Big Lick Historical Archives

Good Morning, !

A few miles outside Roanoke, Virginia, there’s a small graveyard known as Tombstone Cemetery. Tucked inside is one of the region’s most unusual pieces of early American folk art: “The Old Tombstone,”also called the Denton Cenotaph.

Carved sometime after 1805, the monument is attributed to Laurence Krone, a German-born stonemason working in the Roanoke Valley. Local tradition says the Denton family cared for Krone during an illness, and that he later carved this memorial at no cost when their child, Robert Denton died at age nine.

➡️ What makes it different

Unlike a typical headstone, the piece is a single block of freestone shaped like a small coffin. Its top once included a removable lid that revealed a simple carving of a child’s head and upper torso —a rare motif for Southwest Virginia.

The surfaces are covered with a long inscription that doubles as a family register, written in German, English, and Latin One line reads:

“Once loved, once valued, now avails me not; Though my relations have not me forgot . . .”💙

The original lid was stolen by 1967. To deter further damage, the Hollins Lions Club later added a small roof and protective enclosure.

In 1977, The Denton Cenotaph was listed on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places (1980).

On July 10, 1936, Roanoke hit 105 degrees. The hottest day on record. Today it is gonna feel like that!

By afternoon, downtown felt like a stove. Heat bounced off the Market Building, brick storefronts, rail yards, sidewalks, and streets. People still dressed for the time: men in long trousers, shirts, hats, and often ties; women in dresses, slips, stockings, and hats.

Most homes had no air conditioning, as central AC wasn't a thing until the late 1960s-1970s. Shades came down, windows opened at night, fans pushed hot air around, and porches became the best rooms in the house. Kitchens were worse, so families leaned on cold meals: tomatoes, cucumbers, pickles, bread, potted meat, deviled eggs, chicken salad, ham, summer fruit, iced tea, lemonade, and ice cream.

A small garden helped immensely, even if you lived in a small home or apartment. You’d be surprised what only a few pots of tomatoes, beans, or cucumbers.

Downtown offered relief too. A lunch counter, quick diner, drugstore counter, the Texas Tavern, or Hotel Roanoke’s dining room meant someone else’s kitchen took the heat.

Outside, dogs hid under porches, children looked for water, and workers endured it until the sun slipped behind the ridges.

By evening, here in the Valley, folks were probably listening & praying for a mountain breeze or a cooling downpour.

Today stay cool & safe! I am counting the days until the cool & crisp days of autumn.🍁🍂🎃

Here are the headlines from that day and also the headline the NEXT day. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

🔥The heat the past week has been no joke. It’s also nothing super new. We value and love our gorgeous fall and spring, so it’s a fair trade off. Thankfully, there are plenty of places to cool off around here. Roanoke’s earliest swimming spots were less about lap lanes and more about relief from the heat. Before air-conditioning, people cooled off with wherever water and shade were close - like along the Roanoke River and Tinker Creek, at mill ponds, and in the clear swimming holes locals knew about. We used to just head down to the creek or head out to Spring Run pool where we were members.

🏊🏼‍♀️As swimming grew from a summertime habit into a social pastime, our region followed the broader American trend that, for some, dropped the informal riverbank dips and gave way to the organized bathing beaches at Lakeside, and eventually, other pools in the area. Early pools were often simple affairs—wood-framed enclosures or sand-bottom basins—until concrete became the standard in the early 1900s, prized for being durable, easier to clean, and big enough for water loving crowds. A lot of people also didn’t know how to swim, so the normality of pools made learning how to swim more of a thing.

🌊That shift showed up around here in the familiar places people still associate with escaping the heat. Lakes and picnic grounds around what’s now the Blue Ridge Parkway drew families for breezes and water. Spots like Carvins Cove, Loch Haven Lake Club, Smith Mountain Lake , Douthat State Park, Fairy Stone State Park, etc became known for summer outings, while outdoor public swimming facilities and later neighborhood pool clubs made “going swimming” a regular daily/weekly summer thing, instead of a special trip. Not to mention, swim teams also came into play more regularly.

💙However people got there—on foot, by trolley, or packed into a car—the goal was the same: find water, find shade, and come home cooler than they left. Let’s also remember that not everyone is fortunate enough to have air conditioning or the ways and means to go swimming. Some older people grew up without AC and not having it is no big deal b/c they are acclimated to the heat. Whatever the journey to no AC may be for people, we do feel for you and pray a cool dip or a reprieve from the heat comes soon.

🇺🇸 Happy 250th, America! 🇺🇸

Good Morning, ! If you’d stood near the Big Lick in the colonial years, the first thing you’d notice was the smell—briny, mineral—and the mud cut with hoofprints. Deer and buffalo came to the licks. So did people. Before “Big Lick” was a town name, it was a place everybody knew because of the Valley beauty and the salt licks.

Life in the valley was mostly work. Settlements took time. Clearing land was no small task. Cabins went up with neighbors’ help. Gardens had to be guarded from deer. Corn had to make it. Fences had to stand. Over time, familiar surnames kept appearing around the lick and along the bottoms—**Evans**, **Tosh**, **Akers**, **Terry**, **Brown**, **Burke**, **Carvin**, **Rentfroe**, **Griffith**—families clearing land, raising children, and trying to get through winter with enough left in the crib and smokehouse.

The licks provided nutrition to the wildlife more than you think and were a natural stop. Drovers watered stock there. Hunters lingered. Travelers traded news a little at a time. There was no TikTok, Instagram, X, Facebook, or instant communication. News came when it came.

The Great Wagon Road mattered, too. It carried families, wagons, livestock, tools, rumors, and ambitions down through the Shenandoah Valley into the Virginia and Carolina backcountry. Places like Big Lick were shaped by that movement—not as polished destinations, but as practical stops where travelers could water animals, repair what broke, trade what they had, and decide whether to keep going south or put down roots.

It was not a soft life. People lived on a rough edge—far from old centers, close to danger, in the wild, and dependent on neighbors whether they liked it or not.

When the Revolution came, it reached the backcountry through shortages, interruptions, confusion, militia musters, divided neighbors, raids, forts, lead shot, wagon roads, and the steady push of settlement. Southwest Virginia was not a quiet edge of the story. It was a hard, dangerous, and important frontier.

Even before independence was declared, frontier leaders signed the Fincastle Resolutions in January 1775, pledging resistance to British tyranny before the Declaration of Independence had even been written. The people here were far from the polished rooms where speeches were made, but not far from the argument over liberty.

The region mattered in practical ways. The lead mines near present-day Austinville in Wythe County supplied shot for Washington’s army and Patriot forces in the South. Here, the Revolution was not only ideals on paper. It was ammunition, horses, wagons, tools, food, and families keeping farms alive while the war took what it needed.

The danger was complicated. The Cherokee War of 1776 brought violence across the frontier as settlers pushed farther onto Cherokee land, and militias built forts across the New River Valley for protection. Communities were also split by Tory activity, with Loyalists and Patriots sometimes living uncomfortably close together. The backcountry could turn partisan fast—neighbor against neighbor, raid against raid, rumor against rumor.

By 1780, frontier strength helped shape the war farther south. The Overmountain Men—Patriot militia from the western settlements, including leaders such as William Campbell—gathered at Abingdon and marched south to Kings Mountain. Their victory over Loyalist forces helped break British momentum in the Southern campaign.

So I do not imagine the Revolution arriving here only as grand news from Philadelphia or Williamsburg. I imagine it coming down the road in worn boots, broken wagon wheels, hungry horses, nervous families, militia calls, and hard choices. Muster days pulled men from fields. Women and older children kept farms going. Wagons and worn-out soldiers appeared on the road. During the war, my family, who had immigrated from Germany in 1740s and settled in the Buchanan area, made wagon wheels and parts, as well as feeding soldiers and their horses as much as they could when they passed through the Botetourt County area.

Still, Big Lick remained Big Lick: a muddy, briny place where animals and people kept coming. On the Fourth of July, that is worth remembering. Independence was not only made in capitals. It was held together in places like our little Valley by ordinary families doing the hard, unglamorous work that kept things going while soldiers fought for true independence.

We know the famous heroes of the Revolutionary War and probably have our favorites. But the war was also helped by people who crossed an ocean for a cause that was not theirs by birth. My personal favorite is the Marquis de Lafayette.

Lafayette was barely more than a teenager when he came to America, bringing his rank, money, safety, and future with him. He did not come for a ribbon or a polished portrait. He came when the army was short on everything, learned the hard business of war, and stayed when the cause looked shaky.

Washington trusted him, and Lafayette earned that trust by sharing rough conditions, taking real risks, and caring deeply for the soldiers under him. Moving between American camps and French courts, he used his name like a tool, not a trophy, pressing France to stay invested in what often looked like a thin and reckless gamble.

Late in the war, especially in Virginia, Lafayette helped keep pressure on Cornwallis, bottle up British forces, and buy time until the larger net could be thrown. Yorktown was not one man’s victory, but Lafayette helped set the table for it—where French troops and French ships helped close the trap.

So today, alongside the local names who held on around Big Lick, General Washington, the Culper Spy Ring, and countless men, women, Black Americans, and others, it is worth tipping the hat to the young Frenchman who treated American independence not as a romantic idea, but as a duty. Lafayette risked himself to keep the American experiment alive.

And when the work feels messy or unfinished—as it always does—it helps to remember Lafayette’s words: “Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.”

May we honor that gift today not just with fireworks, but with steady resolve to widen the circle of freedom, kindness, pride, and love—neighbor by neighbor, year by year. Have a wonderful Independence Day, my fellow lovers of history! Love, ~BLHA

Good Morning!

To illustrate the deplorable condition of many Roanoke City streets, Edward L. Stone commissioned George Davis—the city’s best-known and most respected photographer—to travel through Roanoke’s heavily trafficked areas and document the roadways as they appeared in 1915. This photograph from that series shows the worn and neglected entrance to the Park, or Fifth Street, Bridge. It also captures two interesting billboards from the period. The one at the top advertises electric lighting for home use: the Roanoke Railway and Electric Company would install electrical outlets in a home for fourteen dollars and fifty cents, with financing available for up to twelve months.

The second photograph shows Norfolk Avenue—now Roanoke Avenue—looking toward the Randolph Street Bridge, another scene from George Davis’s 1915 survey of Roanoke’s streets. Wagon wheels and the new automobiles alike had rutted and potholed the unpaved thoroughfare in the heart of the city, though these images were by no means the worst in the collection.

See captions for details on the remaining photos in this album.

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Good morning 💙

The Historic Roanoke City Market began in 1882 when the city licensed 25 produce vendors (“hucksters”) to sell on a downtown square along Campbell Avenue. My great-great-great grandfather was one of them, selling fruits and vegetables.

It was formally authorized in 1884, gained its first permanent market building in 1886, and after a fire, the current City Market Building was rebuilt in 1922.

The market has operated continuously in the same location for 140+ years, making it Virginia’s oldest continuously operating open-air market.

This photograph is from1884- the year Roanoke was chartered as a city.

Good Monday Morning, . It is gonna be starting to have high 90s + for a stretch coming soon, and all we can think about is cooling down in some of our area’s lakes in the midst of our gorgeous Blue Ridge Mountains.

Geographically, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lake levels can swing because the balance between what comes in and what goes out isn’t steady.

🏔️Mountain Lake is the classic example. It sits on fractured rock, and it doesn’t have a reliable surface outlet. In wet periods, rain and snowmelt keep the basin full. But in drier stretches, water can slip away through cracks and channels underground. Sometimes those openings widen or clear out, and the lake drops quickly—leaving mudflats and bare shoreline behind. Over time, sediment and debris can clog those leaks again, and the lake slowly returns. Who remembers a few years ago when the lake went completely dry? It was an insane thing to witness, walking around on a literal lake bottom. Thank goodness the lake levels were normal when they were filming Dirty Dancing!

🛥️Smith Mountain Lake and Carvins Cove are different: they’re reservoirs, so their levels are shaped as much by management as by weather. When the watershed is dry, less water flows in. At the same time, water may be released downstream, drawn for water supply, or lowered for seasonal operations. Add summer heat and evaporation, and the waterline can retreat far enough to expose wide stretches of bank.

So the exposed shorelines usually come down to one simple thing: for a while, the lake is losing water faster than it’s being replaced —by hidden underground drainage in the case of Mountain Lake, and by drought plus controlled drawdowns in the case of the reservoirs.

Brief History of Mountain Lake in Pembroke, Va:

🏔️Mountain Lake, near Pembroke, Virginia, sits high on Salt Pond Mountain and has drawn visitors for centuries. Settlers recorded it in 1751, and by the 1800s it had become a summer stop; in 1851 a lodge opened, establishing it as a mountain resort. In the 1930s banker William Lewis Moody Jr. rebuilt the property, replacing the old wooden hotel with the stone lodge that still defines the site today.

💃The lake gained international recognition in 1986, when the resort stood in for “Kellerman’s” in *Dirty Dancing*. After Mary Moody Northen’s death, the Mary Moody Northen Endowment took stewardship in 1989, and a major renovation in 2012 repositioned the resort as a year-round destination—leaning into its film legacy with themed events.

In the 2000s the lake’s well-known natural cycle of draining and refilling became especially visible: water levels dropped sharply (2002, 2006) and the lakebed stayed mostly dry from 2008–2020. Since 2020, wetter seasons have helped the lake refill significantly, though it hasn’t always returned to historic depth.

Brief History of SML:

🛥️Smith Mountain Lake is a man-made hydroelectric reservoir in Southwest Virginia. Created in 1963 by damming the Blackwater and Roanoke rivers, the 20,000-acre lake took nearly three years to fill and officially reached “full pond” on March 7, 1966.

Long before the lake existed, the Roanoke River Basin was home to Native communities—including the Cherokee, Shawnee, and Monacan—who hunted game drawn to the area’s natural salt licks.

European settlement began in the 1670s. The lake and the nearby mountain were later named for brothers Daniel and Gideon Smith, who claimed the land in 1740.

⚡️Appalachian Power first studied the idea of a dam in the 1920s, but construction didn’t begin until 1960. Over the next three years, crews moved roughly 300,000 cubic yards of forested land and relocated farming communities and cemeteries.

🌊Smith Mountain and Leesville were constructed primarily for hydroelectric power. During peak usage, water flows through the turbines to generate electricity; when demand drops, pumps move water back up into Smith Mountain Lake for later use.

Today, what began as a hydroelectric project has become Virginia’s second-largest lake, with more than 500 miles of shoreline and a reputation as a major recreation destination for boating, striped bass fishing, and lakeside living.

I remember a story of my grandfather’s where he said people were buying up tracts of land around what everyone presumed would be the shoreline of SML once completed. Imagine their surprise when they go to see their plots of land were under water!

Brief History of Carvins Cove:

🏔️Carvins Cove, just north of Roanoke, began as a small frontier homestead. In 1746, Welsh settler William Carvin received a 150-acre land grant near Tinker Mountain, and the community that grew around it became known as Happy Valley. Over time it developed into a rural settlement with dozens of homes and local institutions, with many residents supported by timber work and gristmills.

In 1926, Roanoke Water Works proposed an 80-foot dam at Carvins Creek Falls to secure a reliable water supply for the growing city. Construction struggled in the late 1920s, and in 1938 the City of Roanoke took over the project, purchasing the land and partially built infrastructure. In the mid-1940s the cove was cleared, and in 1946 the reservoir filled—displacing the Happy Valley community and submerging the former village beneath the water.

Today, the cove remains a major drinking-water source; during rare drought drawdowns, foundations and other traces of Happy Valley can reappear along the shoreline.

Whatever this summer calls for, I hope that for the water lovers like us and the other countless ones throughout the valley, that we get a normal, healthy amount of rain! And for summer haters, the rain at least cools it down a lot.

For more history about SML ➡️: https://smithmountainlake.com/news/local/looking-back-at-smith-mountain-lake/collection_8f868ff3-2423-555c-8ec0-63b91ab31a9d.html.

For more history about Carvin’s Cove ➡️: https://www.playroanoke.com/parks-facilities/carvins-cove-natural-reserve/

For more info about Mountain Lake ➡️: https://www.mtnlakelodge.com/

Glorious Morning, . We are resharing one of our previous posts - because being a part of this close knit community offers a welcoming experience with a UNITED purpose of restoring and properly preserving history.

BLHA’s mission is to raise awareness to the historical uniqueness of many areas of the city’s boroughs. The pride that comes from knowing about the history of your borough can restore the historical integrity that they each deserve, even on their own stand alone merit. There will be more to come soon about our non-profit, but for now, please read & if you feel led, support this organization! The link to support Friends of Washington Park is included at the end.

UPDATE: HistoriCorps and EAM investigators onsite again today in Washington Park. Friends of Washington Park received a grant for this assessment work through The Christiansburg Institute from the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

I’ve added those pictures, too, including a picture we found and worked on a little so that we can better see more details.

Last week, myself and two other board members visited the Washington Park Caretaker’s Cottage, aka Evan’s Cottage, and what a glorious piece of history it is! The new pool looks beautiful, and hopefully the cottage will come alive again and gather the rest of the necessary funding needed to preserve it correctly.

If you go poking around Washington Park with your eyes open and your imagination not asleep at the switch, you’ll come upon a small, plainspoken brick cottage that has outlasted more schemes, speeches, and civic “improvements” than any sensible little house has a right to. Folks call it the Washington Park Caretakers Cottage, and it has been standing there since about 1840—long enough to have heard the town’s story told in every accent from earnest to aggravated.

Jeremiah Whitten built it, back when the land still remembered what honest work felt like. Before the park ever had a name fit for a postcard, this spot was tied to a grist mill Mark Evans set going in the mid-18th century—one of those contraptions that took a man’s grain and, with a lot of noise and a little miracle, sent him home with flour. Time marched on in its usual insolent fashion, and by the late 19th century the place had drifted into Peyton Terry’s dairy farm, with cows doing the bookkeeping and the seasons keeping the hours.

Then came 1922, when the Charles Lukens family sold the property to the City, and the land turned public—set aside as a park for Roanoke’s African American community in the Jim Crow era, when even leisure had to fight for its own breathing room. The cottage—one story, brick, and stubborn—became the caretakers’ home. It wasn’t grand, but it was steady, and steady is a kind of grandeur when the world is determined to be otherwise.

In the early 1960s, the City decided (in a burst of inspiration that must have struck at the same time as a lapse in conscience) that the park would make a fine place for a landfill. This did not sit well with the people who lived nearest the consequences, and it had the added defect of being wrong. The dump became a spark in the long, hot season of the Civil Rights Movement. Rev. Wilkinson helped lead the fight to close it, and the struggle wore on until the landfill was finally shut down—proof, if anyone needed it, that a community can be patient and furious at the same time.

After the dump was closed, the park got its proper embellishments: picnic shelters, basketball and tennis courts, trails, ball fields, and a community pool—things a park ought to have had all along instead of a heap of other people’s refuse. The park changed. The neighborhood changed. The cottage kept right on standing there, taking it all in like an old witness who has seen too much to be easily impressed.

These days, shambles of the past meet modern times with the community swimming pool, and demolishing the cottage has paused, which has relieved the community. It’s no secret that it has been badly neglected , and with movements such as The Friends of Washington Park & Roanoke Valley Preservation, the cottage has hope and a future in the 21st century.

For more than a century, Washington Park has grown and shifted with the nearby community, carrying both joy and harm in its memory. And the little caretakers cottage, weathered and weary, still holds on—a rare, tangible link to the park’s layered past and to the people who insisted, against the odds and the odors of a city landfill, that this place should be worth more than what others were willing to throw away.

To make a donation, please follow the link and make sure to earmark it for “Evan’s Cottage”.

➡️ https://connect.clickandpledge.com/w/Form/8091343a-cc75-42b9-a7cb-58da31720131 to donate via Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation.

Join the Friends of Washington Park, Rke. VA History & Future for updates!