The Roanoker - March/April 2018 - 21

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
(LEFT) COURTESY OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WESTERN VIRGINIA, (RIGHT) COURTESY OF NELSON HARRIS

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
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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 Roanoketo-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 f rom
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 L ee 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. I

(Left) Benjamin Keagy
Home in 1976
The home site was
west of the Brandon
Oaks Rehab Center
and opposite of the
Brandon Avenue/
Deyerle Road
intersection, and was
razed in the 1990s.
(Above)
Lee-Hy Motor Court
This image is from a
postcard dated 1952;
the back portion was
razed in the 2000s.

MARCH/APRIL 2018

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The Roanoker - March/April 2018

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