The story below is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photo above: Courtesy of Nelson Harris
From entertainment and arts to business and politics, Nelson Harris gives readers the scoop on this “celebratory and cautionary” decade.
Nelson Harris’ journey to writing about the Roanoke Valley’s history began with a collection of postcards and a stroke of luck. “Browsing through a bookstore while out of town, I saw a book on ‘Lexington in Vintage Postcards’ and realized I could possibly do the same for Roanoke,” he says.
The more he researched for the project, the deeper his appreciation for the area and its past became. Harris has since produced 13 additional titles with Arcadia Publishing, with his latest work, “The Roanoke Valley in the 1950s,” coming out on May 6.
The inspiration behind the book is the same as that of its predecessor, which focused on the 1940s: to provide a detailed recounting of the happenings throughout a 10-year span that shaped and continue to impact not just Roanoke City, but the valley in its entirety.
While similar to “The Roanoke Valley in the 1940s,” the 1950s installment is “quite substantial.” It features over 700 pages and 300 archival photos, giving wide-spectrum coverage of the ins and outs of a decade that saw both triumphs and turbulence. Community staples like Mill Mountain Zoo, Vinton’s Dogwood Festival and Roanoke Symphony Orchestra were established, Roanoke’s Diamond Jubilee and Salem’s sesquicentennial were celebrated and high-profile entertainers visited the area on the regular. During the same time period, local lives were lost as some of the region’s own fought in the Korean War, urban renewal left many displaced in northeast Roanoke and the US Supreme Court delivered its verdict on Brown v. Board of Education. “So the decade was quite dynamic on many fronts,” remarks Harris.
There are still loads of the Roanoke Valley’s past left to explore, and this local historian, who writes this magazine’s Strange Days of Roanoke column (see page 10), already has ideas for what he hopes to focus on next. “I would welcome the opportunity to do a book on the Roanoke Valley in the 1960s, and I have been working on a book on the history of Mill Mountain/South Roanoke for some time that I would like to finalize.”
Harris couldn’t be more grateful for the support he’s received from Sheila Umberger, director of Roanoke Public Libraries, the Roanoke Public Library Foundation and the individuals at local museums who work tirelessly to preserve the valley’s history. “Without such resources, I could not have written any of my books.”
The story above is from our March/April 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
