cover story ness incubator and an inland port, a place where fledgling distribution companies can develop and existing distribution companies can try out the area before committing to locate here. Those companies will bring jobs, he declares. “They won’t be milliondollar jobs,” Griffith says. “They will be good jobs for hardworking, taxpaying Americans.” Griffith is an amateur historian, so he would appreciate Roddy Moore’s explanation of how vital the pathways that intersect in the Roanoke Valley have been to the region’s people and businesses — and for how long those routes have been important. Moore, director of the Blue Ridge Institute at Ferrum College, talks about the Great Road that carried pioneers west, the Great Valley Pike that carried settlers south into the Roanoke Valley and the Carolina Road that carried
some of them farther south. Commerce moved along those roads, too. “We’ve got an account book here from a store in Tazewell,” Moore says, “and it was what a wholesaler in Baltimore was sending to Tazewell. Let me tell you, if you could buy it on the coast, you could buy it in Tazewell.”
those roads and cattle drives into Pennsylvania were organized by the end of the 18th century. The cattle drives are anachronisms, but the roads they followed aren’t. “These roads never stopped because they were just taken up by other roads,” Moore says. The Valley Pike became U.S. 11 and then
“Distribution at every level is still what Roanoke is about.” Some people may be surprised that imported goods made their way that far into the mountains even when this was the edge of the frontier, but they might be more surprised that the transactions weren’t one-way. “What people don’t realize is that traffic moved both ways on these roads,” Moore says, explaining that everything from feathers to ginseng moved east and north on
I-81. The Carolina Road became U.S. 220. It may one day be part of I-73. Like those roads, Fitzpatrick argues, the region’s role in distribution and logistics never went away. “Distribution at every level is still what Roanoke is about,” he says. “I’m a firm believer that history repeats itself. The question is how savvy are we at understanding when to make history repeat itself.”
Though some railroad freight is loaded and unloaded in the Roanoke and New River valleys, most of the 150 million tons of cargo that moves by rail in the valleys is only passing through.
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MARCH 2013
Photos courtesy Norfolk Southern