Monday morning, September 24, 1877. Middleton's history reports that with Hayes were Vice President William A. Wheeler and Secretary of State William M. Evarts, as well as his family and Governor Wade Hampton of South Carolina. A crowd, including students and several hundred African Americans, were at the depot to meet them.

"Mr. Hayes arose with much composure and dignity, lifted his silk hat, and got ready to make a speech," The Fincastle Record reported of the occasion. "A look of expectancy played over his face. He thought he would be received like Mr. Grant was in London, but no one said a word; and the President looked intently down on the colored women, and then on the students. He waited awhile for some one to speak, but the crowd was looking too far to the front (of the train)É"

Hayes asked what county Salem was in, and several African Americans told him, "Roanoke." 'This the Roanoke River?' Hayes asked. 'Yes,' answered severalÉ" Voices "were crying out, 'Hayes, Hayes,'" the Fincastle newspaper reported. "Whereupon Mr. Hayes introduced the Secretary of State, Mr. Evarts." But, Middleton tells us, there was no speech and the train moved off.

Hayes had been elected president the preceding year on a disputed electoral vote while losing the popular vote. He wrote in his diary that on the trip that brought him to Salem he was "received everywhere heartily" and that he found "the country is again one and united."

There is no record of McKinley's ever having made a return trip to Salem after the war. Although he had survived the bullets of Hanging Rock, he was assassinated in Buffalo, NY, in his second term as president in September, 1901.

An erroneous report has circulated for years that there were three, not two, future American presidents in the Union Army at Hanging Rock. Dr. Albert J. Russo of Salem even wrote a poem entitled "Three Presidents at Hanging Rock." [See poem elsewhere on this page.] The third (and erroneously reported) president-to-be who supposedly was at Hanging Rock was James A. Garfield, who succeeded Hayes as president. Garfield was another Ohio boy who, indeed, had fought in the Union army, heading a Union brigade that drove invading Confederates from eastern Kentucky early in the war. But well before Hanging Rock he resigned from the army to enter the U.S. House of Representatives, to which he had been elected in 1862. Like McKinley, by coincidence, Garfield also was assassinated. He was shot in Washington railroad station in July, 1881, only four months after taking office, and died two months later.

After a hiatus of nearly 60 years in reported presidential visits, Franklin D. Roosevelt came to call on October 19, 1934, to dedicate the Veterans Hospital. It was one of the most momentous occasions in Salem's history. Planting on four sections of the median parkway on the Boulevard were groomed and curbing installed as part of the preparation.

FDR came to Salem in a motorcade from downtown Roanoke via Lee Highway, turning north on College Avenue to the Boulevard, northwest on Boulevard to Market and Main, east on Main to College, south on College to the Boulevard, and to the hospital. Cheering crowds, including flag-waving school children, lined the streets; a banner on Main Street proclaimed THE PRESIDENT HERE TODAY, and patriotic bunting was everywhere, as the procession of cars moved through the town. At the hospital grounds, some 40,000 persons gathered to hear the President speak.

Roosevelt told the crowd that "the men who will occupy this hospital will be your friends and neighbors. I commend them to your care." Afterward, Roosevelt returned to Salem to depart from the town's Norfolk & Western Railway passenger station. There he received another warm welcome, with Boy Scouts serving as an honor guard and as Salem Mayor Wilbur R. Cross and other dignitaries escorted him to his waiting train.

Because Roanoke people treated the dedication almost as an exclusively Roanoke occasion, the visit aggravated some of the tension existing between Roanoke and Salem, according to Middleton. Salem folks speculated that the President actually spent more time in Salem than in Roanoke. The Salem newspaper deplored the noticeable absence of mention of Salem, even as a joint host with Roanoke: "It wouldn't have taken away any of the glory from Roanoke City, and it would have shown a kindly, friendly spirit toward a neighbor."

President Richard M. Nixon, the next presidential visitor in our pantheon, did not make any such mistake when he came to speak at the Salem Civic Center on October 28, 1969, at a rally for Republican gubernatorial candidate Linwood Holton.

After giving the crowd that met him at the airport the old Nixon trademark &endash; the arms-raised, hand-flinging V-sign &endash; he bantered with the 6,000 people crowding the Civic Center and told them, "It's great to be back in the Roanoke Valley," then added: "By the way, I realize I'm in Salem, not Roanoke." It brought a burst of applause and laughter from partisan Salem folks and a streamer headline in the Salem Times-Register."

The crowd was overwhelmingly pro-Nixon &endash; one banner announced "Happiness is Having President Nixon in Salem" &endash; but not all: a small group of peace demonstrators brandished "Get-Out-of-Vietnam" sentiments outside.

Although Nixon was billed in 1969 as the only President to visit the Valley since FDR, two Presidents-to-be actually had come to town during the hiatus, when no one could possibly have predicted they would later become Presidents.

Film star and TV personality Ronald Reagan, who succeeded Jimmy Carter as President in1981, came to Salem on March 15, 1957, in a public relations tour promoting the GE plant and the GE Theatre TV program, of which Reagan was then the host. And House Minority Leader Gerald Ford, who later became vice president under Nixon and president after that, highlighted the Sixth District Republican Convention June 29, 1968, at the Salem Civic Center to promote a successful reelection bid by fellow Congressman Richard H. Poff.

Still later, former President Jimmy Carter and George Bush also visited Salem, Carter in 1984, Bush earlier this year. Carter visited Roanoke College on April 10, 1984, and spoke to about 2,500 in the college's Bast Center, bashing the Republicans in general and Ronald Reagan in particular. Bush, the last on the list, spoke at the Salem Civic Center February 23 of this year, urging people to support his son, George W., for President.

Who knows what boy or girl sitting in a Salem school might be the next chapter in Salem presidential history?

top

An Erroneous Poem

On the outskirts of Salem, Virginia,
In the Civil War's '64
History was being made,
Three future Presidents were in the roar.

Hayes, Garfield, McKinley&endash;
General Averell retreated for no gains,
Land trap held by Rebel's McCausland;
Cannons shot up troops and wagon trains.

Hayes, Garfield, McKinley
Fought the good fight at Hanging Rock,
Wonder it is they survived
So history could tell and talk.

Captain McKinley lived through Hanging Rocks holocaust;
As President McKinley he signed into laws
Panama Canal and the Great White Fleet,
Our luck was better than it ever was.

Never in the battle's fitful fight
Had three men destined to be
President of these United States
All survived to set their enemies free.

It is fitting that these three soldiers
With military and political ties
Knew Hanging Rock's fight and freedom&endash;
That on this Rock history lies.

This poem helped spread the erroneous belief that there were three, rather than two, future U.S. Presidents in the Union army engaged in the Battle of Hanging Rock in the Civil War. Hayes and McKinley were, in fact, at Hanging Rock. However, Garfield was not. The misconception probably developed because Garfield once had fought with these same Ohio units. He had resigned from the army, however, before Hanging Rock was fought, to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. The widely published poem reportedly was written by Dr. Albert J. Russo.

top

1797 Visit
Future King of France Unimpressed by Salem
Salem's Preston Place: Did Louis Phillippe stay here?

Although he was never a President, one of Salem's most illustrious early visitors later became king of France.

He was Louis Phillippe, exiled duc d'Orleans, who had deserted France in 1793 to escape the excesses of the French revolution and spent more than three years traveling in America. Destined to serve as king of France from 1830 to 1848, he came down the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of 1797 through Fincastle and on to what is now Salem, following an itinerary mapped out for them by George Washington. His party, which included his two brothers, the Count de Montpensier and Count Beaugolis, passed through this area April 19-20, 1797 &endash; five years before Salem became a town.

They were not particularly impressed.

They dined at the home of a Mr. Coles, whom Louis Phillippe described in his diary as "a Pennsylvania German." Deedie Kagey in her History of Roanoke County says "the reference to Coles placed Louis Phillippe in Salem."

The countryside around Cole's home, Louis Phillippe wrote, was "unimpressive except here and there."

As disparaging as he was of the countryside here, he was even more critical of the people he met. Immediately before arriving in Salem, he and his party had stayed at Bott's tavern on what is today U.S. 220 near Daleville in Roanoke County. There, he wrote in his diary, "we found ourselves among a large group of travelersÉ headed for Kentucky and uneasy about the latest massacre by the Indians. In their anxiety they wanted us to swell their number, but we ignored the plea, knowing all too well the miseries such a crowd could cause in the region's tiny innsÉ Nothing is more boring than bored people who want to talk and have nothing to talk about. During the three hours they made us wait, as usual, for a few slices of fried ham and coffee with brown sugar, there were some who never shut up for a moment and others who never said a word but could not stop yawning, scratching, [and] belching."

Louis Philippe did say something nice, however, about the country to the immediate west &endash; Bent Mountain and the Shawsville area-- where he traveled after leaving Mr. Coles'. "We crossed the river Raunoake six times and went to sleep at Colonel Lewis's, two miles above Colonel Hancock," he wrote. Colonel Lewis' home was "a pleasant place and comfortable place. His house is charmingly set on a foothill of the Alleghanys and surrounded by lush meadows. In the old days there was a fort here that was captured by Indians."

It can be assumed that the river crossings occurred around Lafayette, and that Hancock's place is Fotheringay, which stands today between Shawsville and Elliston.. The "Colonel Lewis" was Andrew Lewis, fourth son of General Andrew Lewis, who, with his wife Agatha Madison, cousin of President Madison, hosted a number of notables of the time at their impressive home, "Bent House" on Bent Mountain. The fort was Fort Voss near Shawsville.

It is worth conjecturing that Mr. Coles' house, where the royal group spent the night, might be the red brick home that still stands today as "Preston Place," the home of Dr. Esther Clark Brown and her husband Ray Brown at 1936 West Main Street in Salem. According to research by Leah Russell, Registrar and Associate Dean at Roanoke College, that property (which today is surrounded by a strip mall, restaurants, motel and WalMart) was sold in 1788 to John Cole, a blacksmith, who kept it for more than 30 years. The house itself was probably built before 1830.

(It is also possible that Louis Phillippe's visit to Mr. Coles preceded by one year another visit to the same place by Davy Crockett, the famous frontiersman. Crockett wrote in his autobiography that in 1798, at age 12, on a trip to Tennessee, he, too, spent the night "at the house of a Mr. John Cole on Roanoke.")

Both possibilities must be recognized as highly conjectural. Most homes in this area before 1800 were made of logs or wood; few were made of brick, as was Preston Place. Another possibility is that the notable visitors stayed in an earlier, wooden home which was Cole's home before the red brick home was built.

top

Radio Was First Information Superhighway

Tom hurried home from his afternoon job, eager to set up his new equipment. He had saved for months to buy it, and now he was overjoyed to be finally entering the modern age. As he began to make the necessary connections, Tom reflected that this new technology would bring the world into his home&emdash;an amazing amount of news, sports, entertainment, and information right at his fingertips. Of course, Tom knew that technology was changing so quickly that his machine was already outdated, but it would suit his purposes. He finally had his. . .

New computer with internet capabilities?

No. It's 1924, and Tom has just tuned in his new radio&emdash;America's first

information superhighway. The comparisons between the radio fad of the 20's and the internet today abound. The technology changed with unbelievable speed. Parents didn't

fully understand their children's fascination with it. Users could "bookmark" their favorite "sites"-- even if that only meant writing an AM frequency on a paper tuning dial.

A new long-term exhibit by the Salem Museum returns visitors to the day when the hot new technology was radio, when eager boys discussed not RAM and HTML but superheterodyne and vacuum tubes. Based on a summer exhibit from 1998, "Making Waves: The Valley's Radio History" looks at not only the development of the medium in its early days, but the way radio evolved in the Roanoke Valley.

"When we saw the response from the summer exhibit two years ago, we started thinking about a longer-running version," said Museum Director Mary Hill. "This year, when we retired a long term exhibit on Lake Spring Hotel, we decided to revisit the subject of radio."

"The exhibit really tells two different stories," said curator John Long. The first story is the development of radio on the production end, in the studios. Begun more as a scientific hobby and a military tool, radio didn't become a mass medium until after World War I.

The Roanoke Valley got in early on the new fad. Roanoke's first professional radio station, WDBJ, broadcast its inaugural program on June 20, 1924 with Ray Jordan fiddling "Turkey in the Straw." Few would have suspected what radio in the valley would become. In fact, few could have even heard it.

At that time, S.H. McVitty, a prominent Salem businessman, was the only person in the area to own a factory-made radio set. When the McVittys called the station and let WDBJ know that the program came through, "we thought it was a big thing," said Jordan, who later became WDBJ's station manager. WDBJ was the second station to emerge in the entire state of Virginia, broadcasting at 20 watts for about two hours each day. For a quick comparison, WDBJ's offspring WFIR is now one of over twenty stations in the Roanoke Valley and broadcasts at 5000 watts 24 hours daily.

In the early days, recorded music was far from the norm for radio stations. Instead, live broadcasts featuring local groups comprised the bulk of the programming. "A lot of local celebrities got their start doing live broadcasts, like Glenwood Howell, Woody Mashburn, Roy Hall, and of course Irv Sharp," said Long. A series of pictures, courtesy of the Blue Ridge Institute in Ferrum, VA, tells the story of live country radio, and an interactive sound system allows visitors to step back in time and hear snippets of their music.

The second story told by the exhibit is the evolution of radio on the receiving end, in people's living rooms. As radio became more widespread, the equipment naturally changed. The earliest set on display is an Army receiver that only received Morse code messages. Few people saw a practical home use for radio. But as radio found its voice, hobbyists assembled sets that looked like something from Dr. Frankenstein's lab. Later, when radio was truly a mass medium, the wires and tubes and obtrusive horn speakers were hidden in handsome mahogany boxes and cathedral cases. As radio became a part of everyday life, radios became a part of the furniture.

The exhibit culminates around the middle 1950s, with the birth of Salem's own WBLU. About the same time, a confluence of developments was changing the nature of radio. First, transistors began to come into wide use, making radios smaller, clearer, and more portable. In addition, a new format, FM, was beginning to appear. The innovative style of rock and roll, combined with better recording technology, marked the phase-out of live country music groups that had been the staple of Roanoke radio. And most importantly, the new technology of television began to supplant radios as the center piece in living rooms.

"Radio didn't go away," said Hill, " and it never will, but an era had passed. We hope this exhibit will bring back a few memories and show kids what their grandparents experienced."

top

Local Boy Scouts Celebrate 85th Year
One hundred million teenage boys can't be wrong.

Well, they can be, but not about this. Earlier this year, the one hundred millionth youth joined the Boy Scouts of America. Statistically, the organization decided that it was a boy in New York State, but who knows? Maybe he was right here in Salem.

Meanwhile, local scouts and scouters in the year 2000 are celebrating their own set of round numbers: 90, 85, 70, 50, 25. Each of these represents a significant anniversary: the Boy Scouts of America is 90 years old; the local council, the Blue Ridge Mountains Council, is 85 (as is the Order of the Arrow, the Scout's fraternity for honor

campers); Cub Scouting for younger kids dates back 70 years; Camp Powhatan in Pulaski County, dear to the hearts of all local scouts, is 50; and the affiliated trail camp, High Knoll, is 25. Such a confluence of anniversaries is worthy of celebration, but more so are the positive ideals that Scouting has imparted to 100 million youth over the past nine decades.

The Boy Scout tradition traces its heritage back to Lord Robert Baden-Powell, a British military hero, who discovered after his return from the Boer War that London boys were intrigued with the wilderness training to which he had subjected his soldiers. Baden-Powell began a club he called Boy Scouts to teach not only practical outdoor skills but also the values of loyalty, honesty, and service.

Scouting crossed the Atlantic as a result of a random act of kindness. In 1909, American businessman William Boyce found himself lost in a London fog. Spying a boy, he asked him for directions; the boy personally took Boyce to his destination. When Boyce offered him a tip, this "Unknown Scout" declined, saying that he was a Scout and could accept no reward for a good turn. Impressed, Boyce made inquiries into Baden-Powell's program and, with the help of such dedicated men as Ernest Seton Thompson and Daniel Beard, determined to institute such a program in America. On February 8, 1910, the Boy Scouts of America was born.

American Scouting was scarcely a year old when our area jumped aboard. On March 2, 1911, Salem Troop I was established by beloved local physician George M. Maxwell, with a charter membership of eight boys. Affiliated with Salem Presbyterian Church, their activities included religious instruction along with Scout skills: one young scout earned a free camping trip by reciting the Shorter Catechism to Maxwell. Camping and outdoor activities were, as today, the chief attraction. In 1911, the Maxwell's troop hiked to Mountain Lake and back; in 1913, it was a week long trip to Crockett Springs (now Alta Mons, the Methodist church camp in Shawsville), again walking the whole way. One early member of Troop I was Charlie Hammitt, who in the 1920's would become a nationally known actor and model, appearing in dozens of silent films.

Early scouting programs like Troop I (soon followed by Troop II) were less structured and more autonomous than was ideal. Scoutmasters could receive some guidance from the national office, but for the most part were left to improvise on programs and activities. To be truly effective, it was being discovered across the nation, scout troops needed to be part of a local council. For that reason, in 1915 a group of 38 dedicated civic leaders met in Roanoke to discuss forming a more structured organization to unite area scout troops. From this effort came the Roanoke Council, overseeing scouting in the Roanoke/Salem area.

By the 1930's, the council's jurisdiction encompassed virtually all of western Virginia, a fact reflected in the 1953 name change to Blue Ridge Council. Still later, in 1972, it merged with the Lynchburg area's Piedmont Council and added one word to their title to become today's Blue Ridge Mountains Council.

The new council had several immediate challenges. One was addressing an inexplicable drop-off in Salem scouting. Following World War I, the Salem troops had largely died out. A few small scouting programs continued into the early 20's, but in 1926, according to legend, something very similar to William Boyce's London meeting reinvigorated the movement. W. R. Cross, a Salem businessman, enlisted the help of two Roanoke boys to change a flat tire for him. Like the Unknown Scout, these boys declined payment. Impressed, Cross invited Roanoke Council executive D. D. Withers to address a meeting of the Salem Kiwanis.

Withers urged them to take the lead in sponsoring new Salem scout troops. From this effort eventually came Troops 50 through 55, scattered throughout town in various churches and at Roanoke College. Another early order of business for the council was to acquire a permanent place for council troops to camp. In 1919, they settled, for the next thirty years, on the original Camp Powhatan near Natural Bridge. But by 1949, having weathered two world wars and a depression, the Roanoke Council had outgrown this site, and it was abandoned in favor of new digs on Max Creek in Pulaski County. "New" Camp Powhatan, 400 acres of mountain forest (soon including a seven-acre lake), was opened a half century ago, in 1950.

It did not escape the attention of council leaders, however, that there was plenty more land in the neighborhood. Surrounding Camp Powhatan was an additional 15,000 acres owned by Radford College. The land had once been part of an iron mining concern (any scout who has ever tasted the water at Powhatan can attest to the presence of iron), and later was mined for a type of natural pigment found in the local shale. In 1934, the land was bequeathed to Radford College; but in 1959 that school was looking to buy a pipe organ for its chapel.

To raise the necessary funds, Radford obtained permission to sell off its Max Creek land, and the scout council was quick to make an offer of $56,000. This bid narrowly edged out the competition, and thus the Blue Ridge Council came into possession of the largest council-owned scout reservation in the United States. Tens of thousands of scouts have put the land to good use.

In 1962, a second camp, Ottari, was opened on the reservation to accommodate the 8,000 or so scouts in the council. In 1975, at the urging of several Powhatan staff members, a trail camp, High Knoll, opened to rave reviews. Scouts spend a week on High Knoll hiking 50 miles and visiting a number of outposts along the trail to learn outdoor skills. More recently, the reservation has added a first-rate ropes course, a weeklong fishing camp, a high- adventure program on the New River, and a Claytor Lake aquatics program. The Blue Ridge Mountains Scout Reservation today attracts not just area troops, but eager boys from across the nation (and more than a few international scouts).

Much of this growth has been made possible by a new revenue resource. For years, the Girl Scouts have been known for their fundraising cookie sales; the Boy Scouts finally found their equivalent in popcorn. Popcorn sales have helped pay for these expanded programs, as well as a new dining hall at Powhatan, new campsites and showers, and other improvements.

The future of scouting, as it begins its tenth decade and sets out to recruit its second hundred million members, seems as bright as ever, and its timeless values securely invested in the next generation.

top