Shenandoah Valley Turnpike — The Great Road South

Before Roanoke was a railroad city, it was a crossroads. The Great Wagon Road — the Indian Road, the Valley Pike, depending on which century you stood in — threaded south through the Shenandoah Valley carrying Scots-Irish and German settlers from Pennsylvania into the backcountry of the South. Quakers and Mennonites came first in the 1720s and 1730s. The Scots-Irish followed in the 1730s via the Potomac, the largest group of non-English immigrants from the British Isles before the Revolution. They moved through shared hunting grounds, a different vector entirely from the English gentry settling the Tidewater. The Shenandoah Valley Turnpike was chartered in 1838 to formalize what was already there. The Valley Turnpike Company paved it with macadam before the Civil War. Roanoke sits at the southern terminus, which is why Big Lick existed as a town at all before the Norfolk & Western arrived in 1882 and turned a crossroads into a corporation headquarters. In the 1960s, Interstate 81 followed the same corridor the wagons had worn into the ground. Route 11 still traces the turnpike, and historical markers along it mark the old route through Roanoke County — the bones of the road that made this city possible before the railroad made it a city at all.