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Interestingly enough, one of the nation’s first transcontinental highways was birthed right here in Roanoke.
Location
Section of Route 11 linking Roanoke and Salem.
History
One of the nation’s first transcontinental highways was birthed in Roanoke. Dr. Samuel Johnson of Roswell, New Mexico, wrote a letter to David Humphries in Lexington, Virginia, in 1919 proposing an interconnected highway system that would link New York City to San Francisco. This was decades before the interstate highway system was proposed under the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower.
As a result of Johnson’s letter and Humphries’ interest, a nationwide promotion effort was conducted that culminated in a meeting at the Hotel Roanoke on December 3, 1919. Over 500 men from across the United States attended and brought into being what became known as the Lee Highway.
The group, known as the Lee Highway Association, lobbied state and local governments to adopt the plan to create a southern coast-to-coast highway. A similar highway was already in existence through the northern states, the Lincoln Highway. Lee Highway was named for the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.
The Lee Highway Association’s effort was more promotional than actual infrastructure. The initial goal was to piece together already existing two-lane highways in various states to create, in name, one highway. As the effort unfolded, however, small communities began to push for the highway to come through their towns to reap the economic benefits of a steady stream of motorists.
In the December 1921 edition of The Highway Magazine, the plan and progress of Lee Highway was described.
“The original plans contemplated a highway along the Appalachian valley between the Blue Ridge, Allegheny and Cumberland mountain ranges, beginning at the Gettysburg National Park on the Lincoln Highway and running via Winchester, Staunton, by the tomb of Robert E. Lee at Lexington, Natural Bridge, Roanoke, Bristol, Knoxville, Chickamauga National Park at Chattanooga, and thence to Birmingham and New Orleans. If the plans of the director are carried out, however, the scope of the undertaking will be broadened and the road will extend from New York to New Orleans, and thence to San Francisco.”
By 1921, the director of the Lee Highway Association was Johnson, whose original letter to Humphries proposed the idea. Johnson was living and working in Roanoke by then to bring to fruition his grand scheme for a national highway memorial to Lee and a practical means for improving the economies of southern towns.
Johnson affiliated himself with the Good Roads Movement, a late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century national effort to improve road construction and driving conditions, and found those connections to be allies in his promotion of Lee Highway, including a future U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.
Significance
For Roanoke, Lee Highway became well-known and was used as the primary name for the stretch of U.S. Route 11 that connected Salem and Roanoke prior to annexation bringing together the two municipal borders in 1976. Today, that portion of Lee Highway would be from Apperson Drive/Route 419 intersection in Salem to the Brandon Avenue/Mudlick Road intersection in Roanoke. Just north of the entrance to Brandon Oaks is a stone monument erected to commemorate Lee Highway that was placed there in the mid-1920s by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In the bottom land between the present Appalachian Power Company substation and the Roanoke River was one of Roanoke’s early airstrips, Cook Field, managed by Clayton Lemon and Frank Reynolds. The airstrip operated in the 1920s and early 30s and was the first true airstrip in the valley. Lemon used to offer plane rides to paying customers on weekends as a means of supplementing his policeman’s salary.
The field was the scene of a tragic accident on February 9, 1930, when a young parachutist, Raymond Ross, came to Roanoke advertising his jump. He gathered some 3,000 spectators, passed the hat, and then was taken up by Lemon in a plane for the crowd to watch his leap. At 3,300 feet, Ross stepped out onto the wing of the plane and jumped, but to the horror of the crowd his chute failed to open.
“Many who had been sitting in their cars stepped to the ground to watch the exhibition. As he continued his plummet-like fall, flat of his back, many realized that something had gone wrong. There was no apparent movement of any part of his body, but as he passed into the last 500 hundred feet, which meant that he was doomed, many gasped and saw him disappear behind some trees,” reported the Roanoke Times.
Between 1940 and 1970, much of Lee Highway between Roanoke and Salem was cow pasture and wooded, but there were several significant landmarks, most of which are now gone. The first Lutheran church in the Roanoke Valley stood near Brandon Oaks’ entrance and is denoted by a historical marker. The Lee-Hi drive-in theater opened in 1948 near the present-day bowling alley and former Food Lion grocery strip mall. It was the first drive-in theater in the Roanoke Valley and operated until 1982.
Lee Hy swimming pool was owned and managed by the Roberts family that also owned Lakeside Amusement Park. The pool’s heydays were in the 1940s and ‘50s and was where East Mental Health is today. After the pool closed, a bar opened on the site called the Candlelight Club that later burned. The mental health office was originally the Reid & Cutshall’s Wayside Furniture store in the 1960s.
As traffic increased on the Roanoke-to-Salem section of Lee Highway in the 1940s and ‘50s, gas stations and strip motels began to dot the roadway, remnants of which are still in place today.
Lee Highway has passed from the vernacular of Roanoke’s younger generations, and the same has happened for much of its cross-country route envisioned by Johnson. Today, the vast majority of Lee Highway has now been renamed by states and localities, but its early and mid-Twentieth Century promotion as an automobile route galvanized much attention. That effort, coupled with other national highway systems, gave rise to what would eventually become our nation’s interstate highway system.
The fact that the idea and logistics for Lee Highway were birthed, planned, and promoted in and from Roanoke a century ago allows the city to claim a rightful place in our nation’s transcontinental highway history.
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