The valley belonged to the Tutelo and Monacan peoples first.
For centuries before European contact, the Siouan-speaking nations of the Blue Ridge hunted the forests and fished the headwaters of the Roanoke River. The salt marshes and mineral licks along the valley floor drew game in such numbers that early European settlers called the area Big Lick. The name stuck for a hundred years.
Scottish-Irish and German settlers pushed into the valley in the 1740s, following the Great Wagon Road south from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah. They found a landscape of extraordinary beauty — a wide valley ringed by blue mountains, watered by clear creeks, with soil good enough to farm. Small communities grew slowly for over a century.
Then the railroad arrived and everything changed overnight.
In 1882, the Norfolk & Western Railway chose Big Lick as the junction point for its Shenandoah Valley line. The village of 500 people renamed itself Roanoke — after the river, after the Algonquian word for shell money — and within a decade it was a city of 25,000. The railroad built the shops, the hotels, the downtown. The locomotive works at East End became one of the largest in the South. The famous star went up on Mill Mountain in 1949, visible for sixty miles.
The railroad also built the city's divisions. Gainsboro and Henry Street became the center of Black commerce and culture, thriving under segregation's forced self-reliance — and suffering when integration dispersed the community without replacing what was lost.
Today Roanoke is something rare: a small city with a big backyard. The Appalachian Trail runs through its suburbs. The Blue Ridge Parkway traces its southern edge. The greenway system threads thirty miles of trail along the river through downtown. The railroad legacy lives on in the museums, the architecture, and the iron bones of a city that was built in a single generation.