Colin Woodard is a Politico Magazine contributing editor, the author of the recently released American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good and a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for his work at Maine’s Portland Press Herald.

A decade ago, the U.S. Census counted 15 people living in Roanoke’s downtown.

If the world knew anything about the city of 100,000 in southwest Virginia, it was likely because of the massive illuminated star beaming down from a nearby mountain, a sad reminder of a long-ago era when holiday shoppers, bearing paychecks from the railroad that dominated the local economy, thronged the downtown department stores.


Now Roanoke is back on the map, with people at home and away starting to talk about it in a way they haven’t since the 1880s, when the “Magic City” sprang up out of nearly nowhere around a new railway interchange like some Far West gold-mining town. The downtown has been revitalized and, for the first time in its history, has 2,000 people living in it, many of them getting to and from other parts of the city via a refurbished greenbelt. A highly competitive medical school and world-class, $77 million research institute with a top-notch neuroscience program have both sprung up near the hospital, and the institute is about to double its size. People from the outside world—attracted by the beauty of the surrounding Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountains—are moving in, reversing a 30-year population decline. Schools are good, violent crime is at a half-century low, and a public broadband network just doubled Internet speeds. Passenger rail service to Washington’s Union Station is making its return, and a tourism industry is flourishing where none existed before. The latest bit of good news, Oregon-based Deschutes Brewery, the eighth-largest craft brewery in the country, announced in March that it had chosen Roanoke for the site of its $85 million East Coast hub, bringing an initial 108 jobs.

“Up until 2005, it was always, ‘Woe is us, and it’s so bad, and there was this star, which was kind of an embarrassment,’” recalls Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Regional Partnership, which markets the region to potential investors. “Now there’s a groundswell of love for the place, of community pride. We’re celebrating that star.”

How did a small city in a disadvantaged region four hours from a major metropolis—one that had seen its signature industries atrophy or depart, that lacked so much as a branch campus of a state university—transform itself from the forgotten stepsister of the Appalachians into a formidable rival to Asheville, North Carolina? The answer has lessons for small, out-of-the-way cities everywhere: Roanoke’s people did it largely by themselves, in small steps and with an eye to assets and alliances in the wider region around them. “At some point we realized that we may never have the white knight come in with a Volkswagen auto plant and give us a quick win,” says Lisa Garst, a former city councilor in neighboring Salem who now heads Livable Roanoke Valley, a nonprofit that aims to engage citizens, governments and businesses in a regional planning process. “We realized what’s going to happen is going to come from people who are already invested here, know the value of the area and can stick it out for a 20-, 30- or 40-year time frame.”

Private, public, non-profit — Roanoke's leaders come from a variety of backgrounds, but they've all played a part. Nancy Agee, sixth from the left, is the CEO of Roanoke's biggest employer, Carilion Clinic. Ed Walker, third from left, helped give new life to Roanoke's downtown by redeveloping its historical buildings. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

And it all happened in what would seem the most unlikely of places: a city created, built and controlled for most of its history by the distant investors of that most controlling and rapacious of Industrial Age corporations, the railroad.

***

Virginia may be the site of the first successful English colony and cradle of presidents, but Roanoke is an extremely young city. In 1881—when Philadelphia was about to celebrate its bicentennial and there were 61,000 people living in Richmond—what’s now downtown Roanoke was nothing but fields, cow pastures and marsh a mile and a half west of the village of Big Lick, population 650.

In February of that year, E.W. Clark & Company of Philadelphia dispatched surveyors to Roanoke County to find the best spot to build a hub that would connect the two railroads it had acquired: the Shenandoah Valley Railroad (which was expanding north to south) and the Norfolk & Western (which ran east to west). Big Lick’s businessmen offered the company $10,000, a free acre of land and tax exemptions if it would build the hub in their hamlet. The company agreed, took the incentives, and, to the locals’ surprise, began construction of a brand new community not in their hamlet but a mile and a half to the east near the foot of Mill Mountain. They named it Roanoke (because “Big Lick” just wouldn’t do) and within weeks it dwarfed the older village and would soon spread west and absorb it.

New Window Roanoke has redeveloped its historical downtown while keeping an eye on the future. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

In a matter of months, Clark & Company’s subsidiaries laid out a new street grid on the banks of the rail line and constructed 128 houses, a depot, shops, iron works, railroad offices and the grand Hotel Roanoke, which has served as the city’s central landmark ever since. Demographers define “boomtowns” as having a 15 percent annual growth rate. In the first decade after the company’s arrival, Roanoke’s population increased an average of 290 percent a year and the city became Virginia’s third biggest after Richmond and Norfolk. The speed of the growth meant a certain lack of polish. The Hartford Courant’s correspondent found “streets of temporary wooden shops and dwellings, drinking shops and ‘hotels’ with false board fronts hiding the upper half stories and big letter signs after the manner of the West.” As in the instant cities of the Far West, there were drunken fights in the saloons and brothels, unpaved roads that turned to mud when it rained and reeking open sewers beside wood sidewalks. “The town,” the Baltimore Sun reported, “suggests a mining camp or a mushroom city of Colorado.”

Roanoke’s ribald reputation chastened company officials, motivating their wives to organize civic improvement efforts in the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in their contracting celebrated landscape architect John Nolen to the city in 1907. Nolen, a student of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., is generally credited with being the father of American city planning, and for Roanoke he created what was the nation’s first comprehensive city plan. Nolen, who had been raised in an orphanage and had a rather un-Victorian empathy for the poor, was appalled that the city had “no public gardens, parks, parkways, no playground, no attractive school yards, no monuments, no public library, no open plazas or public squares … and no public buildings of distinction.” He found the living conditions in the African-American neighborhood—home to a third of the population—completely unacceptable. His plan called for comprehensive investments throughout Roanoke, including a network of parks, a river walk along the Roanoke River, playgrounds in every ward, a grand city hall and library, and the purchase of Mill Mountain for the public, a resource he likened to Mount Royal in Montreal. The plan, he said, would turn Roanoke into the “most attractive city in the state if not the entire country.” But the city fathers didn’t like the idea of investing in black neighborhoods, and voters rejected even a scaled-down bond issue.

Trains passing through Roanoke used to carry coal from the Pocahontas coalfields to the nation's fuel-hungry cities. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Nolen’s plan was put on the shelf. Many of its recommendations would wait a century to be implemented.

***

For the next half-century, Roanoke settled into a comfortable company-town pattern, with the Norfolk & Western dominating the civic scene and the regional economy through its ownership of 400,000 acres of Appalachian coal country. The railway built its own locomotives and rolling stock near the town center, underwrote the construction of a hospital at the foot of Mill Mountain and donated land for parks and churches. The city remained sharply segregated, with African-Americans maintaining their own commercial and entertainment district right into the 1960s, when much of it was demolished in the name of “urban renewal.”

By then, Roanoke had begun to feel the same forces undermining cities across the country. Federally subsidized superhighways tore through neighborhoods and funneled people to new homes in far-flung suburbs. Department stores, shops, restaurants and hotels followed them, eroding the tax base and the vitality of downtown. “By the mid-1970s, downtown Roanoke was in sad shape,” says Dwayne Yancey, editorial page editor of the Roanoke Times. “The old farmer’s market in its heart was a bad place—hookers, transvestites, dealers, all manner of shady characters. Decent people didn’t go there.” Educator Anita Price, who is African-American, arrived around this time from Baltimore, following her husband back to his home city. “I was depressed for two years because I looked around and thought, ‘Oh, Lord, how am I going to give my children a good education, give them the cultural environment that we’re used to in this area that looks absolutely devoid of any amenities?’” recalls Price, who is now vice-mayor. “It was segregated, the downtown was lily-white, and I saw no minority professionals. These things really concerned me.”

The city council, deadlocked by factional differences—partisan, racial and parochial—couldn’t take action. “They would argue with each other instead of doing strategic planning, like the federal Congress now,” says retired bank executive Warner Dalhouse, who rallied city luminaries to do something about it. “Downtown was becoming a ghost town, but we believed it was the beating heart of the whole Roanoke Valley, the city lights of the whole western part of the state.”

Founded in 1882, Roanoke's City Market is nearly as old as Roanoke is. Just like you could back then, go to the market today and you'll find baked goods, locally grown vegetables and fresh meat. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

In 1975, Dalhouse and his colleagues saw an opening: The city had annexed a large chunk of county territory and, in order to give the new residents fair representation, a judge had ordered the entire city council, mayor and vice-mayor to go up for reelection, all at once. “It looked to several of us like a historic opportunity because you could elect a new council and get diversity and business expertise and energy and progressive ideas and mutual agreement all at the same time,” Dalhouse says.

They drafted a bipartisan dream team—including preacher Noel Taylor (who would later become one of the first African-American mayors elected in a predominantly white Southern city) and Nick Taubman, son of the founder of Advance Auto Parts—ran them as the “Roanoke Forward” party, and raised the then unheard-of sum of $90,000 to promote their candidacies. “It was a landslide,” Dalhouse recalls of the 1976 vote. “We elected all seven.”

Roanoke has a strong city-manager form of government, and the dream team hired a young, energetic outsider for the position, Bern Ewert, who had to leave his previous gig in Stratford, Connecticut, after blowing the whistle on a bribery scheme. “In Roanoke, the charge from them to me was very broad: Integrate the city workforce, improve city relations, rebuild the neighborhoods and downtown, and lower taxes,” recalls Ewert, who was 35 when he arrived just after New Year’s in 1978. “And when you finished all that, come back and talk to us.” The fact that past bond issues to do such things had been shot down by voters didn’t make the task any easier. Nor did the local preference for demolishing historic buildings rather than renovating them, as Ewert proposed.

But Ewert gathered up his courage and did what nobody had previously dared to do. He went to Jack Fishwick, president of the Norfolk & Western, a man who determined the fate of entire counties in the Kentucky and West Virginia coal country but didn’t participate in city politics because, as Ewert puts it “they were so powerful they were afraid they’d skew things. I was scared of him, like everyone else was.” But he made his pitch: To save downtown, they needed his support. Fishwick agreed and, like magic in the Magic City, winds began filling the reformer’s sails. The local CBS television affiliate agreed to give Ewert’s team two prime-time slots a week to present and solicit public ideas and preferences for the revitalization of downtown, an effort called Design 79. A local department store gave his staff a storefront where they collected thousands of ideas and suggestions from more spotlight-averse citizens. “The idea was to get as many citizens involved as we possibly could,” Dalhouse says. “By the time it got to a vote”—for the $15.5 million bond issue to move forward—“literally thousands were invested in it.”

The resulting plan was modular, so it could be tackled piece by piece, and included revamping the historic city market building as a food emporium, adding benches, trees and awnings to the surrounding farmers market, expanding the library and a downtown park, building parking garages and connecting downtown and the Hotel Roanoke with a new pedestrian bridge over the busy rail corridor. The centerpiece was a rehabilitation of a large 1920s commercial building on Market Square to serve as the new rent-free home of several area museums and theaters. “We knew we needed a magnet—the equivalent of an anchor store at a shopping center—to attract people to the center,” Ewert recalls. The referendum passed on the first try, with a 55 percent majority.

Mayor Sherman Lea is a former prison director, and Deputy Mayor Anita Price came to Roanoke from Baltimore in the 1980s. The previous mayor, David Bowers, saw an end to his political career after suggesting that Syrian refugees should be treated like the Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during World War II. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

The joint museum space, Center on the Square, was an instant hit, with 40,000 visitors on its opening weekend in 1983. “That was a real red-letter date,” says Yancey of the Times. “It gave people a reason to go there; restaurants and businesses followed, and the trend line has just continued from there.”

But just as downtown was flickering back to life as an entertainment district, the rest of the city was reeling from a body blow to its identity from which it took two decades to recover.

***

The shocking announcement came on an early spring day in 1982. The Norfolk & Western, which had been based in the city since its foundation, was merging with a D.C.-based rival and moving its headquarters to Norfolk, 240 miles away. The new Norfolk Southern would shed 1,500 local jobs—a third of the total and including many clerical positions—beginning a long, slow retreat from the city it had built. “In those days, they didn’t give you three weeks of media chatter beforehand, they just made an announcement and boom!” says Doughty, who worked for a local public relations firm at the time. “We were pretty happy, content and self-satisfied being a railroad town, so that was quite a kick in the pants for the community and the region.”

The blows kept coming. The railroad closed the Hotel Roanoke, now a Tudor-style, 382-room edifice and as much a symbol of the town as the Mill Mountain star, shutting off its fountains and dispatching liquidators to sell off its furnishings. “To see that place closed with a chain link around it was just more bad news,” says Ray Smoot, a veteran administrator at Virginia Tech, 35 miles to the west in Blacksburg. Not long thereafter, the railroad abandoned its grand headquarters building down the hill from the hotel. People looked to the local banking powerhouse, Dominion, to fill the void, only to have it absorbed by a Charlotte rival in 1992. “It really set up a decade of civic angst,” says Yancey. “If we’re not a railroad town and we’re not a banking town, what are we?”

But the marginalization of traditional power had a silver lining, observes Ed Walker, a native son who was attending Washington & Lee University School of Law, an hour to the northeast, at the time. “Everybody used to pack up their briefcases and go to the railroad and the bank to see if they could build this museum or do x, y or z,” he says. “Now there was nowhere to go to anymore. The city had to look to itself. And that created a power vacuum that let some talented and interesting and unexpected change agents come forward and try things that never could have happened when I was growing up.”

The first such agent was a very large one, Virginia Tech, a public research university in the next valley to the west that had never had much to do with Roanoke. “Virginia Tech did not at the time have a first-class hotel or conference center on its campus in Blacksburg,” says Smoot, then the CEO of the Virginia Tech Foundation, the university’s investment arm. “And there was the iconic Hotel Roanoke sitting there empty.” The railroad agreed to donate the hotel to the university foundation, which allied with city officials and local civic leaders to raise $28 million to completely rehabilitate the structure, while the city put up $14 million to build a conference center wing, which opened in 1995. “That’s the thing that began Virginia Tech’s relationship with Roanoke,” Smoot says. A decade later, that relationship would move into overdrive, transforming both parties.

Ed Walker has been a guiding hand behind downtown Roanoke's development and now lives downtown himself. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Other higher education institutions in the region—from Roanoke College in Salem to the Virginia Community College system—partnered with civic leaders and the state to turn the old Norfolk & Western headquarters building into a higher education center, where various institutions could offer classes, continuing education and workforce training. “We’re going to change this town from a blue-collar town into a university town,” retired Norfolk & Southern chief Fishwick proclaimed during this era. “I think it’s the greatest thing to happen in Roanoke in my lifetime.” The center enrolls 2,800 students at a time, and by 2010 was estimated to be boosting the local economy by $32 million.

Meanwhile, a deteriorating sewer line winding along the overgrown and ignored banks of the Roanoke River was wearing out, requiring that the city establish a right of way to properly replace it. A local nonprofit, the Valley Beautiful Foundation, introduced city leaders to the greenway concept in John Nolen’s 1907 plan: a riverside park with walking or biking trails connecting the city’s districts. Slowly, starting in the late 1990s, a greenway expanded along the new sewer lines, eventually to extend into a 285-mile network crisscrossing the valley between the Appalachian Trail to the north and the Blue Ridge Parkway to the south. They were immediately popular. “We had problems with trying to keep people off the greenways until we finished constructing them,” recalls Darlene Burcham, who was city manager during much of the build-out. “People could live in one place and work in another and not have to get in their car.”

***

As the greenways expanded, Walker, by then a young, third-generation attorney doing due diligence reviews for businesses, was getting frustrated with the creative and financial limits of his profession, which was not always in alignment with his desire to effect positive social change. He had helped open the Downtown Music Lab, a nonprofit providing at-risk teens a place to play and record music (musician Dave Matthews was among the donors), but it was a project assigned to him by Dalhouse, the retired bank executive, that showed him another path.

“I had early on identified Walker as a talent and had decided to give him some nudging in one direction or another,” Dalhouse says. A historic movie palace in Roanoke’s declining Grandin Village neighborhood was up for sale, and local do-gooders needed help raising $1.6 million to buy and rehabilitate it as a community theater. His instincts about Walker were spot on.

“I just had this epiphany about the incredible convening power of real estate,” recalls Walker, who was amazed by how quickly people and money rallied around the project. “Nothing moves faster than community-minded capital with investing in a community’s real estate. You can take the status quo and change it immediately.” Anchored by the theater, the Grandin neighborhood promptly bounced back and is now one of the city’s most desirable areas.

Walker has had his hands in a variety of projects, from a modern co-working spaces to a historical theater. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

So, in 2002, Walker quit the law and embarked on a series of profitable, but socially minded, redevelopments in the heart of the city, a place Design 79 had shored up as an entertainment and a shopping district but where a grand total of 15 people actually lived, most of them in apartments above their ground-floor place of business. The first was the stately 10-story Colonial American Bank building, which he and a partner purchased for $1.4 million in 2003 and renovated as upscale condos ranging in size from 3,000 to 4,800 square feet. Walker’s family moved into the top floor and his partner into another condo, and Dalhouse purchased a third (which he and his wife live in today), prompting other well-heeled buyers to follow suit. Walker then bought the former Grand Piano and Furniture Company block nearby and, with the help of historic tax credits and an $880,000, no-interest loan from the city housing authority, converted it into 58 mixed-income apartments. “Condos were one thing, but it was largely unknown how many people would pay rent to live down here,” Walker says. To his shock, the entire building was leased on opening day. “Everybody looked at each other and said, ‘What just happened?’”

Since then, Walker has helped develop Kirk Avenue, which runs behind the City Market area, as a restaurant and arts corridor, including a music hall that offers traveling bands free loft accommodations upstairs; transformed the decaying Patrick Henry Hotel into a mixed commercial and residential space with 134 apartments and a restored ballroom; and purchased a beloved local radio station to prevent it from abandoning its funky indie-folk-country format. He’s also donated a park and playground in Grandin Village, and developed inexpensive condos in a former Cotton Mill in another part of the city and a large riverfront property that now houses an enormous rock climbing gym. Combined, his projects to date run to some $70 million and 600,000 square feet. He founded an annual conference—CityWorks (X)po—that draws 350 experts to Roanoke to discuss “big ideas for small cities.” “Ed’s a very unusual developer in that he didn’t want to make a lot of money and run, but was more interested in the long-term benefit to the community,” says Burcham, the former city manager. “He realized we needed various income levels of housing, and he did that.”

Modern architecture blends into Roanoke's 20th century industrial aesthetic. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

By the late aughts, downtown was taking on a 24/7 vibe, with more shops, businesses and eateries moving in to cater to residents, who numbered in the hundreds and total more than 2,000 today. A local art museum, having outgrown Center on the Square as the result of a large bequest, raised $66 million to build the new, 85,000-square-foot Taubman Museum of Art two blocks away, which opened in 2008. Even with the Great Recession that kicked off later that year, the city moved forward with step-by-step investments: two new high schools, an award-winning renovation of the main library, the revamping of a downtown park and amphitheater (which reopened with a concert by Sheryl Crow), and the continued expansion of trails and bike paths.

“Hail Mary passes—going after The One Big Thing—often fail,” says Chris Morrill, a past president of the Government Finance Officers Association, who has been city manager since 2010. “You go for rapid incrementalism. You figure out where you want to go and you just keep moving: market building, new park, greenways, plaza, reopening the formal entrance of City Hall. You keep the momentum going and eventually all the naysayers say, ‘How did we get here?’”

Beth Doughty of the Regional Partnership agrees. “People want economic development to be a silver bullet, but it’s not. It’s like spinning plates,” she says. “No one person or entity is responsible for all of the plates, but you do want them all spinning at the same time.”

But Roanoke still had a problem: What did it want to be?

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Despite the progress, the city remained in an identity crisis through the 1990s and well into the aughts, disheartened that it had been left behind by upland Southern rivals such as Asheville and Charlotte. “I was asked from the day I arrived, ‘What is your vision of the city?’” says Burcham, who was city manager from 2000 to early 2010. “I said it’s not my vision, it’s the community’s vision, but everybody needs to get away from the idea that the goal was to be Charlotte, that if we didn’t get a particular airline coming here we were doomed.”

Beth Doughty of the Roanoke Regional Partnership has helped bring green spaces into downtown Roanoke. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Meanwhile, the board of the Roanoke Regional Partnership—a joint venture of regional city and county governments that spent much of its time trying to lure northeastern manufacturers to the region—decided it wanted to also focus on improving the area’s competitiveness. “Talent is the currency of the 21st century, and we needed to be more concerned about attracting it,” says Doughty, who left her position as head of the regional chamber of commerce in 2008 to take on the task. Essential to that was finding a new narrative the community could embrace, she says, and it became clear to her what it was. “If you asked people what’s the best thing about Roanoke, they would say, ‘The mountains, they’re so beautiful,’” she says. “But they talked about them like they were wallpaper. If we could embrace the idea we were an outdoors city, we could monetize the outdoors and really strengthen the region’s real advantage, its livability.”

The Partnership hired a full-time outdoor branding guru, Pete Eshelman, who set about building partnerships with governments, businesses, nonprofits, and state and federal park authorities to extend trails, reopen whitewater rafting destinations, improve fishing and launch America’s Toughest Marathon, an annual event so-called because running it involves a 7,400-foot ascent. He’s helped organize professional road-cycling events, get a top BMX rider to develop a plan for an action sports park and raise money to build new canoe ramps and kayak park on the river. “This could only work if we had buy-in from the community, so it had to be real and true,” Eshelman says. “Now when they travel somewhere and talk with people about what Roanoke is like, an outdoor narrative is going to be part of the description, and that wasn’t the case before.”

Simultaneously, the region’s visitor promotion agency, which previously focused on getting conventions to come to town, began marketing the area as “Virginia’s Blue Ridge,” a place of scenic beauty and outdoor adventure with a happening city in the middle. As a result, over the past five years travel spending has grown by more than a fifth, and hotel revenue by 25 percent. More visitors are coming—creating 600 more jobs—but the real goal of the effort is to get some of them to decide to come back and put down roots. “This is more than just tourism; this is workforce development, because we’re competing for world talent,” says Landon Howard, the agency’s president.

A good thing, too, because suddenly Roanoke needed to recruit a lot of very talented people very quickly to partake in the most consequential undertaking since E.W. Clark & Company showed up back during Chester Arthur’s presidential administration.

A short car ride from downtown is Carvins Cove, which at 12,700 acres is the country's second largest city park. Pete Eshelman of the Roanoke Regional Partnership has helped develop Roanoke as a destination for outdoor tourism. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

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There’s been a hospital at the foot of Mill Mountain since 1900, when railroad officials decided they needed a place for injured workers to be treated. The current incarnation, Roanoke Memorial, was by the early 21st century the flagship of a sprawling nonprofit hospital network, a fleet of air ambulances and the only Level I trauma center in the western half of the state. The network, Carilion, was financially sound, but changes in how health care providers are reimbursed required that it shift its focus from managing hospitals to improving health outcomes across the surrounding communities, a clinic model that required a hiring bonanza, including a quadrupling of its physician staff. But how to recruit and retain so many highly skilled people to come to the mountains of southwestern Virginia?

New Window Nancy Agee arrived at Roanoke Regional Hospital as a candy striper in the 1970s — today she is the CEO of Carilion Clinic. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

An essential component would be to open a medical school in Roanoke, an attractive feature for many of medicine’s best and brightest, recalls Nancy Agee, then Carilion’s chief operations officer and now its CEO. “It creates a different vibe and helps satisfy the sense of curiosity that many of the best and brightest physicians have,” she says. “We could do it ourselves, but wouldn’t it make more sense to find a partner?”

By good fortune, a partner was close at hand. Down at Virginia Tech, President Charles Steger had challenged his institution to grow from a lower-50-ranked research university to one of the top 30 by 2013, a move that would require moving into fields funded by the National Institutes of Health. “We didn’t have a human medicine school, but we did have a lot of experience with technology transfer and research-related entrepreneurship,” says Smoot, the Virginia Tech administrator. “So a conversation began with Carilion.”

The result was two joint ventures to be built in 2010 on what had been an old industrial site on the way from the hospital to downtown Roanoke: an elite, research-intensive medical school and a biomedical research institute with world-class aspirations. They approached Michael Friedlander, then chair of the neuroscience department at one of the nation’s leading and largest medical research institutions, the Baylor College of Medicine at Houston’s Texas Medical Center, to head the institute. “I only knew where Roanoke was because for some reason it was the place the Weather Channel gave for the region’s temperatures,” he says. “But they said you are going to get to build from scratch an innovative biomedical research enterprise and you can pretty much build it around your vision. And of course, you don’t often get offered stuff like that. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Friedlander took the job but knew the greatest challenge would be attracting top people from established institutions like Texas Medical Center, which had more employees (105,000) than Roanoke had people. “I had been struck by the natural beauty of the place and by the people’s pride in it and wanting to make it work,” he says. “Most academic medical centers in the U.S. are in not-so-great parts of major cities. Here we’re right next to a major health center with one of the top 12 busiest emergency departments in the country and you can go out at lunch time and be pulling trout out of the Roanoke River in hip waders.” If he could get people to visit, Friedlander thought, he would have a shot.

Since before Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute opened its doors in 2010, Michael Friedlander has been at its helm. | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

His fishing expedition worked. Today, the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute has some of the top researchers in neuroscience working on everything from the decision-making patterns of drug addicts to the use of brain imaging in psychiatry. It will break ground soon on a $66 million expansion that will double the number of research teams to 50. The medical school next door is also research intensive, with the unusual requirement that students undertake a research project of publishable quality. Although the institution is only six yers old, this year it had 4,600 applications for 42 spots. Commercial research spinoffs are beginning to populate the downtown side of the complex, an area being promoted as the Innovation Corridor.

“We’ve gone from a train city to a brain city,” says Mayor Sherman Lea, who, like the vice-mayor, circuit court clerk, school board chair and other city-wide elected officials, is African-American. (“When you have a city with less than 30 percent African-Americans in the mountains next to Tennessee, you wouldn’t think that. But that’s how we’ve changed,” he says of the electorate’s choices.)

And soon it will be a beer city as well, having lured Deschutes here instead of long-envied Asheville and 48 other cities the brewery considered up and down the East Coast. Deschutes chief financial officer Peter Skrbek says he was drawn by logistics and clean water, the strong public schools and an outdoorsy culture akin to the company’s home in Bend, Oregon. “But the biggest thing was just being wanted by the community and their enthusiasm for us to come there each time we would visit,” he says. “I’ve never seen such enthusiasm for a company’s investment.”

When the Deschutes news broke, one industry publication declared Roanoke the new Asheville. Over at the Roanoke Times, Yancey’s editorial responded: “We’d gently beg to differ,” he wrote. “We’re the new Roanoke.”