Big Lick Historical Archives

Good Morning, beautiful !

🛝Lakewood Park, located in southwest Roanoke, takes its name from a small, picturesque pond that became a favorite neighborhood ice-skating spot in the 1950s and 1960s. Originally part of Roanoke County, the surrounding neighborhood was developed in the late 1920s and was officially annexed by the City of Roanoke in 1942.

🏠In the late 1920s, the area was promoted as “Lakewood Colony,” an exclusive, invitation-only residential development associated with prominent Roanoke businessman E. R. Johnson. Built around 1927, Lindisfarne—an imposing English Tudor mansion—was constructed for Johnson, a lead investor in the Lakewood development and an operator of commissaries along the Norfolk and Western Railway. With its classic Tudor design, the property has long been regarded as one of the finest Tudor Revival homes in the Roanoke Valley. It is truly is a glorious home.

📈The 1942 annexation brought this then-sparsely populated county land into the city and helped set the stage for the neighborhood’s residential growth. In the following decade, Lakewood Park emerged as a beloved open-air winter destination: when temperatures held, residents would bring their own skates and glide across a flooded section of the park that froze naturally near the historic Old Stone House.

🦆In the 1950s & 1960s , families would buy baby chicks at 5 & dime stores a few weeks before Easter, and then the week of Easter they would let them go in Lakewood Pond. One other anecdote is that the ducks, once mature, were used as a Thanksgiving meal for the inmates in the city jail.

🌳By mid-century, the pond had become a well-known community focal point, drawing locals back each winter for skating. Today, maintained by Roanoke Parks and Recreation, Lakewood Park remains a tranquil gathering place with green space, sports facilities, and walking paths.

Today is June 6th—D‑Day— and back then it was the kind of news that made a whole place go quiet.

In the Roanoke Valley, people heard it on the radio, saw it in extra papers, and felt two things at once: relief that the war was finally turning, and dread because they knew what an invasion would cost. Roanoke’s rails and shops were already running hard for the war effort, but after D‑Day the stakes felt closer—more worry over sons and spouses overseas, more prayer in churches, more people watching the mailbox and the front porch.

Over time, June 6th became a day the Valley remembers in a personal way—not just as history, but as the moment the war stopped being “somewhere else.”

One book that captures that “small place, huge cost” feeling is “The Bedford Boys” by Alex Kershaw. It tells the true story of young men from Bedford, Virginia—especially Company A of the 116th Regiment—who hit Omaha Beach in the first wave on June 6, 1944. Bedford lost 19 men in the opening minutes and 22 in all, a devastating blow for a town that size. Kershaw uses interviews, letters, and diaries to follow their lives and what their loss did to families back home—courage and sacrifice, but also survivor’s guilt, trauma, and grief that didn’t end when the war did.

Today let’s honor all of the brave humans who have fought to allow us to squabble all over the internet, be hateful to one another with no recourse, and to rage bait and crank people up to the point of spewing vitriol. It seems kinda childish and petty in comparison to the true bravery and selflessness the people fighting for YOU, doesn’t it? We will never see or experience a generation like that again.

I am not trying to make light, but show a serious disconnect between the freedoms people here have and the advantage they take them for. All I ask and hope is that people will take a step back, take a beat, take a breath, and pause. I love all of you, . Let’s set an example and rise about the hate and vitriol and bond over our love of history and Big Lick /Roanoke.

Thanks for reading & remember, kindness costs nothing. Respect the freedoms you have by just being kind.

BLHA



For those interested in purchasing the book on the Bedford Boys, follow the link: https://amzn.to/4fqU1Sl

Happy Tuesday, 💙.

➡️Before your Kroger Points, Food Lion MVP, or Sam’s Club cards, there were S&H green stamps and Top Value Stamps!

🛒In the 1950s, many Roanoke-area retailers participated in trading-stamp promotions, including S&H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps. Shoppers received stamps based on how much they spent—most often at grocery stores, but also at places like drugstores and gas stations—then pasted them into booklets and redeemed filled books for merchandise from a catalog at redemption centers.

🛍️Typical redemption items were practical household goods: dishes and glassware, toys, cookware, towels and small appliances (toasters, irons, mixers), and sometimes larger items depending on the catalog.

🏬The programs peaked in mid-century American retail and declined as stores shifted to different pricing/marketing strategies and the cost of stamps became less attractive to merchants. Top Value Stamps ended in the early 1980s. S&H continued longer and later accepted unredeemed Top Value books after Top Value closed.

Do you remember shopping, collecting, and spending them? I remember my mom had a dollhouse from S & H green stamps and it was metal and had lots of little furniture.

Happy Friday, !

This post is not about “Big Lick/Roanoke”, per se, but something cool a lot of people might not know about! Some around the area might remember when this began construction and then maybe some were surprised when they saw its tall tower on the horizon in the middle of the mountains!

You come around a bend on the Blue Ridge Parkway and—without warning—the trees fall away.

⛰️For miles you’ve been hemmed in by forest, the road lined with trunks and shadow. Then, near Milepost 145, the land opens like a curtain. A broad green field spreads out below the ridge, and beyond it—set back as if it’s trying not to be noticed—rises a pale stone complex that looks as though it was lifted from medieval England and placed gently on a Virginia mountainside.

⛪️ That distant silhouette is Syon Abbey.

It isn’t a tourist stop. There’s no sign pointing you toward it, no gift shop, no welcome center, no helpful plaque telling you what you’re seeing. In fact, that’s part of the point. Syon is an active, cloistered Benedictine monastery—private, gated, and intentionally withdrawn. The community there has chosen solitude with a seriousness that feels almost out of step with the modern world. You’re not meant to wander the grounds. You’re not meant to step inside. You’re meant, at most, to glimpse it—quietly & respectfully—while you keep moving.

And yet it’s hard to keep moving.

✝️ Even from a distance the abbey has a kind of gravity. The church and cloister, completed in 2007, were designed by Cram & Ferguson Architects, drawing inspiration from the broken beauty of ruined English monasteries. The stone is imported Spanish limestone, and it catches the light with a warmth that makes the whole place seem to glow—especially early in the morning or late in the day. A bell tower rises above the complex with a calm, deliberate confidence, and the buildings gather around a courtyard like they’ve been there for centuries.

💙 They haven’t. But they were meant to feel that way. Years ago, you were able to visit by appointment with small group. My mother in law had become involved with a Benectictine sister organization and was able to see it before she passed last year. She said it was so solemn, so quiet, reverent, and something she would never forget. Maybe in the future, they will have small group visits again. It would be so amazing to witness this selfless & deeply personal way of life.

💰The monks purchased roughly 243 acres here in 2001, choosing a rural site near Callaway in Franklin County, about 35 miles south of Roanoke. They built not simply a set of structures, but a world—self-contained, self-sustaining, and shielded from the constant noise of outside life. It’s important to note, too, that this Syon is not the historic Syon Abbey of England, the old Bridgettine house founded in the fifteenth century. This is a newer community with a different lineage, but it carries a name that echoes older monastic history and the idea of a life set apart.

📍If you want the best view, locals will tell you to pull off at Pine Spur Overlook. From there the abbey sits in the distance, unmistakable against the sweep of the land. On a quiet day, you might even hear the bells—faint, but clear enough to make you look up and listen. It’s a strange experience, hearing a monastery you can’t enter, a place you can’t visit, calling out across the mountain air as if to remind the whole ridge that time doesn’t only belong to the hurried.

The Parkway rolls on, and eventually the trees close in again.

🌳But for a moment—just long enough to see pale stone against green, and to feel the hush that seems to surround it—you’re left with the sense that something old still lives up here: the ancient urge to build beauty, to choose silence, and to let the world pass by at a distance. It truly is a glorious wonder to see!

(Photos courtesy of Cram & Ferguson Architects website)

Good Morning, !

In the early 1880s, Roanoke was still learning how to be Roanoke.

Only a breath before the transition to Roanoke in the early 1880s, people called this place Big Lick -a muddy, mineral‑rich crossroads that suddenly found itself sitting in the path of railroads, money, and ambition. New streets appeared. Old landmarks vanished. And the town began trading its rough edges (early railroad years were rambunctious & WILD!) for brick, signage, and a name for the official letterhead.

One of the men with a stake in that transformation was Ferdinand Rorer.

Rorer was a landholder and promoter—one of those figures who shows up whenever a town is turning into a city, full of tons of ideas and willing to try most all of them. His name threads through Roanoke’s early growth stories: property deals, development in the southwest section, industrial schemes tied to the mountains, and even the way the city’s map littered with his family’s names.

In 1881, Rorer put up a showpiece of the moment: the Rorer Park Hotel, standing at 5th Street SW and 4th Avenue SW. It wasn’t just a building—it was a statement. A hotel tells travelers (and locals) that a place expects visitors, expects business, expects tomorrow to be bigger than today. It gives a place a pulse & makes them look alive.

And then—almost as if the city decided it needed not only rooms, but refinement—the hotel became tied to a school.

The boys in this photograph are students of the Alleghany Institute, a preparatory school for boys. The Institute was chartered February 24, 1886, and it would operate until 1897 —a short life, but long enough to leave behind images like this one: young faces and stiff collars, posed in a town that was still inventing itself.

For a time, the school operated in/at the Rorer Park Hotel itself—an arrangement that feels very Roanoke in that era: practical, improvised, and optimistic. Education set up shop wherever walls and space could be found, because the future was arriving fast and people didn’t want to be caught unprepared.

Later, the Institute moved to the site that would become Burrell Memorial Hospital, linking this small, almost-forgotten school to a far more enduring chapter in Roanoke’s story.

So this photograph holds more than a group of students. It holds a slice of the city’s turning point: a developer’s hotel, a school trying to shape young men for a new age & century, and a community shifting—name, streets, and identity—beneath their feet.

There is a lot a city can learn from looking at how past leaders handled a lack of preparation, poor financial trajectories, the challenging social & racial issues thru the decades, and also how they handled education. Roanoke City could only benefit from taking a trip down memory lane.

🇺🇸 Today is Memorial Day. I am going to share the early history of this holiday and some local history as well concerning the day.

🗓️ Memorial Day didn’t start as a long weekend. It started as people showing up at cemeteries to honor their loved ones who have passed in battle.

🥀 After the Civil War, towns across the country began springtime trips to burial grounds to clean plots, lay flowers, and speak names aloud. The custom became known as “Decoration Day”. In 1868, Union veteran leader John A. Logan (Grand Army of the Republic) called for a national observance on May 30. One of the best-known early ceremonies was at Arlington National Cemetery. Over time, remembrance widened beyond the Civil War—especially after World War I—and in 1971 the federal holiday moved to the last Monday in May.

Roanoke’s timeline makes the story interesting. When Decoration Day took hold in the late 1860s, Roanoke as a city didn’t yet exist in its later railroad form. The area was still Big Lick and nearby communities—church-centered, rural, and already used to tending family graves.

So early observances here likely looked less like a parade and more like a gathering at a burial ground:

- A late-spring gathering at a local burying ground
- Graves weeded and reset, sometimes freshly whitewashed fencing or repaired markers
- Flowers brought from yards and fence rows—peonies, iris, wild blooms—laid carefully on known graves and, often, on unknown ones
- A short devotional service: hymns, Scripture, prayer, and a few words about duty, sacrifice, and the hope of resurrection
- A community meal afterward (“dinner on the ground”)

It was a low-key, quiet observation & rememberance.

🚂 Roanoke changed fast in the 1880s and 1890s. The coming of the Norfolk & Western and rapid growth turned Decoration Day into something more scheduled and public—set times, set places, planned speakers.

🪦 A key anchor for those public observances was the rise of Roanoke’s major cemeteries. Fair View Cemetery, established in 1890, quickly became one of the valley’s best-known burial grounds and, over time, a resting place for thousands of veterans from the Civil War forward. Whether the ceremonies were modest or elaborate in any given year, a cemetery like Fair View naturally functioned as a stage for Memorial Day because it held what the day required: names, dates, flags, and the physical proof of sacrifice.

By 1900, Roanoke was keeping May 30 as an annual Decoration Day: cemetery first, Civil War graves thick with flowers, flags, and wreaths—and, often, the city’s public rituals around it.

In these decades, Memorial Day also became a “speech day.” Across the country, the holiday developed a recognizable script: a procession to the cemetery, invocations, music, a keynote address—often from a judge, minister, or veteran officer—and then the laying of flowers and flags. Nationally, veteran organizations like the DAR helped fix that pattern in public life. In growing cities like Roanoke, similar local groups, church leaders, schoolchildren, and civic officials commonly joined in, each adding their own piece: children reciting patriotic verses, brass bands providing solemn hymns and marches, clergy offering prayers, and veterans standing as living witnesses beside the graves.

When we say “events,” it’s easy to picture one big downtown moment. Early Roanoke was usually more like two things happening around the same purpose:

As Roanoke grew, the day picked up the public pieces—speeches, veterans’ groups, music, and sometimes a procession. Even then, it wasn’t really a celebration. It was a way of saying, in public: we remember.

By the mid-to-late 20th century, many American towns developed a Memorial Day pattern that paired remembrance with the seasonal turn toward summer. In Roanoke, a vivid example is Festival in the Park ( do they still do this?) which began in 1969 and has continued annually over Memorial Day weekend. That doesn’t replace the meaning of the holiday—it shows how communities layer new traditions onto old ones. The weekend can hold both: the quiet of cemeteries and the noise of public life; the hard fact of sacrifice and the ordinary fact that the living still gather.

However it was organized, the meaning stayed simple: gratitude and sorrow braided together.

In the valley’s earliest observances—before Roanoke had even fully become Roanoke—it looked like this: flowers in hand, walking among stones, speaking names, and refusing to let the dead become anonymous. Now, it no longer represents the early observance of the men who died while fighting for the North & the South. Today is to honor the many wars and the many men and women who have died in service. Let us honor them all today. I personally believe we should also remember the POWs who either perished, are presumed perished, or are still fighting for their lives.

And if you or your family have lost loved ones, please know that the nation mourns today with you. I have several who have served and passed while serving, as well, and I start a rewatch of Band of Brothers on Memorial Day every year. Just kinda the thing my fam does to honor them.🇺🇸

Last thing: we pray for peace between nations that are currently in a state of conflict. So much death and turmoil on all sides, especially in the Middle East.

Good Mornng, y’all! This post, I am going to share a few personal anecdotes concerning the Mayor & Rev. Noel C. Taylor. I apologize for the long post, but it’s important for us to tell. 💙

🎃 When me and my scrawny little girl self would gather my neighborhood friends for Halloween, and we would make, what seemed to us, up the monumental staircase leading up to Mayor Taylor’s house (he lived in our neighborhood). He & and his sweet wife relished at all of the kids and lemme tell you, when you get a full sized candy bar you get to choose what kind bc of all the varieties - it makes a little kid’s Halloween memories epic. My older brother delivered papers and always was so generously treated by this family that only showed kindness, even to people they didn’t know. When he passed away, it was a huge loss to the city, our neighborhood, and his kindness towards anyone he encountered was such a rare qualities back then, and an even rarer quality now.

So let’s talk about this Roanoke Legend. ⬇️

⛪️ Reverend Noel C. Taylor (1924–1999) was a trailblazing civil rights leader and politician who served as Roanoke’s first Black American mayor from 1975 to 1992. He is celebrated for helping Roanoke desegregate with comparatively little violence and for his long tenure as pastor of High Street Baptist Church in Roanoke’s Gainsboro neighborhood.

They called him “Reverend Mayor” like it was one title—because in Roanoke, Noel C. Taylor never really split his life in two.

📰 In the 1960s, when he came to High Street Baptist Church in Northwest Roanoke, the city still ran on old rules—some written in ordinances, plenty enforced by habit and intimidation. Black residents were expected to stay in certain lanes, sit in certain sections, keep their voices to certain volumes. And if you wanted to understand where leadership came from in that world, you didn’t start downtown. You started in the church.

✔️ From his pulpit, Taylor learned something that would define him later at City Hall: people don’t just want speeches. They want someone who will stand in the room when the temperature rises—someone who can listen, translate, argue, and still keep the door open for tomorrow. As the civil-rights era pushed Roanoke toward desegregation, Taylor became one of the leaders helping the city change without combusting. Not because the change was easy—it wasn’t—but because he knew how to work the hard, unglamorous middle ground where real decisions get made: meetings, committees, quiet negotiations, and public pressure that didn’t let officials pretend nothing was happening. I cannot imagine anyone who would covet having to be that person during that climate here in Roanoke, and across the nation.

🏛️ Then, in 1975, he became mayor—chosen from city council in Roanoke’s system, and soon confirmed again and again as the city kept turning back to him. His tenure stretched from the mid-1970s into the early 1990s, the longest in Roanoke’s history. For a lot of residents, “the Mayor” simply meant Noel Taylor—steady, familiar, always showing up, always speaking to others from across walks of life with respect and humanity.

🏭 Those were years when cities like Roanoke were trying to reinvent themselves. The old industrial guarantees were fading. Downtowns across America were struggling. Shopping drifted outward. Investment followed highways. Roanoke had to decide: do we let the heart of the city hollow out, or do we rebuild confidence—brick by brick, block by block?

🏚️ Taylor put his weight behind projects meant to pull people back toward downtown and into shared civic space, such as reinventing the Roanoke City Market Building - the kind of development that signaled Roanoke wasn’t going to quietly shrink into nostalgia. They remember a mayor who could talk budgets one minute and community dignity the next, who treated the city not as an abstract machine but as a place where people lived their whole lives.

⭐️ But city progress always has an argument attached to it. Development helps some, harms others. “Revitalization” can mean jobs and pride—or it can mean displacement and erasure, especially in neighborhoods that have already carried too much of the city’s burden. Taylor governed in that tension. People disagreed with him. People questioned priorities. People worried—sometimes loudly—about who benefited first. And still, even critics often admitted something important: he wasn’t distant from ordinary life. He wasn’t passing through. He had been in Roanoke’s streets, sanctuaries, and community rooms long before he had a ceremonial gavel.

🧐 One detail that still catches outsiders off guard: Taylor was a Republican. In today’s shorthand, people expect that to “explain” someone. In Taylor’s era—especially in local Southern politics—it didn’t. His power wasn’t primarily partisan. It was relational. It came from trust built over time, from being the person who could sit with opposing sides and keep the city from splitting into permanent camps.

🏛️ When he finally stepped away from office, Roanoke felt the absence. Not because everyone agreed with him—they didn’t—but because he had become part of the city’s civic nervous system. Later, Roanoke named public places for him, including the municipal building—an unmistakable statement that his leadership had become inseparable from the city’s modern story.

💙 And maybe that’s the clearest way to picture Noel C. Taylor: not as a saint in a portrait, not as a villain in a controversy, but as a bridge—sometimes creaking, sometimes crowded, always necessary. A pastor who entered politics without shedding the moral weight of the neighborhoods that formed him. A mayor who helped Roanoke move from “separate” into something closer to “shared,” and who spent nearly two decades trying to prove that a city’s future doesn’t have to come at the price of its soul.

💒The Mayor & Rev. Noel C. Taylor’s long time impact on this region is still being implemented and built upon. Now that is a true legacy. 🏢

💙 Good Morning, lovely ! It’s no secret that the earliest “Big Lick” papers survive in fragments—mentions in deeds, travelers’ notes, court entries, and the occasional stray advertisement. To understand what was happening here, you often have to read the margins: the settlements just beyond the lick, the roads that threaded through them, around them, and the trade that flowed along those routes.

📰 In the early 1800s, the country around Big Lick (present-day Roanoke) still carried the feel of a frontier crossroads. Drovers and wagoners moved livestock and goods along the old Valley routes and the Great Wagon Road corridor; hunters and surveyors tracked the creeks and gaps; and small farms clung to the bottoms where the soil was workable. The salt lick itself—an old draw for game and a landmark for people—gave the place its name and its early importance. Travelers stopped where water was reliable, where animals could be watered, and where a meal, a bed, or a fresh horse might be found at a tavern or ordinary along the way. Word-of-mouth mattered, but print was beginning to matter too: notices for land, mill sites, runaway apprentices, and goods “just received” were part of the region’s everyday information network.

🗞️ What follows is a first small batch of clippings—early examples of how Big Lick was described, marketed, and imagined. Even before Roanoke was “Roanoke,” the area’s boosters were already comparing themselves to neighboring communities—Salem and the Roanoke County countryside, Bedford, Botetourt—and trying to persuade outsiders that this was more than a stopping place. We were here, certainly: defined by the salt licks, the great roads, and the taverns that served them. But these advertisements show the larger ambition: to be known, not merely passed through.

Enjoy!

Good Monday Morning, ! Did you know that the actor and comedian Mel Brooks had local ties via Virginia Military Institute?

If you are my parents ago ( boomers) they know exactly who he is. Later generations know him for Blazzing Saddles & Spaceballs. But for the rest of you, here is a quick bio.

Mel Brooks is best known for sharp, over-the-top parody—comedies that lovingly roast whole genres—and for earning **EGOT** status (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony).

Big hits

- The CLASSIC Blazing Saddles — a fearless, satirical Western
- Young Frankenstein — a pitch-perfect classic-horror spoof
- Spaceballs— his EPIC Star Wars send-up
- The Producers— Oscar-winning breakout film

Beyond the movies

- The Producers (Broadway musical)— record-setting Tony wins and a major career capstone
- The 2000 Year Old Man— iconic improv with Carl Reiner
- Get Smart— co-created this hit spy-comedy TV series

( And HAPPY GRADUATION, VMI!!♥️💛🖤)

Salem Presbyterian Church sits at the corner of East Main and Market Streets, doing what churches and landmarks are forever doing—standing still while the town changes alol around them. It is a congregation, yes, but it is also a public witness to Salem’s early hopes, its hard arrangements of labor, and the long, slow schooling of a community learning what it means to live together, worship together, and build community.

The tale properly begins in 1831, when a small company of Presbyterians—twenty-nine souls, according to the record—set about organizing a church in Salem. Folks came in from the Catawba Mission Church, along with some from the little Big Lick Mission congregation, and with a certain frontier confidence declared they would raise up a mother church for Presbyterianism in this valley. In those first years, the life of the congregation was practical in the way all beginnings are: humble and thankful. Salem was young, and worship sometimes meant borrowing what shelter could be borrowed. The church’s own account notes that the first Sunday School met in the Methodist church, because it happened to be the only church building available at the time. Soon enough Salem Presbyterian established its own “Sabbath School,” and you can already see the pattern that would keep showing up: worship at the center, education close beside it, and outward service guided by The Great Commission.

By mid-century, growth pressed the congregation beyond its original quarters. In 1851 Salem Presbyterians began building a new sanctuary—one meant to look permanent and that they were serious about the long run. They raised a Greek Revival church, temple-form, with an Ionic portico in antis—classical lines that, in Virginia and across the wider South, were a way of “speaking in architecture”: order, learning, civic confidence. Pattern books and classical details guided the proportions and trim. Later generations would point to the interior woodwork as the work of a highly skilled regional carpenter, Gustavus Sedon, and would link the broader design to the Deyerle builders whose handiwork is thankfully still scattered around the region.

But even when a building looks like dignity, it can carry difficult truths in its very mortar. According to published accounts of the church’s history, the 1851–1852 construction was carried out primarily with enslaved labor, and bricks were fired on site. The sanctuary was dedicated on August 8, 1852—fully paid for at the time of dedication, a point of pride in the congregation’s narrative. Worship has continued in that room ever since, and there is a sort of uncommon weight in that fact: the building is not only old, it is old in the way that matters most to a church—used, week by week, by generations who brought their prayers and their grief and their gratitude to the same walls.

In the decades that followed, Salem Presbyterian grew into the wider Presbyterian footprint of the Roanoke Valley. The congregation has long emphasized mission—spiritual and practical—and it points to an 1841 Session resolution that expressed a commitment to spreading the Gospel through education and outreach. Over time, that impulse worked itself out through community ministries , through local partnerships, and through direct service.

The church’s history is also, like many church histories, a history of “planting”—that Presbyterian habit of forming new congregations as population shifts and neighborhoods rise. Salem Presbyterian’s own account names the churches it helped plant, and in doing so it shows how influence travels in a place like this: not by conquest, but by sending out people and resources until the map has more worshiping communities than it had before. In a region that grew outward from rail corridors, mills, and later suburban expansion, that kind of congregational multiplication mattered. It placed worship where people actually lived, and it extended Salem Presbyterian’s reach beyond the crossroads where it began.

The physical plant grew as well. The historic sanctuary remained the symbolic heart, but the story includes the steady expansion of education and fellowship space as the needs of each generation changed. By the late twentieth century, Salem Presbyterian had become not only a Sunday destination but also a host site—a place that made room to connect with Salem and the wider valley; support for local food access, shelter and transitional assistance, and long-running community events such as a Community Thanksgiving Dinner hosted since 1991, for example, are ways they have remained connected to the community which they serve.

By the early twenty-first century, the numbers tell one part of the story: a congregation that began with twenty-nine members in 1831, today is still very much an active body of members. But the deeper continuity lies in something less easy to count—the durable habits of worship, teaching, and service carried forward through wars, economic changes, denominational shifts, and cultural upheavals.

At the center, still, stands the 1852 sanctuary: classical in its lines, local in its craft, raised with materials fired on its own ground, and shadowed by the truth that “historic” in Virginia often means built by hands whose names were not recorded and whose freedom was denied. Salem Presbyterian Church’s story is therefore not only a pleasant narrative of civic pride and religious endurance. It is also a window into the layered moral history of the valley—a place where faith, community, architecture, and power have always been intertwined.

And that, in the end, is why the church remains historically important: not merely because it is old, but because it has been present—week after week, generation after generation—in the same public square of Salem life, gathering a people, shaping them, and sending them back out into the town with the obligations of neighbor-love still resting on their shoulders.

So today, let’s pay homage and respect to the Presbyterian mother, Salem Presbyterian. Many church plants such as Campbell Memorial Church, Second Presbyterian Church, Raleigh Court Presbyterian Church, Woodside Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Colonial Heights Presbyterian Church, West End Presbyterian Church,Belmont Presbyterian Church,Westminster Presbyterian , and we can’t forget Salem’s great grandchildren, Christ the King Presbyterian Church and their little church plant Providence Presbyterian Church, to name a few, owe it to the brave souls who came together to create their mother, Salem Presbyterian, in 1831.